250,000 Somalis Displaced

A staggering number of Somalis have been uprooted as a result of the recent fighting, compounding an already difficult humanitarian situation in the war-torn country.

A quarter of a million residents of the Somali capital Mogadishu have been displaced by fighting since July 7, a Somali cabinet minister said on Sunday.

Somali’s Minister for Humanitarian Affairs Mahmoud Ibrahim told the pan-Arab Al-‘Arabiyya that the living conditions of the displaced people in and around the capital were dangerous.

“It’s clear that the fighting is extremely bad in several areas throughout the country and we have recently been forced to suspend activities in northern Mogadishu,” a representative of an international aid organization operating in the country told The Media Line on the condition of anonymity. “Our Somali staff didn’t feel secure to continue to provide care. This was the first time in 17 years that we had to suspend activities there.”

Roberta Russo, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Somalia said that according to their latest figures, 227,000 Somalis had been displaced over the last two and a half months.

This brings the total number of displaced Somalis to approximately 1.3 million.

“The situation is really desperate,” Russo told The Media Line. “Women are fleeing from Mogadishu with their kids on foot, without carrying anything in their hands. Many families are spending the night without shelter, without access to water, food or healthcare.”

Russo said there was an increasing number of Somalis seeking to flee the country, to Kenya or to Yemen, hoping for international protection as refugees.

The U.N. agency is providing relief items such as mattresses, tents, cooking pots and jerry cans for carrying water.

Minister Ibrahim said the government was doing what it could to help the displaced people, such as distributing tents to those rendered homeless, but that the banning of some aid organizations by armed groups had hurt the Somali people.

Islamists looted two United Nations compounds last week and announced they would ban three U.N. agencies operating in areas under their control.

The current displacement is the largest since the government of President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmad came to power five months ago.

Islamist groups such as the A-Shabab organization alleged that the organizations – the U.N. Political Office for Somalia, the Development Program and the Department for Safety and Security – were working against the Somali people and against the establishment of an Islamist state.

The government is currently made up of both secularists and Islamists, but hard-line Islamists reject this government as being pro-Western. A-Shabab seeks to overthrow the Somali government and enforce Shari’a, or Islamic law.

Hundreds of fighters and civilians have been killed since fresh fighting broke out in May.

Somalia has not had a stable government since 1991 and the weak Transitional Federal Government is facing problems on many fronts.

The transitional government controls parts of the capital but much of the country is out of government control.

The government announced Sunday it had taken control of Beledwyn, a town in central Somalia, from Islamists. The government has denied reports that it only entered the town after the Islamist fighters had left.

The United States is concerned the country will become a safe haven for Al-Qa’ida operatives and recently announced it sent 40 tons of arms and ammunition to the Somali government, also providing funding to train local soldiers.

The instability in Somalia has fueled a spate of piracy in the Gulf of Aden and there are also fears that Somalia will become a battlefield for a proxy war between Ethiopia and its arch enemy Eritrea.