DADAAB (northern Kenya): An increasingly violent insurgency in Somalia is fuelling a fresh refugee crisis with nearly 40,000 people arriving at a desert camp in north-eastern Kenya this year despite the border being closed.The Dadaab settlement now hosts more than 210,000 people, making it the world’s biggest refugee camp. With at least 200 new arrivals every day, aid workers are struggling to cope.

“We are already at bursting point,” said Maeve Murphy, field officer with the UN Refugee Agency in Dadaab, 60 miles south of border with Somalia. “And more refugees are on their way.”

The refugees are fleeing the worst fighting in Somalia since the early 90s, when the country’s descent into anarchy began. On one side is the internationally recognised but weak Transitional Federal Government (TFG), supported by thousands of Ethiopian troops. Waging an increasingly effective guerrilla war against them is a broad-based, Islamist-led opposition, whose hardline wing last week took over the strategic port city of Kismayo.

More than 8,000 civilians have been killed in Somalia since the beginning of last year, while nearly one million people have been internally displaced since September 2007. Drought, hyperinflation and year-on-year food prices increases of up to 700 per cent have compounded the humanitarian crisis. The UN’s Food Security Analysis Unit recently described the situation as “alarming and profound”. Some 3.2 million people – nearly half the population – needed emergency assistance, it said, up from 1.8 million people in January. One in six children under the age of five is acutely malnourished.

But aid delivery is more difficult than anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Afghanistan, humanitarian workers say. Pirates prevent food relief arriving by sea, while ambushes, roadblocks and targeted assassinations have severely impacted field operations. All of south and central Somalia and large parts of the northern Puntland region are almost completely off-limits to international staff.

The capital, Mogadishu, remains the epicentre of the insurgency and it is there that many of Dadaab’s new arrivals start their journeys. Paying GBP50 for a seat in a truck or minibus, they make the 600-mile journey south to the Kenyan border, which has been officially closed since early 2007 but remains porous enough for the refugees to sneak through.

Abdullahi Shimoy Mukhtar, 40, who arrived in Dadaab with his family on August 1, said that the insecurity had made it impossible to earn a living in Mogadishu.

“If the government soldiers or Ethiopians suspect that you support Al-Shabaab [fighters from the Islamist militant wing], they will kill you in the street, and vice-versa.”

Dadaab, where temperatures often touch 104C, consists of three neighbouring camps, though a fourth may soon have to be built. The newcomers’ shelters are desert igloos; bent branches covered with plastic sheeting and blankets.—Dawn/Guardian News Service