Mortar shells and machine gun fire rocked Mogadishu for a third day Saturday as government troops and their Ethiopian allies continued a major offensive to quash a growing insurgency by heavily armed Islamic militants, according to The Associated Press. Scores of civilians have died, and the toll was sure to rise as officials counted the dead, the report said. The offensive, which started Thursday, has sparked the heaviest fighting in Mogadishu since the early 1990s. On Friday, insurgents shot down an Ethiopian helicopter gunship and mortar shells slammed into a hospital, leaving corpses piled in the streets and wounding hundreds of people. «The victims are the civilians, only civilians are dying and getting wounded in this fighting,» said Khadijo Farah Warsame, 45, a mother of seven.
