Trapped in famine-hit Afgoye, a rag-hut city ruled by Islamist Shebab rebels and the world’s largest camp for displaced people, Saedo Saleh knew she had to escape when her baby son fell sick. “There is nothing there, no aid of any kind,” she said, cradling her screaming one-year old son in a clinic in the government-held but war-torn Somali capital, where she sought help after sneaking across the frontline. “People are struggling, because there is not enough food, people are sick and there is nothing for them there,” she said. Kenyan troops and tanks crossed the border into southern Somalia at the weekend to assault hardline Shebab positions there, after a spate of kidnappings of foreigners inside Kenya, but the rebels remain in control of much of southern and central Somalia.
Afgoye, a crowded corridor of some 410,000 people along a key road running west out of Mogadishu is struggling under the Al-Qaeda linked Shebab’s draconian restrictions on foreign aid. Almost three months since the UN declared famine in the first of several southern Somali regions — now including Afgoye and camps inside Mogadishu — the situation remains grim, despite international efforts to increase aid. The United Nations has described Somalia, where a civil war has been going on since 1991, as facing the most severe humanitarian crisis in the world. Four million Somalis are in crisis, with some 750,000 at risk of dying in coming months if efforts are not scaled up, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has warned.
Even inside Mogadishu, base of a 9,000-strong African Union force and the weak Western-backed government, recent fighting and security concerns have limited access to desperate people needing food, shelter and medicine. “The aid has increased but it is not being coordinated well; people are still in need and more people are arriving,” said the owner of a clinic.
“Some have come to help us, but we need more, because we have so little — the food we get is just enough to survive from day-to-day, but not enough to live a life,” said Sara Ibrahim, a mother of six, living in basic plastic shelter provided by a Qatari aid agency.
Children weakened by hunger are now “sitting out in the rain all night, and risking contracting diseases,” said the Save the Children Somalia office, adding that two children were recently swept away by flood waters. Food deliveries have reached some 2.2 million people as of last week, over half of those in need and massive increase since a few weeks ago, OCHA’s latest report reads.
