World Food Programme (WFP) officials said the areas of southern Somalia controlled by the al Qaeda-linked a
l-Shabaab... Harakat ash-Shabaab al-Mujahidin aka the Mujahideen Youth Movement. It was originally the youth movement of the Islamic Courts, now pretty much all of what's left of it. They are aligned with al-Qaeda but operate more like the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban. The organization's current leader is Ibrahim Haji Jama Mee'aad, also known as Ibrahim
al-Afghani. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Kenyan al-Qaeda member, is considered the group's military leader...
, which imposed a ban on food aid in 2010, were among the most dangerous to operate in worldwide.
"There are 2.2 million people yet to be reached. It is the most dangerous environment we are working in the world. But people are dying. It's not about politics, it's about saving lives now," Josette Sheeran, WFP's executive director, told agency staff and news hounds in northeastern Kenya.
The drought gripping the region straddling Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia is the worst for 20 years and is affecting some 10 million people, the United Nations
...aka the Oyster Bay Chowder and Marching Society...
says. In southern Somalia, 3.7 million people risk starvation.
WFP was among several groups ordered out of rebel-held areas last year who were now preparing to return. A WFP official briefing Sheeran said the agency was considering food drops from aircraft in regions inaccessible by land.
Aid groups also face landmines in the border areas where al-Shabaab clashed with Kenyan and Ethiopian forces earlier this year, said Regis Chapman, WFP Somalia's head of programme.
Sheeran visited the pastoralist village of El Adow some 100 km from the Somali border.
A Rooters witness said cattle carcasses littered the arid lands surrounding the settlement.
More than a quarter of the children in the area are malnourished and a third of adults receiving food handouts, UN data showed.
Nice Gesture, But Not Enough
In that case, it's too much.
In El Adow, 75 year-old Nimau Witou clutched three bags of wheat, soya, beans and a can of cooking oil, given to her by WFP, lamenting the demise of her entire herd of livestock. The handout should last her and her family a month.
"It's a nice gesture but it's not enough," Witou told Rooters.
"And it's not the kind of food we are used to; it's the wrong kind of food. But it's our only lifeline," she said.
Alongside Sheeran was La Belle France's Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire, who will report to a UN emergency meeting in Rome on Monday.
Al-Shabaab have accused the UN of exaggerating the gravity of the humanitarian crisis and denounced the declaration of famine in two parts of Somalia as political.
Aid agencies the hardline group expelled from southern Somalia in 2010 could not return, they said, reversing a previous pledge.
Somalia's beleaguered government exerts almost no power outside of the capital, Mogadishu, where government forces and African troops are battling to quash the rebels' four-year insurgency. It condemned the bad turbans' aid ban.
"The bully boyz are literally and deliberately starving the people to death," Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali said in a statement. "It is the insurgency itself that is the root cause of the famine."
Cycles of drought and flooding have become increasing frequent across the Horn of Africa and east Africa, due largely to global warming.
| Or possibly to maldistribution of resources due to endless and vicious internecine warfare |