Residents of Mogadishu are fleeing the city today as the shelling of Islamist strongholds by the interim government and its Ethiopian military allies enters its sixth day.
At least 230 people have died since the latest fighting escalated last Wednesday, local human rights activists say. Hospital wards are so crowded that doctors are tending to the wounded in tents and under trees.
The latest battles are centred on an insurgent stronghold in Mogadishu where corpses lay rotting in the sun.
An earlier four-day spike in violence at the end of March killed more than 1,000 people, mostly civilians.
The government is struggling to gain full control of the capital four months after ousting rival Islamist leaders who ruled much of southern Somalia for the second half of 2006.
Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi said there would be no let-up in the offensive until the government crushed armed resistance by Islamist fighters, backed by foreign jihadists and militiamen from the dominant local Hawiye clan.
"Until the terrorists are wiped out from Somalia, the fighting will go on," Mr Gedi was quoted as saying. "The battle is clearly between terrorists linked to al-Qaeda and the government supported by Ethiopian and African Union troops."
An African Union (AU) force of about 1,500 Ugandan peacekeepers, working with Mr Gedi's government and targeted by the insurgents, has so far failed to halt the violence.
Nearly half a million people have fled Mogadishu, and before the fighting the city's population was estimated at between one million and 2.4 million people.