WELCOME TO WORLD WAR!!!

NAIROBI, Kenya -- A secular alliance that is battling fundamentalist Islamic militias in Somalia charged Wednesday that its rivals are bolstered by fighters from the Middle East, Pakistan and elsewhere, and said it has the bodies to prove it.

"Foreigners were fighting alongside the local terrorists and were killed," said Hussein Gutale Ragheh, a spokesman for the secular alliance. No one was caught alive, he said, but among the dead were Arabs and others who looked like Pakistanis, Sudanese and Oromo fighters from neighboring Ethiopia.

The report could not be independently verified, but the possible presence of foreign extremists has heightened fears that al-Qaeda is making Somalia a staging ground, a State Department spokesman said Wednesday.