'Somalis will become extinct'
2008-06-26 22:07
Mogadishu - Conflict in Somalia has killed 2 136 civilians so far this year, bringing the death toll since an Islamist-led insurgency began in early 2007 to 8 636, a local human rights group said on Thursday.
The Mogadishu-based Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation said it had also recorded 11 790 civilian injuries since the start of last year, when rebels began attacking the Somali government and its Ethiopian military allies.
"If the international community does not intervene to stop the massacre in the country, Somalis will soon become extinct," the group's chairperson, Sudan Ali Ahmed, told Reuters.
As well as civilian deaths, hundreds of fighters on both sides have also died, locals say.
The insurgency - the latest in a cycle of conflict since the 1991 fall of a military dictator - has compounded the effects of drought and poverty to create what aid workers call one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
'The disaster is happening now'
"Somalia is no longer on the verge of catastrophe, the disaster is happening now," Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) director of operations Bruno Jochum told a Nairobi press conference in the latest international warning.
The United Nations says one million Somalis - out of a total population of about nine million - are living as internal refugees in the Horn of Africa nation.
But the Elman rights group, in figures given to Reuters, put that number at 1.9 million. Tens of thousands of Somalis have also fled to neighbouring countries.
The governments of Ethiopia and Somalia dispute the numbers of dead and displaced, saying rights groups are accepting Islamist "propaganda" and exaggerating the situation.
Mogadishu, the epicentre of the conflict, has seen an upsurge in fighting since a UN-brokered peace agreement at the start of this month. Hardline Islamists rejected the pact, signed by the Somali government and some opposition members.
In the latest violence on Thursday, Islamists killed nine policemen in Mogadishu after tricking them into a meeting, and shot dead two government soldiers in a central village, Rebay, locals and authorities said.