The international community, by contrast, is dawdling on the sidelines. "At the moment, it's only paying lip service to Somalia," argues Jibril Mohammed, a Somali businessman. The UN's position is clear. On 30 January, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it would not deploy troops until the fighting stops, employing the old adage that peacekeepers need a peace to keep.That leaves a desperately under-strength, under-financed African Union force of 5,300 Ugandans and Burundians manning the barricades in one of the world's most fragile states. According to Amisom's Major Barigye in February, its soldiers had not been paid since August. Whatever their promises of assistance, in practice African troop-contributing countries are deterred from providing manpower by the low levels of payment they receive compared with supporting other missions, such as the much better resourced joint UN-African Union force in Darfur. It may seem an unimportant bureaucratic quirk but on such questions of finance key decisions turn in the developing world.

The future necessarily lies with the TFG, but it too will need to be properly funded to kick-start a government that is able to provide the most basic service of all: a modicum of law, order and security. There is a long way to go.

"Take out Amisom and the TFG would collapse in 30 minutes," says one analyst. Again, the signs suggest the international community understands neither the urgency nor the gravity of the situation. In the latest UN report on Somalia, issued last December, it was reported that of the $58m pledged to the TFG by foreign donors in Brussels last April, the government had received $5.6m. It is difficult to build an army from that. "If the TFG can get a small, capable and loyal force going, this could make a significant difference on the ground," says Ernst Jan Hogendoorn, the Horn of Africa project director for the International Crisis Group in Nairobi.

The most terrifying thing I encountered in Mogadishu had nothing to do with the UN security officer's apocalyptic warnings, not even the cluster of mortars that dropped on us in Villa Somalia. Instead it was a story about a Somali child who came back from school in Mogadishu one afternoon to find his father listening to pop music. "Dad, you're an infidel," the child said. The father decided there and then that it was time to leave Somalia and took his family to Kenya.

If the international community fails to respond urgently to what is happening in Somalia, another generation may soon be lost to the toxic delusions of Islamic fundamentalism. "I don't think the West understands the magnitude of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and its influence in the Horn of Africa," says Abdusalam Omer, a government adviser. "There's not a three-year-old in Somalia, Djibouti or Yemen who isn't affected. At the moment, al-Shabaab is in the ascendant, opening schools in many cities. Yet if a reasonably modest investment is made in TFG they can defeat al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda for the first time in any country."