There are no more hospital beds available in this bloodstained capital, and barely enough bandages to patch up the wounded. Even the bottles of medicine are running dry.
But still the patients keep pouring in – and they are the lucky ones, having survived another day of gunfire and mortar shells as Islamic insurgents battle troops allied to Somalia’s fragile government.
“Even the shades of the trees are occupied at this point,” Dahir Dhere, director of Medina Hospital, the largest health facility in Mogadishu, said yesterday. “We are overwhelmed.”
Battles rocked Mogadishu for the sixth straight day Monday as Somalia heads toward one of the worst humanitarian crises in its history, with civilians getting slaughtered in the crossfire. A local human rights group put the death toll at 1,000 over just four days earlier this month, and more than 250 have been killed in the past six days.
More than 320,000 of Mogadishu’s 2 million residents have fled since heavy fighting started in February.
Ahmed Mohamed, 32, was not one of them. A mortar shell hit him over the weekend, crushing his right leg.
“The doctors told me I would die unless they cut off my leg,” Mohamed said, tears streaming down his face in the city’s Keysaney Hospital, which was packed beyond capacity with nearly 200 people. “So I have to let them do it.”
Somalia Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi said Monday his interim government was winning the battle against the insurgents, but called for greater support from the international community.
“If we do not get international support the war may spread throughout the region and Africa,” Gedi said. “These terrorists want to destabilize the whole region.”
The government and its Ethiopian backers have been facing mounting pressure from the US, European Union and United Nations over the mounting civilian death toll and appear determined to bring order to the city before a planned national reconciliation conference in June.
But the fighting has decimated Mogadishu, already one of the most violent and gun-infested cities in the world. At least 18 civilians were killed Monday, said Sudan Ali Ahmed, the chairman of the Elman Human Rights Organization group. A 6-month-old baby was among those wounded, said a witness, Khadija Farah.
Somalia has been mired in chaos since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned against each other. The western city of Baidoa, where the Somali Parliament is based, was dubbed “City of Death” in the 1990s during a searing drought and famine there. Mogadishu, once a stunning seaside capital, is now a looted shantytown teeming with guns, with no functioning government or institutions.
A national government was established in 2004, but has failed to assert any real control.
Last month, troops from neighboring Ethiopia used tanks and attack helicopters to crush a growing insurgency linked to the Council of Islamic Courts. The movement had controlled Mogadishu and much of the country’s south for only six months in 2006, but those were the most peaceful months since 1991.
The group was driven from power in December by Somali and Ethiopian soldiers, accompanied by US special forces, who have accused the group of having ties to al-Qaida. The militants reject any secular government, and have sworn to fight until Somalia becomes an Islamic emirate.
Meanwhile, the capital and its surrounding towns have become scenes of ghastly despair. Women and children flee on foot with little more than their clothes and some cooking pots, then sleep by the side of the road. In Afgoye, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the capital, fights were breaking out over a spot of shade beneath a tree.
“Everyone wants to sit in the small area under the tree,” said Asha Hassan Mohamed, a mother of seven who reached Afgoye last week but returned to Mogadishu because she couldn’t find any food.
“It’s so crowded because there is no shelter.”
The United Nations said the fighting had sparked the worst humanitarian crisis in the war-ravaged country’s recent history, with many of the city’s residents trapped because roads out of Mogadishu were blocked.
Catherine Weibel, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency, said many of those who haven’t fled the capital are simply too vulnerable to do so.
“All the people who are sick, in wheelchairs, disabled,” she said, “they cannot leave.”
Somalis flee as sixth day of shelling hits capital
That brought the death toll from the latest violence to at least 267, according to the local Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation, which tracks casualties from hospitals, families and counts on the street, where bodies rot in the sun.
The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR warned of scenes of growing chaos as hundreds of terrified residents carried on fleeing the coastal city and crowds of tired, hungry people demanded help.
“Many are traumatised because of relatives killed … and some children are crying because they have been separated from their parents while fleeing and don’t know how to find them,” said one UNHCR staff member, declining to be named.
The United States said it was concerned about the growing humanitarian crisis in Somalia, triggered by the biggest exodus from the capital since warlords overthrew a dictator in 1991 and plunged the Horn of Africa country into 16 years of lawlessness.
Nearly half a million people have fled Mogadishu, thousands sleeping under trees or in the open in surrounding towns and villages. Before the fighting, Mogadishu’s population was estimated at between 1-2.4 million people.
CATASTROPHE
Humanitarian workers have warned of a looming catastrophe, with diseases like cholera already rife.
“It’s very clear that there is a humanitarian crisis coming out of the conflict that is taking place in Mogadishu,” Jendayi Frazer, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, told reporters in Washington.
Frazer urged all sides to reach a ceasefire and said the United States was working with the Somali government, U.N. agencies, the Ethiopians and others to try to help people affected by the fighting.
She dismissed suggestions the international community was not devoting enough attention to Somalia. “There is not a lack of action on Somalia,” she said.
UNHCR said Afgooye, 30 km (19 miles) west of Mogadishu, was jammed with more than 41,000 displaced people and that the crowds were becoming increasingly difficult to control.
The Elman group said 18 civilians and 19 insurgents were killed on Monday. There was no word of Ethiopian and Somali military casualties.
Civilians have been the main victims and hospitals are so crowded the wounded are tended in tents or under trees.
The government is struggling to gain full control of the capital four months after ousting rival Islamist leaders who ruled much of southern Somalia for the second half of 2006.
Four days of fighting at the end of March killed at least 1,000 people, again mostly civilians.
Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi has said there will be no let-up in the offensive until the government crushes Islamist rebels backed by foreign jihadists and disgruntled militiamen from the capital’s dominant Hawiye clan.
He said neighbouring Eritrea was interfering in Somalia, prolonging the fighting.
Frazer said: “Eritrea has not been playing a constructive role in Somalia. They continue to fund, arm, train and advise the insurgents.”
Eritrean officials could not be reached immediately for comment but have denied such allegations in the past.
An African Union force of about 1,500 Ugandan peacekeepers, working with Gedi’s government and also targeted by the insurgents, has so far failed to stop the bloodshed.
(Additional reporting by Farah Roble; Sahra Abdi Ahmed in Kismayu; Daniel Wallis in Nairobi)
