Reports reaching from the Lower Shabelle region in southern Somalia indicate that at least eight people including women and children have died from hunger and thirst in some parts of the region for the past 48 hours. The elders confirmed the incident to the media today.
The dead people of whom five were children under 10 years of age died in the village of Toora-toorow and surrounding areas, according to Hajji Daalow Ahmed, an elder in the village who talked to the reporters.
“There is a difficult humanitarian situation here and we are calling on international aid groups for more help. There is no enough food and water to drink also,” the elder lamented during his Monday’s via phoneme press conference.
Earlier transitional federal government (TFG) of Somalia sent an alarm to the UN food agency demanding for emergency life-saving food assistance to the people living in draught-affected regions in the country.
But reaching those people seems to be difficult because of the restrictions by the Al-QAaeda-linked Al-Shabab militants who banded aid agencies from operating in regions they control.
Meanwhile, thousands of Holly Quran school children have prayed for rain in the streets of the central Galgadud region.
“Allahu Akbar-Allahu Akbar, the creator of the world, the one whose hand is big we pray to you to give us rains,” the Holly Quran school children and their teachers (Moalims) were announcing since early morning.
The United Nations estimates that more than 3.5 million Somalis nearly half of the country’s total population is currently in need of humanitarian assistance. Those including over 1.5 million people who fled from their homes in the restive capital Mogadishu since January 2007.