Guns have been silent in Mogadishu after four days of battles pitting Ethiopian and Somali troops against anti-government fighters.

Several hundred people are believed to have been killed in the fighting.

Leaders of the city's dominant Hawiye clan said on Sunday they had reached a ceasefire.

But previous truces have been broken, and hundreds more Ethiopian troops were seen arriving in the Somali capital over the weekend.

With rotting bodies still lying in the streets on Monday, it was impossible to calculate an exact death toll from what the International Committee of the Red Cross called Mogadishu's worst fighting in more than 15 years.

Somali reporters have seen scores of corpses, Ethiopia says it has killed 200 insurgents, and residents say they believe several hundred people, mainly civilians, have died.

A small African Union peacekeeping force of some 1,200 Ugandan soldiers has been caught in the cross-fire, pinned down at strategic sites like the air and sea ports.

It lost a soldier during a mortar attack on the presidential compound on Sunday.

PHOTO CAPTION

Smoke rises in the horizon above Mogadishu, March 2007. (AFP)