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Across the yard in the intensive care unit, another dark bungalow packed with flies and the sick, a man waved a fan over the burnt-to-white flesh of his small son, caught in the fire when a grenade had been tossed into their house during a clash between two rival gangs.ДЄ mother looking after another burnt child said: 'We pray for peace вЂ“ we have nothing but prayers. I tried to hide but they shot me,' one man wheezed. 'I was standing when the fighting started. A man sat on a plastic chair next to his wounded brother and waved a paper fan over his head to chase away flies.ДЄll the men had been injured a day earlier, when a pro-government Islamist militia fought a unit of the government's 'proper' army for control of an intersection in the government-controlled area of the capital. All had abdominal gunshot wounds plastic drip bags lay between their legs or on the floor. In the dark, bungalow-like emergency room, five men lay on soiled, torn beds. If the fighting continues we will be without medicine.' The number on his blackboard was 167.Д®ven before the latest surge in Вviolence you could get a sense of the precariousness of life in Mogadishu from a quick tour of the Вhospital. 'We need tents to shelter the patients from rain, and medicine is running very low.

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The hospital was full and around 40 patients were having to sleep under the trees outside. Last year Foreign Policy magazine ranked Somalia as the state most at risk of total collapse, a verdict some might have considered flattering. Yet the chances are you won't have heard about it: with the exception of the latest pirate drama, Somalia is the country the world forgot, a state so broken that scenes which would elsewhere dominate international news bulletins are barely noted on the foreign pages of major newspapers. More than 200 people have been killed in these skirmishes and as many as 60,000 people have fled.

'During the Ethiopian war we had 300 in this hospital.'ДЇew respites in this most ravaged of cities last long, and within days of our conversation the relative calm had given way to a more familiar story: running battles between the forces of Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the notional president, and the more radical Islamist al-Shabaab militia.

That's very good.' He pointed at the blackboard covered with his neat white handwriting: it recorded that 86 patients were undergoing treatment. 'We are only getting four to six gunshot casualties a day. 'It's good times now,' he told me when we met a few weeks ago. For the last 20 years the tall surgeon with huge hands has been operating on the victims of the city's civil war. Mogadishu's best barometer of Вviolence is the little blackboard on which Dr Taher Mahmoud daily records the number of patients in his hospital.

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