MOGADISHU, April 21: Shells pounded Mogadishu on Saturday, killing at least 73 people to swell a death-toll already in the hundreds from this week’s battles pitting militias and Islamists against Somali and Ethiopian troops.

The escalating war has also sent over 321,000 residents fleeing in the biggest refugee movement in Somalia since the 1991 fall of a dictator ushered in 16 years of anarchy.

Even by Somali standards, Saturday’s carnage was shocking.

“I counted 20 dead in the street and the sidewalk. Some were missing heads, others were so mutilated you couldn’t tell if they were men or women,” resident Suleman Mohammed said from the Al Barakah market area where more than seven mortars landed.

Residents and medical staff interviewed by Reuters confirmed a minimum of 73 casualties from the incessant shelling and gunfire across the city on Saturday, adding to an estimated 131 others from the previous three days’ violence.

The week’s final death-toll is expected to soar and may come close to the estimated 1,000 casualties from a similar four-day flare-up at the end of March. Most of the victims are civilians.

The Islamists ruled most of south Somalia for the second half of 2006, before being defeated in a brief war over the New Year. But their fighters – backed by some disgruntled Hawiye clan elements – have regrouped to rise up against President Abdullahi Yusuf’s administration and his Ethiopian backers.

“There are a lot of deaths. I am carrying the bodies of two family members into my car now,” one distraught resident, who asked not to give his name, told Reuters.

Another, Abdi Mohammed, said: “Six shells hit our neighbourhood. One hit our neighbour’s house killing five of the six family members who live there. My 7-year-old son and his friend were wounded.”—Reuters