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More Somalis flee Mogadishu
28/11/2007 10:22 - (SA)
Afgoye - Mostly on foot and a few perched on carts drawn by donkeys, Mogadishu's dispossessed continued to arrive in nearby Afgoye, fleeing the carnage in Somalia's violence-wracked capital.
Anab Haybe Ahmed, Isman and their family were among the latest arrivals.
"The Ethiopian army took my house," said Ahmed. "They moved into it. I only had time to take my children and leave. I have nothing else," said the 36-year-old mother-of-10.
She made the 20km trek from the capital on foot a week earlier.
"When they came, they told us they were looking for a man," she continued. "That's why my husband fled first. We didn't want him to get himself killed." Since then, she added, she had lost track of him.
100 000 people flee
United Nations aid workers had put the numbers of displaced here at least 200 000, spread across some 70 makeshift camps - 15 of them from the last burst of fighting that broke out at the end of October.
Among the acacias and the fig trees, they had been forced to make do with what they had, which in many cases were the clothes they stood up in.
The first wave of 100 000 people fled the capital at the turn of the year, after government forces backed by troops from neighbouring Ethiopia drove out fighters of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) from large parts of the country.
But sporadic clashes had continued in the capital since then, forcing another 100 000 local people to flee their homes for the surrounding countryside.
Isman Abdi Jimale, 47, sat talking with two friends. As much as he hated sitting around doing nothing in the camp, the violence in the capital meant there was no question of going back there for the moment.
He said: "I got here 20 days ago. There was no peace there. The government forces killed my uncle. They came into his house and cut his throat."
'There were no murders'
Isman, the head of a family that included two wives and 15 children, looked back on the period after the ICU ran the city, in the second half of last year, with relative nostalgia.
He recalled: "Life was good. People could walk in the street and lead a normal life. There were no murders."
That had ended after the Ethiopian troops arrived, he said. "They take everything you have and do the worst things to people."
The ICU fighters, he insisted, were people like him. He said: "They want peace."
Aid workers were struggling to cope with the massive influx of people and the overcrowding was making the difficult sanitary conditions worse.
The latest report from the United Nations's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), noted that between 17 and 19 of children under five there were suffering from severe malnutrition.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and other aid agencies focused on treating the weakest of the children, but since the start of its operation on August 22, MSF had recorded the 10 deaths.
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