2nd Aug 11
Somali refugees brave Mogadishu fighting in hope of food
by Katie Naylor
Food for thought: famine victims facing fighting to get aid
Food for thought: famine victims facing fighting to get aid
Hit by the biggest drought in six decades, tens of thousands of Somalis are leaving the country’s central and southern rural areas and heading to Mogadishu, the war-ravaged region where the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) last week began an airlift operation to provide 20 feeding centres with supplies.
Despite continuing fighting, with Transitional Federal Government (TFG) troops and forces led by the African Union battling al-Shabaab’s Islamic militants, more and more people are arriving in the city in the hope of some relief from a drought which is affecting as many as 11 million in Somalia alone, with other countries in the region also suffering.
The WFP has said it has managed to supply 85,000 meals per day in the capital but with mortar shells regularly striking civilian areas, the military offence by the TFG which started last week is expected to hamper the food’s delivery.
The UN officially declared a famine in two of Somalia’s southern regions on 20 July, but the Somali government spokesman, Abdirahman Omar Osman, described the emergency as even more serious. Each day roughly 3,000 people arrive in Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley, the three camps located in Dadaab, Kenya, which now have over 380,000 refugees, with 100,000 of them arriving this year.
US President Barack Obama has said East Africa’s emergency has not been given the attention it needed in the US. Speaking in a meeting with presidents from Guinea, Benin, Niger and Ivory Coast of Friday, Obama asked the African nations to play a bigger part is assisting those affected by the famine.
The UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs believes that famine will now spread throughout southern Somalia, where some regions are controlled by al-Shabaab, which prohibited foreign aid in 2009. Following discussions with relief organizations, the group has allowed some supplies to be delivered over the past weeks but to date no regular food supplies have reached the regions under the Islamist militants’ control.
Eastern Ethiopia, northern Kanya and Djibouti have also been badly hit. The scale of the emergency has even prompted long-term Dadaab refugees to join in the relief efforts. Islamic associations and mosques in the camps are gathering food and clothes to hand out to the newcomers.
Mahmoud Jama Guled, chairman of a section in the Ifo camp, said that they have requested that the population gives new refugees priority at the water points. He explained that in his area alone, one water tank now serves over 6,500 families.
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