MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

By Katharine Houreld – “Tens of thousands of Somalis are feared dead in the world’s worst famine in a generation, a crisis so severe that the United States will allow emergency funds to be spent in areas controlled by al-Qaeda-linked militants as long as the fighters do not interfere with aid distributions.

Exhausted, rail-thin women are stumbling into refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia with dead babies and bleeding feet, having left weaker family members behind along the way.

‘Somalia is facing its worst food security crisis in the last 20 years,’ said Mark Bowden, the United Nations’ top official in charge of humanitarian aid in Somalia. ‘This desperate situation requires urgent action to save lives … it’s likely that conditions will deteriorate further in six months.’

The crisis was the worst since 1991-92, when hundreds of thousands of Somalis starved to death, Bowden said. That famine prompted intervention by an international peacekeeping force, but it eventually pulled out after two American Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in 1993.

Since then, Western nations have mainly sought to contain the threat of terrorism from Somalia – an anarchic nation where the weak Government battles Islamic militants on land and pirates hijack ships for millions of dollars at sea.” Read more.

Aid ban still in place in Somalia, Islamist militants say – “Islamist militants in Somalia have reversed a pledge to allow foreign aid agencies to operate in famine-struck regions in the nation. ‘The lift of ban on aid agencies doesn’t include the agencies that we banned earlier in areas we control because those agencies don’t do relief work, they are spies and work on political agendas’, Al-Shabaab spokesman Ali Mohamud Raage said Thursday on the militants’ radio station, Al Furqaan… Al-Shabaab originally banned foreign aid organizations from providing aid in southern Somalia in 2009, describing them as Western spies and Christian crusaders.” Read more.

Somali militants vow to block aid workers from famine-stricken south – “An al-Qaeda-linked militant group has said it will not allow banned aid organizations to return, meaning only a handful of agencies will be able to respond to the worsening famine in southern Somalia. Meanwhile, the UN children’s agency — one of the few groups that does operate in the area — said Friday that nearly 800,000 children are at risk of dying without urgent assistance.” Read more.

Flashback: Somali aid going to militants, UN staff: report – “The United Nations World Food Program said it is conducting an internal review following a report that as much as half of the food aid it distributes in Somalia ends up in the hands of corrupt contractors, radical Islamic militants and local UN staffers… The report, written by a panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions against the East African nation and obtained by CBC News, describes what it calls ‘large-scale, egregious and systematic obstruction of humanitarian assistance.'” Read more.