GENEVA (AFP) — Heavy fighting has forced 15,000 people to flee their homes in Mogadishu in the past week, taking the total number of displaced in the Somali capital since January to 160,000, the UN refugee agency said Friday.
"This week's fighting in the Somali capital, described by witnesses as the worst since the beginning of the latest insurgency in February 2007, has forced at least 15,000 people from their homes," UN High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman Ron Redmond told journalists.
Almost half of the displaced have moved to safer areas of Mogadishu while most of the others have fled west to the town of Afgooye, which is already "jammed" with over 300,000 internally displaced people, the UNHCR said.
"The new wave of displacement in Mogadishu is worsening an already catastrophic situation in a war-torn country where more than 1 million people are displaced," Redmond warned.
Thousands of Somalis are fleeing across the border to Kenya, despite the frontier being formally closed since early 2007.
Redmond said that even so, the border remains "pretty porous" and that around 5,000 Somali refugees arrive in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya every month.
"The Dadaab refugee camp complex... is currently hosting more than twice its intended population. The recent influx has worsened the overcrowding and UNHCR has made decongesting the camp a priority," he said.
Somalia has been without an effective central authority since the 1991 ouster of former president Mohamed Siad Bare set off a deadly power struggle that has defied more than a dozen peace initiatives.
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