Somalia, July 08: The number of people displaced by the escalating conflict in Mogadishu has reached 204,000, making it the biggest exodus from the troubled Somali capital since the Ethiopian intervention in 2007, the UN refugee agency has said. The eight-week-long offensive led by the Al-Shabab and Hisb-ul-Islam militia against government forces “is having a devastating impact on the city s population, causing enormous suffering and massive displacement”, Ron Redmond, spokesman of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told a news briefing in Geneva Tuesday.
“According to our local partners, fighting in the past week alone has killed some 105 people and injured 382,” Redmond said. While many of the displaced were fleeing to the Afgooye corridor, some 30 km west of Mogadishu, which already hosts more than 400,000 victims of previous conflicts, the majority are now heading further afield to the Lower and Middle Shabelle, Galgaduud, Bay and Lower Juba regions.
Despite the fact that the Kenyan border is officially closed and Kenyan authorities are not allowing asylum-seekers to cross into Kenya, the number of people arriving in the UNHCR-run Dadaab refugee complex situated near the Somali border in north-eastern Kenya continues to rise.
Since May, more than 13,000 Somali refugees have been registered at Dadaab, bringing to 36,000 the number of Somali refugees who have arrived in the camp since the beginning of the year, Redmond said. According to UNHCR, the actual number of new arrivals is much higher since many of them head directly to urban centers like Nairobi, Mombasa and Garissa. Dadaab refugee complex now hosts more than 284,306 refugees.
–Agencies