Despite assurances ot the contrary, Somalia on brink of collapse

Despite assurances to the contrary from the Somali foreign minister, the Western-backed moderate Islamist government in Somalia seems likely to fall, as the al Shabaab insurgency fights its way into the heart of Mogadishu. The government of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed now controls little more than the presidential palace, the airport, and the docks, after a week of fierce fighting that has left more than a hundred dead, and thousands terrorized and displaced. At the same time as Somalia's foreign minister was telling US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jonnie Carson that his government is "not in imminent danger of being defeated by the insurgents", Mogadishu's shops and markets were deserted, and even calls to prayer were not to be heard above the gunfire ringing out in the streets. Insurgents have moved to within a half-mile of the hilltop presidential palace, which is being guarded by African Union peacekeepers with tanks and armored vehicles. The Islamists, reportedly joined by hundreds of foreign fighters, have yet to move on the palace and almost certainly would lose a ground confrontation with the better-armed, 4,300-man peacekeeping force. The al Shabaab insurgency, led by Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, is supported by neighboring Eritrea and probably al Qaeda in its efforts to topple the moderate government and establish rigid Shari'a law in the land. Sheik Hassan has long been suspected of providing safe have to those responsible for bombing the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. The UN estimates that as many as 25,000 people have been displaced in the past week due to the renewed fighting in the capital. Since this most recent insurgency began in 2007, when Western-backed Ethiopian troops ousted the Islamic Courts Union, 17,000 have died and a half million have been internally displaced. Somalia has been in the grips of civil war since 1991.