NAIROBI (AFP) — Some 600,000 people have fled the war-riven Somali capital since February, bringing the total number of people displaced inside the country to a "staggering one million," the UNHCR said Tuesday.
Nearly 200,000 people fled Mogadishu in recent weeks amid some of the heaviest fighting between the joint Ethiopian and Somali government forces and Islamist-led rebels, the UN refugee agency said.
Government troops continued to patrol Mogadishu, as relative stability returned days after dozens of people were killed and thousands wounded, witnesses said.
"Sixty percent of the population or some 600,000 people are believed to have fled from ... Mogadishu since February this year," the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in a statement.
"The numbers of displaced this year are in addition to some 400,000 people displaced by previous fighting," said the statement.
"Families continue to lack proper shelter and consistently resort to using any material - mostly plastic bags and rags - to patch up their 'tukuls' - flimsy dome-shaped shelters," the statement added.
An estimated 200,000 people were living rough in squalid camps along the road to Afgooye, 30 kilometres (18 miles) west of Mogadishu -- a 50 percent increase over the past two weeks, the UNHCR said.
Some of those sheltering there had had to give up some the aid they had received to gatekeepers, individuals who act as self-proclaimed managers in some of the settlements, the statement said.
They were also being charged for the use of the latrines which were often too few for the numbers there, it added.
Aid workers were delivering supplies in Afgooye, but complained that fighting was preventing them from accessing civilians trapped in Mogadishu.
"It is impossible to estimate the number of people remaining in Mogadishu," said Catherine Weibel, the agency's spokeswoman for Somalia.
A statement issued by the donor-funded Food Security Analysis Unit said child malnutrition was rising in the Shabelle region -- Somalia's breadbasket.
The region had suffered the worst crop in 13 years, leaving nearly a million people there on the edge of starvation.
At least 45,000 children under five were acutely malnourished, of whom nearly 8,500 were severely malnourished and in desperate need of specialist care, the FSAU added.
"Humanitarian assistance for the displaced populations, host communities and rural populations in crisis in the Shabelle region is urgently needed to avert a slide into a humanitarian crisis of increased magnitude," it said.
The UN and other independent aid workers warn that the crisis in Somalia is the worst in Africa, a dubious distinction in a continent where catastrophes are common.
The transitional government, riven by in-fighting, has been unable to exert control across the nation and some provinces have declared independence.
The bloody clan bickering and power struggles that intensified after the 1991 overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre have undermined numerous bids to stabilise Somalia.
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