SOMALIA: Thousands below five die in famine

  1. Posted on Friday 5 August 2011 - 09:49
    Mohamedroyter
    Image of Mohamedroyter
    Mohamed Abdi, AfricaNews reporter in Nairobi, Kenya Photo: ECHO
    Kaltum Mohamed sits beside a small mound of earth, alone with her thoughts. It is her child's grave - and there are three others like it. Just three weeks ago, Mohamed was the mother of five young children. But the famine that has rocked Somalia has claimed the lives of four of them, according to AP. Only a daughter remains.
    internally displaced in Somalia Photo_ECHO
    The others starved to death before Mohamed’s eyes as she and her husband trekked to Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, in search of aid. The report said thousands of parents are grieving in Somalia and in refugee camps in neighboring countries amid Somalia’s worst drought in 60 years.

    The drought and famine in Somalia have killed more than 29,000 children under the age of five in the last 90 days in southern Somalia alone, according to US estimates. The United Nations says 640,000 Somali children are acutely malnourished, suggesting the death toll of small children will rise.

    Mohamed and her husband tried to get their children from Somalia’s parched south to the capital, Mogadishu, in time to receive emergency aid from the few humanitarian organizations that are operating there.

    They began their journey in the Lower Shabelle region, where the UN declared famine July 20.

    Her family belongs to a tribe of pastoral nomads, but all of their livestock died in the drought. When her children fell ill, she took them to a hospital in the Lower Shabelle but could not afford the treatment they needed.

    Most aid is not getting to the south where it is desperately needed. An Al Qaeda-allied group, Al Shabab, controls much of southern Somalia and insists that there is no famine. It has banned all aid groups but the International Committee of the Red Cross.

    The family’s journey to the capital, one being made by thousands of other Somalis, came too late. Four of Mohamed’s children died en route because of severe malnutrition and related complications.

    “Death is inevitable,” Mohamed said in a makeshift camp near Mogadishu’s airport, home to hundreds of other displaced people. “But the surprise was how suddenly I lost my four children in less than 24 hours because of famine.”

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