Summary here.

Mogadishu taxi-driver Yusuf Ali starts work three hours later than usual after he has heard the latest security updates on the radio.

“I don’t use a road twice,” he says. I call my two wives often just to tell them I’m alive. It’s that bad.”

Every time she leaves for work, Nadifa Abdi says she reminds her children what to do with her financial affairs if she doesn’t come back.

“Uncertainty and fear hang in the air,” says Abdi, who sells the stimulant khat leaf. “I leave a will whenever I go to work because I’m not sure I will return home alive.”

An upsurge of violence in the Somali capital — where Islamist insurgents are attacking Somali government targets and their Ethiopian military allies — has compelled war-sick Mogadishu residents to alter their daily habits.

Civilians, rather than combatants, have borne the brunt of unceasing explosions and deadly gunfights that are bearing an ever-growing grim resemblance to scenes in Baghdad.

[snip]

Many of the impoverished residents would like to flee the senseless killings — and 400,000 have since February, according to the United Nations — but do not have the means to leave.

Terrified inhabitants say the endless roadside bombs and suicide attacks were unknown before the government took over the city after it ousted an Islamist movement at the end of 2006 with the help of Ethiopian troops.

“Roadside bombs and suicide attacks are a new phenomenon,” says khat vendor Abdi. “Even tyre bursts force us to duck for cover as troops open fire randomly.”

[snip]

In north Mogadishu — where full-scale battles took place in March and April — deserted, bullet-poked houses stand with missing roofs destroyed by rockets and heavy artillery.

Shopkeepers say food prices have shot up since goods that used to arrive via Mogadishu port are now brought through the Gulf of Aden port of Bosasso, in northwest Somalia, as ships skirt insecurity in the capital and pirates off its coast.

Fuel prices have also doubled due to shortages.

“I have lost my enthusiasm for business in Mogadishu,” Dini Shukri, a 38-year-old entrepreneur, told Reuters.

In another echo of Iraq, he said he feared working for the authorities in case that made him a target.

“I wanted to seek contracts from the government, but decided not to because anybody who works with the administration is killed. I avoid military bases since they are like a time-bomb.”

[snip]

“Drivers are the most vulnerable since we go out on roads hidden with bombs,” taxi-driver Ali added.

“A colleague is still in shock after realising he carried a would-be suicide bomber. Life is unbearable.” Article

This is a biggie. The woebegone G. Walker administration’s latest pet pal golden boy trumpeted ally apparently sees the handwriting on the wall (it spells “quagmire”) and extends a stiff middle finger.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said Thursday that his government “made a wrong political calculation” when it intervened in Somalia, where Ethiopian troops are bogged down in a fight against a growing insurgency.

Addressing Ethiopia’s Parliament, Meles said his government incorrectly assumed that breaking up the Islamic movement that took control of most of Somalia in June 2006 would subdue the country. He also said he wrongly believed that Somali clan leaders would live up to unspecified “promises.”

“We made these wrong assumptions,” Meles said on a day when a roadside bomb killed two Ethiopian soldiers in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and two aid workers were shot dead in northern Somalia.

Opposition members of Parliament have accused Meles of making the same mistake in Somalia that critics say the United States made in Iraq: launching a military intervention without having a political plan.

[snip]

Many Ethiopian intellectuals and political leaders opposed the intervention because they said it would inevitably create the conditions for the sort of Somalia-based terrorist attacks that Meles intended to contain by invading the country. Article