The destabilization effort in Somalia led by the Ethiopians and backed by the US has left Somalia in shambles.

World Vision Somalia’s operations director Graham Davison who is based in Nairobi told the BBC’s Network Africa programme that the situation in Mogadishu, “has intensified”, and has “increased to a height that we haven’t seen in previous occasions”.

And about the newly displaced, Mr Davison said: “They’re suffering without food, sanitation, without water, without shelter. And the majority of these people are women and children.”

The outcome of destabilization are not unknown to the continent. South Africa was doing this to Mozambique and Angola for many years with similar effect.

Shells fell on Mogadishu on Saturday, Sunday and Monday as Ethiopian-Somali government troops and Islamist rebels battled.

And on Sunday, thousands were forced to flee from Ethiopian troops after they opened fire on protestors.

UNHCR says the level of militancy and intensity of the fighting has escalated as Ethiopian troops supporting the fragile Somali transitional government try to flush out insurgents.

All in the name of flushing “insurgents”. The real story is that Somalia was stabilizing as a Moslem country that opposed foreign intervention into domestic affairs. Naturally this sort of “alignment” threatened to block the long reach of the American counter-intelligence/anti-terror squads and so the US brought down the nascent government by sending in the Ethiopian army. Now, the US has better military “control” of the region again, but a half-million people or more are at risk of starvation.