Somalia ? Insurgents shot an Ethiopian helicopter gunship out of the sky and mortar shells slammed into a hospital Friday during the heaviest fighting in the Somali capital since the early 1990s, leaving corpses in the streets and wounding hundreds of civilians.

By official count 30 people have been killed since Thursday. But the fighting was so severe and so widespread in Mogadishu that bodies were not being picked up or even tallied, and residents said hundreds more were believed dead across the city of 1 million people.

The violence came on the second day of an offensive in the capital by Somali government troops and their Ethiopian allies to quash an increasingly lethal insurgency. The insurgents are linked to the Council of Islamic Courts, which was driven from power in December by Somali and Ethiopian soldiers, accompanied by U.S. special forces.