Somalia - Fleeing into a Living Nightmare

[Somali refugees in northern Kenya - Footage from Al Jazeera]

If you want a sense of hell on earth, look at the recent article by Peter Smerdon about the camps in Afgooye, Somalia:

It's more than a misery mile, it's a nightmare 30 kilometres. Scores of camps holding 400,000 people driven from Mogadishu by fighting line both sides of a crumbling road running south of the capital. They are perhaps the greatest concentration of displaced people on Earth.

They're also a concentration of utter despair for the men, women and children forced to live in the huts made of twigs and branches only a few metres apart covered with ragged bedsheets if you're too poor or unfortunate not to have received or bought a tarpaulin to keep most of the rain out.

In 2007, more than 700,000 people fled the fighting in Mogadishu, and still the exodus continues. The UN estimates that at least 35,000 and perhaps as many as 61,000 people have fled Mogadishu since September, many winding up in Afgooye.

Overall, 2.6 million Somalis - 35% of the population - now need humanitarian assistance, while one in six children under the age of five is acutely malnourished.

People aren't just fleeing to Afgooye - there are over 200,000 Somali refugees in camps in northern Kenya, of whom 38,000 arrived this year alone. [The video above shows Somali refugees waiting to be registered in northern Kenya.]

World:Bridge also has an excellent post about Somali refugees in Djibouti.  For a map showing the distribution of Somali refugees as of last year, see here.