AFGOYE, Somalia - Aid workers are calling it Africa's biggest humanitarian crisis, but no one has to tell Fatima Usman how rapidly things have gone bad in Somalia.
The slender 23-year-old lost two children to hunger and one to cholera.
"I am praying to God that he will not take this baby yet," she says while cradling her 4-month-old son, whose ribs poke out from the hunger he is being treated for by Doctors Without Borders. "But I do not have enough milk to give him."
In the face of an increasingly brutal insurgency, Usman left behind her three buried children in the capital Mogadishu and fled 20 miles east to Afgoye, the town that has swelled with 200,000 refugees since June.
Half those refugees have arrived within the past three weeks. The fighting took a turn for the worse after Islamic insurgents killed and publicly mutilated several soldiers from Ethiopia allied with the government here.
In all, 1 million Somalis have been displaced by the violence, many of them fleeing to Afgoye, the United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday.
In Afgoye, thousands of makeshift huts have mushroomed, seemingly overnight. Many of the fruit groves have been stripped of their branches. Lucky families receive plastic sheeting from an aid agency to use as a roof against the cold autumn rains.
For the others, sodden lengths of fabric strung over twigs have to do. Under them, families huddle for warmth in the mud. More arrive daily.
Many have stories like Hawo Abdi Baro, who arrived Sunday pushing her three youngest children in a handcart. On Nov. 16, a shell exploded on her house in Mogadishu while the family was sleeping. The 40-year-old had time only to scoop up her youngest three and run out into the street.
In the panic, she lost sight of her four eldest sons, screaming their names above the explosions as she huddled in a doorway.
"I don't know where they are. I don't know if they are alive or dead. Please help me find them," she cried at a journalist. "Their names are Abdi, Abdinasir, Isse and Mohamed."
Like many of the others, the family arrived with no food, clothes or shelter.
The timing is bad. The harvest here is the worst it has been for 13 years. Basic food staples have tripled in price. Among children younger than 5, nearly one in every five suffers acute malnutrition, according to the latest U.N. figures.
By comparison, about one in every seven children in Darfur suffers acute malnutrition. Somalia has been in crisis since clan-based warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other.
More than a decade ago, a huge U.N. relief operation was launched for thousands of civilians left starving because of fighting. In 1993, Somali clan militiamen shot down two Black Hawk helicopters and killed 18 U.S. servicemen.
Then-President Bill Clinton ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The U.N. peacekeeping operation in Somalia was scaled back and eventually abandoned in 1995.
Eric LaRoche, who heads U.N. aid efforts in Somalia, says the situation is now worse than when U.S. troops first intervened.
"Somalia has been a forgotten emergency for so many years," LaRoche said. Fewer people are affected "than in Darfur, but the crisis is more severe."
In Somalia, predatory militias roam the country, kidnapping and killing aid workers and erecting makeshift roadblocks. The price for a truck loaded with food relief has shot up from $40 to $400. Afgoye is full of lean men lounging under trees with automatic weapons, eyeing the new arrivals and estimating their worth.
Some work for the unpopular transitional government, widely perceived as corrupt, inefficient and ineffective. Its soldiers have not been paid this year, but the international community, and U.S.-ally Ethiopia, continue to support it as a front line on the war on terrorism against an Islamic insurgency.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opposes deploying U.N. peacekeeping troops to Somalia again, instead suggesting a robust multinational force or a coalition of volunteer nations to help restore security.
The U.N. authorized the African Union to send an 8,000-member peacekeeping force to Somalia in February to calm the country, but only 1,800 troops from Uganda are on the ground.
Sudan's Darfur, where movie stars jet in to call for peace and feed the hungry, draws most of the attention, although help for that region is not fast in coming either.
The UN-AU force is supposed to take control of Darfur by the end of 2007, but a top U.N. official said last week it would not be ready unless Sudan quickly accepted units from outside Africa, and contributing countries offered helicopters and other critical equipment.
Aid agencies have had trouble raising funds for Darfur as well as Somalia, and aid workers in both places have been targeted by fighters.
Some Somali opposition figures are joining the insurgency. Many of the insurgency's senior figures are Islamic radicals, some on the State Department's list of wanted terrorists.
They seized power in Mogadishu and parts of southern Somalia last year for about six months, before being driven out by the Ethiopians in December 2006. Now they receive support from Ethiopia's archenemy Eritrea, turning Somalia into a battlefield.
Yet for all the anarchy, the decisions politicians face pale next to the plight of Somali mothers in Afgoye.
Usman calculates each day how much food she must eat to produce milk for one child - each mouthful one less for her other two children.
SOURCE: AP, November 25. 2007