Baidoa

BAIDOA, Somalia -- Ramon Pollock, lately of the University of Maryland dental school, has been here for months stitching up the wounded and maimed, the victims of Somalia's brutalities.He came out from Baltimore to do this work, without a surgeon's certificate, although he did study at Howard University to be a physician's assistant. And, more helpful, he worked in the emergency room at the District of Columbia hospital.Mr. Pollock, who is 28, doesn't allow fine points to get in his way. He has disdain for bureaucrats who impede his work.

BARDERA, Somalia -- They walk in out of the desert from places not even on the map. They stagger through the sandy gullies where water once splashed, pushing themselves on with sticks, clawing with their skeletal hands, stumbling over the debris of rock and brittle dry brush.They have heard there is food in Bardera, and there is. But it is not enough. Down here in this universe of red earth and perpetual dust, the story is the same as everywhere else in Somalia. There is not nearly enough food.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- In the tension-filled days before the arrival of U.S. troops, relief workers fear that gunmen may rush to loot supplies or even resort to kidnappings before the Americans step ashore.That has prompted the aid workers to bunker down, stock extra food and water, and tighten their security precautions.As always, their safety depends largely on the protection of hired Somalian guards who follow them in heavily armed vehicles to prevent gunmen from killing them or taking supplies.

WAAJID, Somalia -- The Marines haven't been anywhere nea this place in the middle of the Somali badlands.If they come, the only relief worker left here says, they'd better be ready to stay a long time. Otherwise, the terrorism and violence that have hindered the feeding of 33,000 starving Somalis around here will resume when the "technicals" resurface.As he supervised the unloading of wheat and diesel fuel from a German air force cargo plane here yesterday, Hugh Swift of the Irish agency World Concern recounted how increasing members the marauding gunmen have been arriving this week to escape U.S. forces in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Clashes between Islamic fighters and Ethiopian-backed government soldiers heightened fears yesterday that Somalia is inching toward a civil war that could drag in the entire Horn of Africa. As international negotiators worked furiously to resolve the dispute, armed battles around Somalia's transitional capital of Baidoa killed at least one government soldier, according to Somali officials. Islamic leaders, who seized control of Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia from warlords this summer, are calling for a "holy war" against Christian-dominated Ethiopia unless the neighboring nation withdraws its troops, which were sent across the border to prop up Somalia's weak transitional government.

"This," says Father Bill Joy, heaving a sigh and struggling t put words around the thing that is happening half a world away, "is one more test of human faith. I don't know how else to explain it."All he knows for certain is what he reads in the newspaper, or watches on his television: the faces of the needlessly dying in Somalia. No one can explain this in terms of God's will, or religion, or morality, not even a priest. It is simply the suffering of the innocent, and bringing help is all that matters now.So Father Joy's bags are packed at St. Jerome's Rectory, near Camden Yards, and his plane is to leave today for Somalia.

MOGADISHU, Somalia --The leader of the Islamists who now control most of southern Somalia accused the United States yesterday of orchestrating what he called a border incursion by hundreds of Ethiopian troops. "We want the whole world to know what's going on," Sheik Sharif Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, told reporters in the provincial town of Jowhar. "The United States is encouraging Ethiopia to take over the area." American officials said they were not involved in an incursion, and Ethiopian authorities denied the claims that several hundred of their soldiers had entered Somalia in the southwestern Gedo region yesterday morning.

Serial killer in Russia gets life term for 48 killings MOSCOW -- The Moscow City Court gave a life sentence yesterday to a serial killer who had said he wanted to be the most prolific murderer in post-Soviet Russian history. Alexander Y. Pichushkin, 33, was convicted last week of murdering 48 people and trying to kill three others. The total was considerably smaller than the number of killings he claimed. In a television interview, Pichushkin said he had killed at least 60 people, part of a bid to kill a person for each of the 64 squares on a chessboard.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Mogadishu's other warlord, enraged that America has abandoned the fight against his archenemy, is warning of renewed clan warfare in Somalia after U.S. troops leave."

AFGOI, Somalia -- Bright and early each brutally hot day i Somalia, Ali Osman Hassan shows up for work in the middle of nowhere, on the rocky road that links Mogadishu with the interior.Using his hands, Mr. Hassan scoops dirt and rocks into a foot-deep pothole, sculpting a smooth, rounded top. As each vehicle approaches, he draws attention to his handiwork by spinning a piece of cloth like a cowboy's lasso over the filled pothole. Then he pauses, hands raised and smiling, in a bid for donations.