As hunger spreads in Somalia, babies start to die

DOLLOW (HRNW) – Hacked-off thorn branches encircle two mounds of earth heaped over the tiny bodies of Halima Hassan Abdullahi s twin granddaughters. Babies Ebla and Abdia lived only a day.

Weakened by hunger, their mother gave birth to the twins a month early, eight weeks after their exhausted family walked into a camp for displaced families in the Somali town of Dollow. “She is malnourished and her two babies died of hunger,” Abdullahi said at the Kaxareey camp which sprang up in January and now houses 13,000 people.

They are among more than 6 million Somalis who need aid to survive.

After rains failed for four consecutive seasons, the worst drought in 40 years has shrivelled their beans and maize and dotted scrubland with the corpses of their goats and donkeys. read more

With global focus on Ukraine, aid agencies and the United Nations are desperate to attract attention to a calamity they say is shaping up to be comparable to Somalia s 2011 famine. More than a quarter of a million people died then, mostly children under five.

There is only enough cash for about half the people in the Kaxareey camp. Abdullahi s family is not one of the lucky ones.

She has not seen anything like it since the early 1990s, when a famine helped trigger a disastrous U.S. military intervention in Somalia that ended notoriously with the shooting down of a Black Hawk helicopter. Her family had never had to leave their land before, she said.