Dahir Awale and his family live in ruins which used to their home several weeks ago but now has been completely destroyed as a result of heavy bombardment by clan insurgents and Ethiopian and Somali government forces in Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

Awale, like thousands of others who fled to the outskirts of Mogadishu during the fierce conflict,has returned to his neighborhood in the north of the seaside city of two million people to rebuild his life. But his hope is ruined like his home.

"I have lost almost everything I had," Awale lamented as he sat on a collapsed wall of his home in Towfiq neighborhood where the fiercest fighting took place. "You see, our house is no more here and all we had had been looted."

Thousands of Mogadishu residents have been pouring back to the city following the routing of the insurgents by the Ethiopian and Somali government forces last Friday.

The Somali government had called on displaced people, who have been languishing under the trees on the outskirts of the city, to return homes which were partly or totally destroyed by the intense shelling.

However, returnees have harrowing stories to tell. Some have their whole belongings, others lifetime savings, incinerated in front of their eyes. Widespread looting took away almost anything people owned after the victory was claimed by the transitional government last week.

Awale says that they took only their mattresses and sheets and left everything else behind, money, jewelry, cars, furniture, everything.

Awale is one of the thousands of Mogadishu residents who are returning from a life of misery on the outskirts of the city and beyond to an uncertain life in the capital to start their life from scratch.

Rotting corpses, unexploded shells and hand grenades still litter the streets in residential areas, posing health and safety hazards to returnees and their children.

Without help from anyone, Awale has managed to put up a single 6 by 6 meters makeshift room, with no electricity or running water, out of the ruins of his once beautiful six-room stone house for his family of nine.

The little electricity and running water that was available in the past has been destroyed by the recent fighting. People have to relay on water fetched by donkey carts. A 20-litter barrel of water cost almost 15,000 Somali shilling which is equivalent to one U.S. dollar, very much out of the reach of ordinary Somalis.

Markets in some Mogadishu neighborhoods have not fully reopened so the price of foodstuffs and other essentials are prohibitively expensive.

Unemployment, which had been rife even before the recent conflict, has skyrocketed as the few places where people gained their livelihood were closed because of instability.

Awale, a teacher by profession, has not been paid last month and does not expect this month either as most schools in the capital still remain closed.

"I cannot afford to feed my family or rebuild my house. With the meager saving I have, our children eat just one time a day," says Awale. "This is not living, this is a struggle for survival."

A few people, who have a family member working abroad, get remittances to support their lives but many in Somalia are not so lucky and have to start the struggle to rebuild their lives anew.

Source: Xinhua