It has been two years since Somalia and Ethiopia went to war over a disputed stretch of land known as the Ogaden.  The fighting, once billed as a superpower proxy battle for control of the strategic Horn of Africa, has instead turned into an unrelenting guerrilla war. Somalia is officially out of the fighting now, but Somali-backed rebels in the desert continue to hold out against an Ethiopian regime backed by Cuban troops and East German advisers . NEWSWEEK's Nicholas Proffitt recently visited the Ogaden and filed this report on the fighting:

In 1903, the father of Somali nationalism wrote a letter warning the English what they would find when they came to fight him in the Ogaden: "If the country was cultivated or contained houses or property it would be worth your while to fight," wrote Sheik Muhammad bin Abdullah Hassan. "The country is all jungle and that is no use to you. If you want wood and stone you can get them in plenty. There are also many ant heaps. The sun is very hot. All you can get from me is war, nothing else."

Hassan was called "the mad mullah" by the British troops. But he gave the soldiers just what he promised for two decades, until they finally bombed his desert fortress into rubble in 1920.  In the blast furnace that is midday, his land, the Ogaden, seems as worthless as he claimed -- a devil's anvil of rock and sand and thorn trees. Only in the evening, when a dry, cool breeze moves across the desert floor, when night clouds evaporate to reveal a shroud of stars and an orange moon, does the Ogaden seem worth fighting for.

SPILLED BLOOD: Hassan's descedants, the guerrilla fighters of the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), also have
promised their enemies nothing but war. Since Somalia pulled its army out of the Ogaden last year and left the fight to the
WSLF, 60,000 people have died -- including 6,000 Cuban troops and nearly 25,000 civilians. Spilled blood burns off the sand almost before it can dry. The standoff war has driven 357,000 refugees into Somalian camps, more than in any other country in the world -- including Cambodia.

The Somali guerrillas, about 20,000 in all, fight with the most basic of weapons. They have AK-47 assault rifles, a few Belgian
FN rifles and some museum-piece Enfields. Their "heavy" weapons are rifle grenades, Russian-and Chinese-made B-40
rockets and some anti-tank mines.

On paper, the Ethiopian force of 60,000 is far superior. It is backed by 17,000 Cuban troops led by senior Soviet officers
under the command of Gen. Vasily Petrov, one of Moscow's most experienced and respected strategists. The Ethiopians have
an arsenal of modern weapons supplied by allies old and new -- American and Soviet tanks, American F-5 fighters and Soviet
MiG's. Yet the Somalis have held the Ethiopians to a draw. In a trip that covered nearly 400 miles into and around Ogaden, I
saw not one sign of an Ethiopian administrative presence -- no schools, no police posts, no Ethiopians at all. "The enemy is very near, but he never comes here," said Deria Migag, 70, in the Ogaden town of Cross, 40 miles into Ethiopia. "He is very afraid of our boys."

The Ethiopian and Cuban troops rarely leave their garrisons.Their main battle strategy, according to Western diplomats in the
Somali capital of Mogadishu, is to eliminate the threat of insurrection by making the Ogaden uninhabitable. Refugees who
stream into Somalia tell of indiscriminate bombing of villages by Ethiopian warplanes, of bombed or poisoned water holes,
slaughtered cattle, rape and murder. When I visited the camouflaged village of "New" Dig, built to replace an earlier Dig
destroyed by Ethiopian bombs, a MiG-21 flew over harmlessly.  Abdi Salaam, a WSLF section commander, explained that the MiG's are piloted by Cubans and East Germans.But the guerrillas fear the Ethiopian-piloted F-5s more because of their heavier payloads and longer ranges.  "The Ethiopians cannot move out of their places, so all they do is bomb," said Salaam.

BOMB ATTACKS: Although the Ethiopians deny it, they hve used napalm at least twice: earlier this year in the village of
Segag and before that in Baku Dawa, where I saw blackened hut frames and agonizingly twisted thorn trees a year after the
attack. More routing bomb attacks are usually unleashed after WSLF raids. Last month, two waves of F-5s and MiG's
obliterated the town of Degahabur, right on the Ethiopian garrison's own doorstep. "My husband has been killed," said Fatima
Hassan, a survivor and, with 320 other townspeople, a refugee in Somalia. "In front of us he was killed by a bullet from the
planes. All of our animals were killed except for a few who escaped.  My children were killed from the bombs. I do not hope to return to that place."

"Whenever they recognize that you are Somali, they kill you," said another refugee from the Ogaden. One herder said that when a group of Ethiopian and Cuban soldiers camped near his guri , or hut, he offered a Cuban officer ten cows to be let alone.  The Cuban politely declined, explaining than "we do not take animals from poor people." That night Ethiopian soldiers
surrounded his hut, stole his cows and bayoneted him in the leg.  The Cuban officer was nowhere to be seen.

RAIDS: In retaliation, the Somali guerrillas pick away at Ethiopian convoys and patrols, aided by an intelligence network that
has penetrated to the highest levels of the Ethiopian Army. In a typical raid last month, the WSLF got wind of an armored
convoy to resupply the Ethiopian Tenth Division. The guerrillas killed eighteen enemy soldiers without a casualty of their own. In a September ambush, the WSLF killed 285 soldiers and twelve officers -- including two Cubans -- while losing only one man.  A month later, after the WSLF was tipped off about a journey by high-ranking Ethiopian officers from Harer to Jijiga, the
guerrillas killed four and kidnapped three. The raid so outraged the Ethiopians that they sent seven MiG's to fly the length of the
Somali border, dropping leaflets warning that "we will take our revenge."

The guerrillas are masters of desert warfare. As our convoy of two Land-Rovers (stolen from the Ethiopians) traversed a road
near the Ethiopian-Cuban garrison at Aware, six of the WSLF's soldiers suddenly popped up from nowhere, helmets and
bodies sheathed in thorn bush. They were ready to shoot, because a white face to them means only Russian or Cuban. Once
they were talked out of firing, I realized that there were a dozen more guerrillas lying in ambush nearby. They fight knowing that
the WSLF has no doctors in the desert to treat wounded soldiers. At what passed for a field hospital, I saw seven men in
dirt-floored huts still recovering from six-week-old wounds.  One youth who had taken a round in the leg lay moaning in the dirt, his leg eaten away by gangrene.

Since most of the 8 million people in the Ogaden are of Somali stock, they support the guerrillas. All Ogaden men of sound
body and sufficient age are fighting. The women have taken over most village chores, including the male preserve of camel
herding, and in camouflaged homes and stores, business goes as usual.  One clothing store I visited in New Dig even had a
well-stocked shelf of American Bicentennial T shirts.

But the Ethiopians have driven out thousands of other nomads, often by poisoning their water holes. For Somalia, with only 3.6
million people, caring for the refugees is a backbreaking problem.  President Muhammad Siad Barre's plea for international aid
has been all but drowned out by the clamor over Cambodian refugees. The U.S. has offered $9 million in food aid to Siad
Barre's regime this year, and has budgeted $14.4 million for next year.  Siad Barre believes his refugee problem is growing
rather than diminishing, but he does not offer a political solution that Ethiopia is likely to accept. "The whole population of the
[Ogaden] region ... are the sons and daughters of the soil," Siad Barre said. "The proper and just solution is to let these people
have the right to choose the sort of government they want."

COMPLAINTS: Somalia is not about to abandon its centuries-old claim that the Ogaden belongs to the Somalis. Reliable
Western sources maintain that Siad Barre's regime is still funneling arms and ammunition to the Ogaden guerrillas. Even in the
unlikely event that Somalia and Ethiopia agree on some political compromise, they still would have to sell the WSLF on a
settlement. Some of the younger guerrillas are complaining that Somalia must do more to help them and they do not hide their
resentment toward the motherland. "Our people are called Western Somalis," said a 25-year-old Storm Trooper named
Moulid. "It is not Western Somalia. It is the Ogaden." Chances are that the stubborn desert fighters, like the mad mullah who
inspired them, will give nothing but war until they hold full title to their land.

Newsweek
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