There is a new, disturbing trend in the systematic murders taking course in Somalia as aid workers are increasingly becoming deliberate targets.
This month gunmen have killed the local head of the UN Development Programme and the deputy head of a German charity. The UN Food Agency (WFP) has lost five contracted workers this year. Four foreign aid workers - two Italians, a Kenyan and a Briton - are currently being held hostage.
Apparently there are real concerns here in Nairobi too that certain UN Somalia offices outside 'Fortress Gigiri' are soft targets, vulnerable to attack by Islamists. My source, who starts a new UN assignment on Monday, does not yet know where her office will be based as the UN is in the process of relocating certain members of staff to more secure buildings.
Back in Mogadishu, threatening leaflets are appearing on the city's lawless streets raising fear levels yet further. According to Reuters, the leaflets threaten local aid workers with death if they did not leave their posts. Such killings have usually been pinned on the al-Shabaab, the Islamist rebels employing Iraq-style tactics in their insurgency against Somalia's Ethiopia-backed government. But I hear there are suggestions from different quarters - including as you might imagine, the Islamists - that government hardliners are behind the latest wave of aid-worker killings. The logic: to push the international community into sending a peacekeeping force (one actually capable of establishing some degree of law and order rather than a handful of overstretched Ugandans) into Somalia, thereby stabilising the TFG.
The WFP has called on foreign governments to provide naval escorts for vessels delivering food aid into Mogadishu's port. Aid agencies claim the worsening security situation could soon force humanitarian programmes to be suspended at a time Somalia faces all-out famine.
Agreed this is very scary, and makes it extremely difficult to provide aid. But is it actually worse than a year ago?
Posted by: Alanna | July 20, 2008 at 06:02 PM