Heavy shelling shook Mogadishu for a sixth day on Monday, as the Somali government and its Ethiopian military allies pursued a campaign to wipe out Islamist militants in the capital, witnesses said. "Anybody who has any means of fleeing the area has left," said Mohamed, a resident close to the scene of the clashes. Fighting since Wednesday has killed at least 230 people and forced almost half a million to flee the city, local human rights activists say. The recent battles have centred around a militant stronghold in the north of the city where corpses lay rotting in the blistering sun, some mutilated and decapitated by incessant shelling that reduced many buildings to mounds of rubble.
The interim government supported by Ethiopian soldiers, tanks and fighter jets defeated rival Islamist leaders in a lightning war over New Year. But four months on, it is still struggling to win full control of the capital where Islamist fighters -- backed by some disgruntled Hawiye clansmen -- have regrouped to resist President Abdullahi Yusuf's administration.
Clutching their belongings, scores of Somalis streamed out of the coastal city, part of the biggest exodus since warlords ousted a military leader in 1991, plunging the Horn of Africa country into 16 years of lawlessness.
Sudan Ali Ahmed, the chairman of the Elman Human Rights Organization, said six militants and 41 civilians died on Sunday. Some of the civilians died of their injuries after being wounded during the previous day's heavy fighting, he said. Ahmed said the figures were based on what Mogadishu residents, hospitals and human rights activists reported to his group on Sunday. They did not have any casualty figures for either Ethiopian or Somali government soldiers.
The new tallies bring the death toll in five days of fighting in Mogadishu to at least 212, with more than 291 wounded, according to the human rights group.