MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Fighting in the Somali capital has killed 25 people over two days, leaving corpses in the streets of a city where a bloody insurgency is intensifying, doctors and witnesses said Thursday.

The fighting in Mogadishu started late Wednesday and continued into Thursday in residential areas. On Wednesday, at least 10 people were killed and 40 wounded. Thursday’s fighting killed about 15 people and wounded 30, hospitals reported.

The government and rebels who want to install an Islamic state in the east African country blame each other for instigating the violence.

“The fighting is intensifying and the government soldiers seems to be retreating,” said Ahmednuur Osman, a local resident. “Insurgents are shouting ‘God is great’ and trying to advance toward Parliament’s meeting hall.”

Somalia has not had an effective government since 1991 when the overthrow of a dictatorship plunged the country into chaos. The vacuum has also allowed pirates to operate freely around Somalia’s 1,900-mile (3,060-kilometre) coastline.

Over the past two months, Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed’s government has come under heavy attacks from insurgents who have pounded government positions with mortars and targeting senior officials in suicide attacks. During an intense two-week period of fighting in the capital in May about 200 civilians were killed.

On Thursday, Ali Muse, an ambulance co-ordinator in the capital, said dozens of wounded in the latest round of violence have been taken to the hospital. Witnesses said corpses were lying in the streets.

The United States said last month that the Obama administration had supplied arms and provided military training worth just under $10 million to the government.

The Obama administration’s goal is to provide the faltering Somali government with weapons and to help armies in several neighbouring African nations train Somali forces. But experts have expressed concern that the arms may end up diverted to Islamic insurgent groups.

The groups control much of the country, sidelining government even in the capital, Mogadishu. Islamist rebels punished four men convicted of stealing cellphones and other items by cutting off a hand and a foot each before hundreds of onlookers in Mogadishu, the latest sign that insurgents wield the real power in the lawless African nation.

Somalis traditionally observe Sufi Islam, a relatively moderate form of worship. But in recent years, insurgents have begun to follow austere Wahabi Islam – rooted in Saudi Arabia and practiced by Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

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