SOMALIA - Apr 22 - Somalis Flee Mogadishu Amid Ceaseless Fighting.

Somali government forces and insurgents blast each other for a fifth straight day, killing scores of civilians and driving thousands from their homes as chaos continued to overtake the country. More than 320,000 people have fled Mogadishu, the capital, since heavy fighting erupted in February. Many are now trapped in wet, squalid camps ringing the capital, with relief efforts severely hampered by the increasingly dangerous conditions. Fatality figures differ wildly, but the most conservative estimates put the toll from the past month near 1,000, with 200 people killed in the past week. Most are victims of the indiscriminate firing of artillery and mortar shells as insurgents and government forces battle, destroying apartment buildings and houses in the process. The shelling in some Mogadishu neighbourhoods was so intense Apr 22 that many residents were unable to get to hospitals - or cemeteries. Some people buried their relatives in makeshift graves along streets under mounds of gravel. "They are pounding us", said Fadumo Ali Hussein, a mother of eight children. She said her sister bled to death Apr 22 after she was hit by shrapnel. "We couldn't get her to a doctor", she said. Diplomatically, conditions that could bring about an end to the fighting after 16 years of instability in Somalia also appeared to worsen this Apr 21, with Eritrea, a neighbour widely suspected of funneling arms to Somali insurgents, pulling out of a regional organisation that has been acting as a counterweight to rising tensions in the region. The organisation, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, which also includes Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, was trying to broker peace in Somalia and more specifically address the rivalry between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The two countries recently fought a costly border war, and many diplomats fear that Somalia could turn into a proxy battle, with Ethiopia supporting Somalia's weak transitional government and Eritrea backing the insurgents. The Foreign Ministry of Eritrea issued a short statement saying that it had "suspended membership" in the group because of "a number of repeated and irresponsible resolutions". The AU has also tried to intervene in Somalia and this year promised to quickly dispatch 8,000 peacekeepers. But so far, only about 1,500 Ugandan soldiers have arrived, and they are mostly hunkered down at Mogadishu's airport. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon of the UN said in a report released Friday that more drastic steps might need to be taken, including forming a "coalition of the willing" to step into Somalia to restore order. But the government seemed to be in no mood to stop the fighting. Ali Muhammad Gedi, the transitional prime minister, told Mogadishu residents, thought to number around two million before the recent fighting, to clear out of the city because no cease-fire was in sight. "Until the terrorists are wiped out from Somalia, the fighting will go on", Gedi said in a radio interview broadcast this Apr 21. "The battle is clearly between terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and the government supported by Ethiopian and AU troops". Many residents in Mogadishu disagree. They describe the insurgency as multiheaded and growing. A number of residents said the men attacking the government and Ethiopian soldiers were a loose band of Somali nationalists, businessmen who have been profiting for years from a lack of government, clans opposed to the clan of the transitional president and radical Islamists. In December, Ethiopian troops helped topple Islamist forces that controlled much of Somalia, and the transitional government entered Mogadishu for the first time. In some neighbourhoods, transitional leaders were greeted with cheers. But the transitional government seems to have lost support, even among its members. Last week, a deputy PM Hussein Aideed, left Somalia for Eritrea, where he joined an alliance of former Islamist leaders. Aideed, who is still technically a member of the transitional government, called the Ethiopian counterinsurgency strikes a "genocide". Ethiopian and Somali officials have denied killing civilians intentionally. But it is getting difficult to find many people in Mogadishu who believe them. "Both sides are creating mayhem because they don't know how to fight a war", said Hassan Omar Osman, who was an officer in the national army, which no longer exists. "The insurgents are bad. But the government is really disgraceful".