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	Militants blocking aid to starving children in Somalia, charity says by Al Jazeera, Reuters, agencies   Oct. 16, 2017   Somalia declares three days of mourning after horrific terror attack.   A powerful truck bomb blast has killed over 300 people and wounded hundreds of others in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu.   The powerful explosion on Saturday afternoon struck a busy junction in Hodan, a bustling commercial district in the heart of the city where shops, hotels, restaurants and government buildings cater to locals. Hundreds of people had been in the area at the time of the blast.   Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed Farmaajo on Sunday declared three days of national mourning and called for donations of blood and funds to victims. Doctors at Mogadishu hospitals struggled to help badly-wounded victims, many burned beyond recognition.   Al-Shabab, an Islamic extremist group that has carried out dozens of attacks in Mogadishu and other parts of the country, is suspected of being behind the vicious attack.   Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Adow said the car bomb blast had "all the hallmarks" of an al-Shabab attack.. This is what they've been doing since 2011, when they lost control of Mogadishu. The government has been unable to figure out how to stop these kinds of attacks," he said.   The bombing, described as the deadliest single attack in Somalia's history, was universally condemned.   Antonio Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, "strongly condemned" the attack in Mogadishu, his spokesman said in a statement.   "He conveys his condolences to the bereaved families and wishes speedy recovery to the injured," said Stephane Dujarric.   "The Secretary-General commends the first responders and the inhabitants of Mogadishu who have mobilised to assist the victims throughout the city. He urges all Somalis to unite in the fight against terrorism and violent extremism and work together in building a inclusive federal state."   On Sunday, Guterres said he was "sickened" by the bombing in the Somali capital. Michael Keating, the UN special envoy to Somalia, called the attack "revolting".   "I am shocked and appalled by the number of lives that were lost in the bombings and the scale of destruction they caused," he said.   Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union Commission, said the pan-African body, which has deployed a peacekeeping mission in the country, would "continue its support to the Somali government and people in their efforts to achieve sustainable peace and security".   15 Oct. 2017   Mogadishu truck bomb: 500 casualties in Somalia's worst terrorist attack. (Guardian News)   At least 500 people have been killed or seriously injured in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, in one of the most lethal terrorist acts anywhere in the world for many years.   The death toll from Saturday's attack, which involved a truck packed with several hundred kilograms of explosives, stood at 276 on Sunday, according to Associated Press, but is expected to rise as more bodies are dug from the rubble spread over an area hundreds of metres wide in the centre of the city. At least 300 people were injured, according to local reports.   The devastating bombing will focus attention on the decade-long battle against al-Shabaab, an Islamist group, in Somalia. It provoked a chorus of international condemnation. Michael Keating, the UN special envoy to Somalia, called it 'revolting'.   Doctors struggled to treat the huge numbers of seriously wounded victims, while thousands of people queued to give blood in Mogadishu.   Rescue workers were still digging out injured survivors late on Sunday night. Hundreds of people took the streets to protest against the attack.   The city has been hit by multiple bombings in recent years. None have been as deadly as this attack, however.   Ambulance sirens echoed across the city on Sunday afternoon as bewildered families wandered among the rubble and wrecked vehicles, looking for missing relatives. Bodies were carried from the scene in makeshift stretchers made of blankets, as people tried to dig through the debris with their bare hands.   'In our 10 year experience as the first responder in #Mogadishu, we haven't seen anything like this', the Aamin ambulance service tweeted.   'There's nothing I can say. We have lost everything', said Zainab Sharif, a mother of four who lost her husband in the attack. She sat outside a hospital where he was pronounced dead after hours of efforts by doctors to save him.   The Somali president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, declared three days of national mourning and joined thousands of people who responded to a plea by hospitals to donate blood for the wounded.   Dr Mohamed Yusuf, the director of the Mogadishu's Medina hospital, said his staff had been 'overwhelmed by both dead and wounded'. He added: 'This is really horrendous, unlike any other time in the past'.   Al-Shabaab has a history of launching bomb attacks against civilian targets in Mogadishu.   Somalian officials said al-Shabaab did not care about the lives of Somali people, mothers, fathers and children.   15 Oct. 2017   Abdulkadir Abdirahman, director of Mogadishu's ambulance service, recounts the horrors he saw after a truck bomb blast that killed and injured more than 500 people in the Somali capital.   "It was a normal day. Very quiet and not much work to do. I was sitting behind my desk at work. Our office is about one kilometre from the scene of the explosion.   All of a sudden, I heard a very big blast. Everything shook. I have never heard anything that loud before. Within a few minutes, the sky was covered with very dark smoke that covered even the sunlight.   I picked up my phone and called the rest of the team. I did not need to tell what just happened because they all heard it. We all rushed in the direction of the billowing smoke.   Aamin ambulance service was established in 2008 and we have never seen such devastation. Not even in our dreams.   Everywhere you looked, there were dead bodies. Everywhere you turned, there were wounded people crying for help. I never imagined I will see such a scene.   Big buildings were completely destroyed. Buildings crumbled. Vehicles were burned and upside down. The tarmac was covered in flesh, blood and pieces of clothes. Our country has never seen anything even close to this.   In one of the burned minibuses were young students coming from school, their charred remains tangled in what was left of the vehicle they were travelling in. I will never forget that gruesome sight.   Our 10 ambulances were not enough to take all the injured and dead to hospital. The corpses were destroyed beyond recognition. You could not tell which corpse was a man and which was a woman.   Everyone in the city was trying to call their family members and friends to see if they were okay. This jammed the network and we in the ambulance service could not communicate with each other or the hospitals.   The hospitals were overwhelmed. They had no choice but to treat the injured in the hallways because everywhere else was full.   I saw people I used to see every day in the city among the dead. Every home in Mogadishu has lost someone or know someone that was killed in the explosion. The city is in mourning."   July 2017   Militants blocking aid to starving children in Somalia, by Daniel Wesangula.   Lack of access to hungry parts of Somalia controlled by Islamist militants is threatening the lives of tens of thousands of malnourished children, an international charity said, as the war-torn nation risks falling back into famine.   Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM), often fatal without medical care, has "skyrocketed" to more than three times the emergency threshold in Hiraan region's Mataban District, a survey by Save the Children found.   "Scaling up to provide services to everyone affected is a challenge because we have around two million people living in al Shabaab controlled areas," said Hassan Noor Saadi, Save the Children's Somalia country director. "Getting aid to them is not easy."   Al Shabaab extremist militants ruled most of south-central Somalia until 2011, when they were driven out of the capital Mogadishu by African Union troops, and still carry out major attacks.   In 2011, some 260,000 Somalis died of famine caused by drought, conflict and lack of access to humanitarian aid.   Somali's erratic spring rains were not good enough to guarantee crop growth, while livestock continue to die, leaving families with little to feed their children, Saadi said.   "When animals die, there is no food, no milk, and no assets to make money off and subsequently buy food," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.   More than 275,000 children potentially face suffer life-threatening severe acute malnutrition this year, according to the United Nations children's agency, UNICEF.   "If these children are not given special foods to help them recover, their immunity will go down and they will become prone to opportunistic diseases," Saadi said. "They can either die from these diseases or from hunger."   Some 714,000 Somalis have fled their homes due to drought and failed crops since last November, joining 1 million previously internally displaced Somalis, the U.N. says.   Aid agencies are also struggling to save lives across the border in Ethiopia's Somali region, where nomads whose livestock have been killed by drought have settled in informal camps.   Medecins Sans Frontieres teams have treated more than 6,000 children with severe acute malnutrition in the area since January, a tenfold increase on 2016, the medical charity said on Monday.   "These numbers are the highest our teams there have seen in ten years," MSF spokeswoman Rosie Slater said in emailed comments, adding that 67 children died in June. "An acute humanitarian emergency is unfolding." http://tmsnrt.rs/2yxUBam   http://reliefweb.int/report/somalia/grim-milestone-somalia-drought-and-conflict-force-one-million-people-flee Visit the related web page
	Five times more civilians die in city offensives, new report finds by International Committee of the Red Cross, agencies   A new ICRC report launched reveals five times more civilians die in offensives carried out in cities than in other battles.   The report, called 'I Saw My City Die', also found that between 2010 and 2015, nearly half of all civilian war deaths worldwide occurred in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, the main focus countries of the report.   "Over the past three years, our research shows that wars in cities accounted for a shocking 70% of all civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria", said the ICRC's Regional Director for the Middle East, Robert Mardini.   "This illustrates just how deadly these battles have become. This is all the more alarming as new offensives get underway in cities like Raqqa in Syria, or intensify in Mosul, Iraq. A new scale of urban suffering is emerging, where no one and nothing is spared by the violence."   The research findings are based on preliminary analysis of battle trends and data over the past three years in Iraq and Syria. The report includes testimony from residents in Syria's Aleppo, Iraq's Mosul and Yemen's Taiz, and expert analysis. It vividly illustrates the effects of siege warfare, the use of explosive weapons and the extensive damage caused to key infrastructure.   The conflicts in these countries have resulted in internal displacement and migration levels unprecedented since WWII. More than 17 million Iraqis, Syrians and Yemenis have fled their homes.   And these battles risk becoming even more protracted if real political solutions are not found soon. Wars in cities are so devastating because of the way in which they are being fought.   Armed parties are failing to distinguish between military objectives and civilian infrastructure or worse, they are using or directly targeting them.   "It's beholden on those with power to act. Warring sides must realise the full impact the fighting has on the people they ultimately hope to govern. Will the victors be able to keep the peace if people feel they have respected neither the law nor the basic humanity of local citizens? The consequences of this violence will resonate for generations and there is the very real danger that cities experiencing these conflicts will simply act as incubators for further violence in the future", said Mr Mardini.   "States supporting parties to conflict must also do their utmost to restrain their allies and ensure better respect for international humanitarian law. And once the guns fall silent, it is local people and organisations which must play a full part in the rebuilding of the communities."   The report also considers Lebanon's 15-year civil war and examines the lessons Beirut can offer to help ensure the recovery of urban communities after such overwhelming and protracted violence.   ICRC Director General Yves Daccord says there are 80 conflicts currently raging in some 40 countries. The ICRC estimates that fifty million people currently bear the brunt of war in cities around the world.   Mr. Daccord is currently seeking more support to assist those affected. "With adequate funding will be able to better assist civilians who fled war zones, and those who chose to stay... If we want them to be able to survive in Syria and Yemen, we need to do humanitarian actions," he said.   "But also at the same time, try to make sure that water, sanitation systems, health system, can continue to function.   "When you are trying to reconstruct, it's not just about reconstructing building or infrastructure. It's about reconstructing society, and really thinking about how the social fabric of a society is living."   "We need to learn from the past, and we see that we are dealing with really protracted crises which impact people over time," he said.   Tens of thousands killed by war   The ICRC report found the most deadly conflicts were in the Middle East, with nearly half of all deaths in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.   The Syrian war has claimed more than 400,000 lives in seven years, and civilians who stayed said they were reliving the trauma on a daily basis.   In two years Yemen's civil war has caused at least 10,000 civilian deaths, and like Syria and Yemen, many Iraqi cities have been bombed repeatedly.   At the general hospital in Mosul in Iraq, just a kilometre from the frontline of the conflict Doctor Julia Schurch said: "All the traumas we see, more than 90 per cent, are directly war wounded traumas - gunshots and shell injuries, which means from blasts," she said. "Here it is really a very high number of war wounded cases, from very small superficial lesions from flying elements to deadly injuries."   With a humanitarian crisis unprecedented since the Second World War, the Red Cross said international assistance remained imperative.   The report makes 10 key recommendations to all parties that are either directly or indirectly involved in these conflicts; all of which are intended to limit the impact of urban warfare by reducing suffering and addressing the urgent needs of civilians.   The recommendations urge strict adherence to international humanitarian law which include among others the cessation of sieges as tactics of war, protecting civilians and civilian infrastructure and allowing access to humanitarian aid. http://bit.ly/2t8isu7   http://www.icrc.org/en/document/iraq-syria-and-yemen-five-times-more-civilians-die-city-offensives-new-report-finds http://www.icrc.org/en/war-in-cities   * Access the ICRC report via the link below. 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