Hiiraan Online

The Guardian

The UN estimates that 173,000 people have fled Mogadishu, the war-torn capital of Somalia, in the last three weeks alone. Add that to the 330,000 people who have already fled the capital this year and it amounts to a humanitarian disaster that rivals or exceeds Darfur. Somalia's transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf, a British- and US-backed warlord, wants the city to empty.

He said in Nairobi that Mogadishu's civilians can either choose to fight the Islamist insurgents or consider themselves targets in his war on terror. Eleven months after inviting the Ethiopian army into Somalia, the Transitional Federal Government (which is neither transitional nor federal, nor a government) is wreaking savage revenge on a population whether or not it shelters insurgents.

The sad truth is that, as long as the international community averts its gaze from the plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees living under trees within 30 kilometres of the Somali capital, the war can last indefinitely. Up to two divisions of Ethiopian troops are camped around the city, and a further 10,000 TFG militiamen hold key points and junctions. But when the Ethiopian convoys move through the city they are often ambushed. They reply with indiscriminate shelling, house-to-house raids and hostage-taking.

Human Rights Watch reported on the consequences of an ambush near the livestock market in Huriwa in the north of the city on November 8, when the body of an Ethiopian soldier was dragged through the streets. The Ethiopians replied with an offensive which left bodies scattered over a wide area -16 in Huriwa, two in another neighbourhood, seven in another. Did they die in the crossfire or were they the victims of summary executions? We may never know, because the TFG accompanies its military onslaught with a similar one against the media and aid agencies. Four radio stations, the only source of news in Somalia, have been closed down and journalists are regularly killed by both sides.

Lack of information helps, of course. It allows Britain, which backs Yusuf, and shelters members of his "government", to claim a convenient degree of ignorance. But the insurgency, meanwhile, is gathering pace, fuelled by popular anger. It is a combination of hardline Islamists in the Shabaab youth movement, and the Resistance, who regard their primary enemy as Ethiopia. At some point they will split, but for now graphic pictures of Somali suffering fill jihadi websites in the same way that Palestine and Chechnya once did. It is becoming a fighting cause. Britain should reassess its support for a warlord who has brought mayhem and havoc back to the streets of Mogadishu.