The crisis engulfing Somalia has been deteriorated dramatically as the hospitals in the country's capital ran out of medical supplies.

The Ethiopian attacks have killed thousands of Somalis and wounded hundreds of innocent civilians while hospitals face shortages of food and medicine, a Press TV correspondent reported from Mogadishu on Thursday.

Mogadishu hospitals are filled with civilians, mostly women and children.

A civilian told Press TV that the world is silent over what is happening in Somalia and the 'real catastrophic situation' in the country is overlooked by the mass media.

Hospitals in this Horn of Africa country especially in southern Mogadishu are in serious need of humanitarian aids as hundred of injured people, in unstable conditions, need support.

More than 6,500 people have been killed in Somalia in 2007, and the international aid agencies have warned that the war-scarred country has become too dangerous to work in as fresh fighting erupted.

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Somalia's Islamist insurgents vowed on Thursday to launch more hit-and-run attacks against the government, saying their tactics were designed to reduce civilian casualties.

Islamist fighters briefly seized the town of Jowhar north of Mogadishu on Wednesday, highlighting the interim government's inability to assert its authority despite support from Ethiopian and African Union troops.

The raid on Jowhar, which served as the administration's temporary base in 2005, killed seven people and came after the rebels briefly took control of four smaller towns. A spokesman for the Islamists said the fighters would continue the hit-and-run attacks, but would not draw Ethiopian soldiers into urban battles to avoid greater loss of life.

"We are capable of holding the areas we capture," said Mohamud Ibrahim Suley of the Somalia Islamic Courts Council, which the Western-backed government kicked out of the capital following a short war at the end of 2006.

"But we always want fewer losses ... we want no harm to come to the civilian population," he told Reuters by telephone from undisclosed location. "Until the people become fully independent ... the fighting will never stop."

In recent months the insurgents have seized towns from local administrations that often amount to little more than militias, only to give them up and melt away -- or be routed by Ethiopian or Somali government forces who arrive later.

Forty humanitarian agencies urged the world this week to focus on the "catastrophic" situation in the Horn of Africa country, where hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from war, drought and food shortages.

The crisis has been worsened by a 15-month Islamist insurgency of Iraq-style roadside bombings and assassinations that killed more than 6,500 people in Mogadishu last year alone.

The United States has formally listed the military wing of the Courts Council -- the al Shabaab -- as a foreign terrorist organisation and says it is closely affiliated with al Qaeda.

Mohamed Omar Dele, chairman of Somalia's Middle Shabelle region, said the assault on Jowhar took place while he and most of the town's soldiers were on security operations elsewhere.

"The terrorists looted all they could and freed all the prisoners from the jails. They even let local people ransack government offices," he told Reuters from Jowhar, which was once controlled by Mogadishu's mayor, former warlord Mohamed Dheere.

"Our forces will not give up until we capture them."

Source: Reuters, Mar 28, 2008