The government has been a mess for the past few weeks  many would argue for the past few years  with the president and the prime minister bitterly and publicly blaming each other for the country’s crisis. More than 100 of the 275 members of Parliament are in Kenya, refusing to go home, saying they will be killed.

Western diplomats, United Nations officials and the Ethiopians seem to be turning against the transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, a cantankerous former warlord in his 70s who has thwarted just about every peace proposal.

“Yusuf has gone from being seen as the solution to being seen as the problem,” said a senior Western diplomat in Kenya, speaking on condition of anonymity in accord with diplomatic protocol.

But Mr. Yusuf’s clan still backs him, and Western diplomats said he might soon flee to his clan stronghold in northeast Somalia.

Most analysts predict that the war-weary people of Mogadishu would initially welcome the Islamists, out of either relief or fear. In 2006, Islamist troops teamed up with clan elders and businessmen to drive out the warlords who had been preying upon Somalia’s people since the central government first collapsed in 1991. The six months the Islamists ruled Mogadishu turned out to be one of the most peaceful periods in modern Somali history.

But today’s Islamists are a harder, more brutal group than the ones who were ousted by an Ethiopian invasion, backed by the United States, in late 2006. The old guard included many moderates, but those who tried to work with the transitional government mostly failed, leaving them weak and marginalized, and removing a mitigating influence on the die-hard insurgents.

On top of that, the unpopular and bloody Ethiopian military operations over the past two years have radicalized many Somalis and sent hundreds of unemployed young men  most of whom have never gone to school, never been part of a functioning society and never had much of a chance to do anything but shoulder a gun  into the arms of militant Islamic groups.