“We are under heavy artillery and tank shelling. The
Ethiopians are using whatever forces and material they have,”
said a fighter belonging to the capital’s dominant Hawiye clan.
“This is the heaviest attack we’ve seen since the war started.”

Insurgents fired back with machine-guns and
rocket-propelled grenades in a second week of fighting that has
centered around an anti-government stronghold in the north of
Mogadishu and turned parts of the bullet-scarred, coastal city
into a ghost town.

Locals and rights activists say nearly 300 people have died
in the most sustained battles since Somali-Ethiopian forces
defeated Islamist rivals in a two-week war late last year.

More than 1,000 were killed in a previous spike in fighting
between government troops and their Ethiopian allies on one
side, and insurgents — a mixed group of Islamist fighters,
foreign jihadists and some clan militia — on the other.

The interim Somali government says there will be no let-up
in the violence until it wipes out the insurgency defying its
attempt to restore central rule to the Horn of Africa country
for the first time in 16 years.

NO MEDICAL SUPPLIES

Doctors at a pediatric and maternity clinic did their best
to treat scores of wounded who found no space among the
bloodied wards of the city’s two main hospitals.

“We have the doctors but we do not have medical material
and medicine. We are hoping to get medical supplies from the
Red Cross soon,” Abdulahi Hashi Kadiye, deputy director of
Banadir Hospital, told Reuters.

The incessant shelling started a fire at warehouses stocked
with building material and paints, sending thick plumes of
smoke above the Industrial Road area of factories, a charcoal
market and soccer stadium, one witness said.

The United Nations says nearly 340,000 people have fled the
city, which was once home to at least one million people, and
it has warned of a looming catastrophe.

“At least half the capital is deserted, slowly turning it
into a ghost city,” the U.N. refugee agency said.

Analysts say Christian-led Ethiopia enjoys tacit approval
for its involvement in Somalia from the United States, which
accuses the Islamists of links to al Qaeda.

Washington, which counts donor-dependent Ethiopia as one of
its closest allies in its war against terrorism, has called for
a ceasefire and said it was concerned about Somalia’s
humanitarian crisis.

But a report published by Britain’s Chatham House
think-tank said efforts to rebuild Somalia had been undermined
by the strategic concerns of Ethiopia and the United States.

“In an uncomfortably familiar pattern, genuine multilateral
concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of
Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actors — especially
Ethiopia and the United States,” the report said.