All parties in Somalia's conflict have carried out rights abuses including executions, rape and torture, Amnesty International said today, adding there were reports Ethiopian soldiers had slit civilians' throats.
Mogadishu's whole population is scarred from witnessing or suffering such abuses, as well as enforced disappearances and beatings, it said in its 32-page report.
Somali government troops and their Ethiopian allies have been battling Islamist-led insurgents since early last year.
The report also quoted witnesses who accused the Islamist al Shabaab militia of indiscriminate attacks on civilians and threatening journalists.
Yet the real scale of the "dire" rights crisis remained unknown because international aid agencies were under heavy pressure not to expose the abuses they witnessed, Amnesty said, and local journalists were often silenced by threats.
The interim government has largely failed to impose its authority on the Horn of Africa country of some eight million people, torn apart by inter-clan violence and vulnerable to cycles of drought, flooding and now skyrocketing food prices.
The Ethiopian and Somali governments have frequently denied committing rights abuses in their fight against what they call al-Qaeda-backed terrorists. Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein has said government troops have the right to defend themselves.
But many Somalis living in southern and central areas say life is worse now than when dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled by warlords in 1991, plunging the country into lawlessness. Up to one million Somalis are refugees in their own land, while an estimated 6,500 civilians were killed last year.
Amnesty said since late 2007 it had received an increase in reports of violations against civilians by Ethiopian forces who helped the government oust Islamist leaders at the end of 2006.
Among the most common were allegations of gang rape and reports of civilians having their throats slit and left lying in the street or their homes because sniper fire made it too dangerous to collect the bodies.
Last month, Amnesty said Ethiopian troops killed 21 people in Mogadishu's Al Hidaaya district - seven of the victims had their throats cut. Ethiopia dismissed the report as lies, saying its soldiers had never been involved in such incidents.
Amnesty said there was a marked increase in executions of civilians by Ethiopian troops in the last two months of 2007. The rise appeared, in part, to have been in retaliation for an ambush of Ethiopia soldiers in early November in which the bodies of several Ethiopians were dragged through the streets.