From Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg TO say Somalia, where conflict between warlords and al-Qaeda-backed jihadists is claiming hundreds of lives, is in a shambles is the grossest of understatements. The country of seven million Sunni Muslims has no banks and has been without a government since 1991, when President Siad Barré, a cold war dictator puppet loyal first to the Soviet bloc and then the West, was overthrown. Former allies fell upon one another and sliced up the country – in the Horn of Africa – along highly complex clan and subclan fault lines. A ruinous man-made famine followed. Skilled and wealthy Somalis began deserting the country and there are now perhaps three million refugees outside the country, living mainly in Kenya, Yemen and Britain.