Drought, terrorists fuel woes in Somalia

BAIDOA, Somalia — The sea of rag-and-stick tents that spreads in every direction from the hungry, embattled city of Baidoa, in southern Somalia, gives way to sprawling plains controlled by the militants of alShabab.

More than 165,000 refugees have streamed into Baidoa since early last year, fleeing the ravages of Somalia’s fiercest drought in 40 years.

Calamity beckons in Somalia, where a combination of extreme weather and extremists is driving the country toward its most serious humanitarian disaster in more than a decade. Five seasons of failed rains, linked to climate change, have hit 7.8 million Somalis, 300,000 of whom are experiencing severe starvation.

But weather alone doesn’t create famine, experts say — it takes people, too. The biggest obstacle to a massive relief effort is the presence of al-Shabab, the extremists who dispatch suicide bombers and forcibly recruit children, tax farmers and prevent aid groups from reaching the worst-hit areas.

Somalis are waiting to see if aid experts will formally declare a famine in the coming weeks. Many already fear that history is repeating: Somalia’s past two great famines, in 1992 and 2011, which killed half a million people between them, were also the product of drought supercharged by war.

It has been a year since Somalia’s government declared the drought a national emergency, but aid workers say the crisis is now critical.

Every minute, on average, a severely malnourished child is admitted to a health facility for treatment. Hospital wards are filling with starving children suffering from measles, pneumonia and other diseases that prey on the weak.