Somalia heads terrorism risk, South Sudan in top 5: survey (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) – Somalia is most at risk from terrorist attack, followed by Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan and the new nation of South Sudan, according to a ranking by global analysts Maplecroft.

The consultancy's latest Terrorism Risk Index also assesses threats to be rising in Yemen, Iran, Uganda, Libya, Egypt and Nigeria.

A Maplecroft statement said increased dangers seen in Yemen and Uganda were caused by al Qaeda-associated violence, those in Iran stemmed from attacks by Sunni Muslim rebel group Jundollah and those in Egypt and Libya originated in terrorist and criminal attempts to exploit Arab Spring political unrest.

Nigeria is beset by militant raids in the Niger Delta, by sectarian violence and by radical Islamist attacks in the north.

The top four rankings were unchanged from Maplecroft's previous survey issued in November 2010 but South Sudan, which came into being last month on secession for the north, replaced the Palestinian Territories at number five due to the high average number of people killed per attack in violence there.

The UK-based company's index rates 198 countries on the number, frequency and intensity of terrorism attacks, plus the likelihood of mass casualties occurring. While based on historical data, it is intended as a forward-looking assessment.

The survey's reporting period of April 2010 to March 2011, partly overlaps with the June 2009 to June 2010 data used in its previous ranking.

It defines terrorism as the calculated and purposeful use of violence employed to influence the attitudes and behavior of people and governments, and takes its raw data from the U.S. National Counter-terrorism Center's Worldwide Incidents Tracking System.

QAEDA OFFSHOOTS SEEN STOKING RISKS

Maplecroft sees 20 states at "extreme risk." Apart from the top five, these are Yemen 6, Palestinian Territories 7, Democratic Republic of Congo 8, Central African Republic 9, Colombia 10, Algeria 11, Thailand 12, Philippines 13, Russia 14, Sudan, 15, Iran 16, Burundi 17, India 18, Nigeria 19 and Israel 20.

There was an increased risk from regional offshoots of al Qaeda including Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the survey said, adding that a spate of revenge attacks by militants in Pakistan following the killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden there in May showed his death had not led to a short-term fall in militancy.

On Somalia, Maplecroft said that despite suffering some losses in Mogadishu, the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab continued to hold much of south and central Somalia and "launch some of the most devastating attacks in the capital" in its fight against a Western-backed interim government.

South Sudan got its rating "primarily due to the intensity of terrorist attacks, with an average of 6.59 fatalities per terrorist incident, almost three times that of Somalia at 2.23."

At least seven rebel militias are fighting the new government's forces which are trying to establish stability after winning separation as part of the climax to a 2005 peace deal ending decades of civil war with Khartoum.

NORWAY LOW DOWN THE SCALE

Despite its elevated risk ranking, the statement said, "South Sudan's death toll of 211 from terrorist attacks pales in comparison to the top four countries. Over the same period Somalia suffered 1,385 deaths, Pakistan 2,163 deaths, Iraq 3,456 deaths and Afghanistan 3,423 deaths, which together account for over 75 percent of the world's 13,492 fatalities.

Iran continued to experience a small but lethal number of mass-casualty attacks including a twin suicide bombing in Zahedan in July 2010, which collectively killed at least 28.

One of the largest changes in rankings was Uganda, which jumped 20 places to 22 following bombings in Kampala in July 2011 that killed 79 people. The attack marked the first strikes on foreign soil by al Shabaab.

The only Western European country seen at high risk was Greece, assessed at 27, down from 24, due to violent left-wing groups. The next most at risk was Britain, rated at 38, up from 46, while France was at 45, barely changed from 44.

The survey period did not cover an attack in Norway by anti-Muslim zealot Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Oslo and a nearby island.

After the attack, some analysts argued that terrorism monitoring had been skewed toward the threat of violence from Muslim groups, ignoring the danger posed by far right westerners.

The survey rated Norway at a lowly 112.

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WFP begins emergency airlifts to hunger-stricken Somalia (AFP)

NAIROBI (AFP) – The World Food Programme airlifted 10 tonnes of emergency supplies to Mogadishu Wednesday to feed thousands of malnourished children in drought-hit Somalia.

Somalia is the Horn of Africa country worst affected by a prolonged drought -- the region's worst in 60 years -- that has put some 12 million people in danger of starvation and spurred a global fund-raising campaign.

Pictures and footage of skeletal children with only a faint flicker of life left in them have conjured up memories of the 1984 Ethiopia famine in which an estimated one million people died.

The peanut-based paste flown to Mogadishu Wednesday was the first in a series of deliveries which aims to supply 100 tonnes of the nutritional supplement to 35,000 children every month, a spokesman said.

The scope of the catastrophe is huge though and delivering aid to one of the most dangerous countries in the world is difficult.

Nearly half of Somalia's estimated 10 million people are in need of relief assistance, owing to the effects of relentless violence and the drought that prompted the UN to declare famine for the first time this century.

Wednesday's airlift also to kicked off a series of WFP deliveries that will go to the Ethiopian town of Dolo on the border with Somalia and to the town of Wajir in northern Kenya, Orr said.

The WFP was forced to pull out from southern Somalia in early 2010 after they were banned by the Al Qaeda-inspired Shebab rebels, who control large areas of the region.

A handful of relief groups were however spared the insurgents' ban, but have been struggling to cope with the rising numbers of people in need of humanitarian aid.

At the weekend, the International Red Cross said it had handed out 400 tonnes of food in drought-hit areas controlled by the hardline Shebab rebels, the first ICRC-led drops into such areas since 2009.

The bulk of Somalia's drought-affected people are in the country's southern regions.

Last week, the UN declared famine in two southern Somalia regions of Bakool and Lower Shabelle, where up to 350,000 people are at risk of starvation.

In Nairobi, a team of humanitarian organisations met with donors to streamline operations to assist victims of the drought that has also hit parts of Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and Uganda.

Aid agency Oxfam criticised French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire for announcing this week that the Nairobi meeting -- a monthly round-table between aid agencies and donors -- was a major conference on the region's crisis.

"Is the diplomatic activity stirred up by France recently not a smokescreen to hide its weak financial commitment?," Jean-Cyril Dagorn, an Oxfam official said in a statement.

Dagorn said that France, which called for a donors conference on Monday in Rome as the current G20 leader, had yet to boost its pledge for more funds for the crisis.

"Nothing concrete has been proposed by the G20, or even France in terms of direct support to small-scale agriculture and pastoralists to increase local food production," Oxfam said in a statement.

Officials said the UN had received about $1 billion (696 million euros) during Monday's Rome conference on the Horn of Africa drought, but needs a billion more by the end of the year to cope with the emergency.

The World Bank on Monday pledged more than $500 million, with the bulk of the money set to go towards long-term projects to aid livestock farmers while $12 million would be for immediate assistance to those worst hit by the crisis.

However charities have slammed low aid pledges and say not enough is being done.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said southern and central Somalia regions, the displaced and refugees in Kenya and Ethiopia were "of greatest concern for the coming six months," according to a statement.

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Food supplements airlifted into famine-hit Somalia (AP)

MOGADISHU, Somalia – A plane carrying 10 tons of urgently needed nutritional supplements to treat malnourished children has landed in famine-hit Somalia, a U.N. official said Wednesday.

The airlift is part of a crisis intervention as famine threatens to spread across lawless Somalia.

David Orr, a World Food Program spokesman who flew with the shipment from neighboring Kenya to the Somali capital of Mogadishu, said it was the first airlift of food aid since the U.N. declared a famine in parts of Somalia last week.

Orr said the aid would be distributed to medical facilities to treat the malnourished children.

WFP spokeswoman Challiss McDonough said this is first of several planned airlifts in coming weeks. She said Wednesday's shipment of peanut butter-based nutritional paste will treat 3,500 malnourished children for one month.

McDonough said WFP decided to send in the airlift because of an urgent need to treat the growing number of internally displaced children suffering from malnutrition before their condition deteriorates.

She said about 18,000 children are suffering from malnutrition and that the number is expected to grow to 25,000.

WFP says it cannot reach 2.2 million people in need of aid in the militant-controlled areas in southern Somalia because of insecurity.

Somalia has been embroiled in conflict for two decades, since the last leader was overthrown by warlords who then turned on each other. Islamist militant groups have spent the last few years battling the weak U.N.-backed government in an attempt to overthrow it.

Al-Shabab — the most dangerous militant group in Somalia — said last week it will not allow the aid groups to operate in its territories, exacerbating the drought crisis.

Earlier this month al-Shabab, which has links to al-Qaida, had shown indications of wavering on its 2009 ban on certain aid groups in its territories.

The drought has created a triangle of hunger where the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia meet. WFP estimates more than 11.3 million people need aid across drought-hit regions in East Africa. The majority of those affected live in pastoral communities whose herds have been wiped out because of a lack of water.

Separately, UNICEF said Wednesday that it is trying to vaccinate more than 300,000 children in Kenya in an emergency program designed to prevent an outbreak of disease as refugees stream into northern Kenya.

Jayne Kariuki from UNICEF said that four northern Kenyan regions will be targeted along with Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp, during the two-week program to immunize the children against polio and measles.

The children will also receive vitamin A and de-worming tablets. In Liboi, a dusty town in Kenya near the border with Somalia, mothers in long robes clustered around with children as aid workers dispensed medicine under a thorn tree.

Kenya recorded it first polio case infection in 20 years in 2009, after a four-year-old girl was diagnosed with the disease along the country's remote border with Sudan.

Polio is an infectious disease that mainly strikes children under five. It causes paralysis and can be fatal.

In 2006, two refugees escaping the war in Somalia were diagnosed with the disease at the Dadaab refugee camp at Kenya's eastern border with Somalia. That outbreak was contained before it spread.

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Tom Odula in Nairobi, Kenya, and Katharine Houreld in Liboi contributed to this report.

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UN declares famine in southern Somalia (AFP)

NAIROBI (AFP) – The UN officially declared famine on Wednesday in two southern Somalia regions, as the world slowly mobilised to save the 12 million people battling hunger in the region's worst drought in 60 years.

The United States urged the Al Qaeda-inspired rebels controlling the area to allow the return of the relief groups they expelled two years ago while aid groups warned many would die without urgent action and funding.

UN Humanitarian Affairs Coordination for Somalia Mark Bowden declared that southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions had been hit by famine.

The UN said that an estimated 3.7 million people -- nearly half of the war-torn country's population -- were facing a food crisis.

"If we don't act now, famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months, due to poor harvests and infectious disease outbreaks," Bowden told reporters.

"If we are not able to intervene immediately, tens of thousands more Somalis may die," the UN added.

Somalia, which has been affected by almost uninterrupted conflict for 20 years and become a by-word for "failed state", is the worst affected nation but parts of Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Djibouti are also hit.

The United States urged neighbouring Eritrea, one of the most secretive countries in the world, to reveal the scope of its own food situation.

"Given the combination of severity and geographic scope this is the most severe food security crisis in Africa since the 1991/2 Somalia famine," the UN added.

Famine implies that at least 20 percent of households face extreme food shortages, acute malnutrition in over 30 percent of people, and two deaths per 10,000 people every day, according to UN definition.

The Shebab expelled foreign aid groups two years ago, accusing them of being Western spies and Christian crusaders.

However, the UN last week airlifted in the first supplies since the group said it would lift restrictions on aid.

Malnutrition rates in Somalia are currently the highest in the world, with peaks of 50 percent in certain areas of southern Somalia, Bowden said.

"Every day of delay in assistance is literally a matter of life or death for children and their families in the famine affected areas," Bowden said.

Over 78,000 Somalis have fled to seek refuge in neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya in the last two months.

In Kenya, they are streaming into overcrowded camps hosting some 380,000 people -- more than four times the original capacity.

On Tuesday, the UN refugee agency said death rates among refugees arriving in Ethiopia's Dolo Ado area reached 7.4 per 10,000 in June, 15 times more than the baseline rate in sub-Sahara Africa.

Somalia's embattled government welcomed the famine declaration -- the first since the term was defined by the UN in 2008 -- as a sign that the world was beginning to acknowledge the scope of the disaster.

"At least it is great that the world has recognised the magnitude of hardship the poor Somalis are facing," Abdulkadir Moalim Nur, a minister in the president's office, told AFP.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation appealed Wednesday for $120 million (84 million euros) for the 12 million drought victims in the Horn of Africa.

Aid group Oxfam said only $200 million (140 million euros) of the needed one billion (700 million euros) had been provided.

"There is no time to waste if we are to avoid massive loss of life. We must not stand by and watch this tragedy unfold before our eyes," said Fran Equiza, Oxfam's Regional Director.

The government's authority over the vast country is limited and Johnnie Carson, the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, stressed that the Shebab's responsibility in the suffering was clear.

A top Shebab official welcomed the UN's famine declaration, saying they would allow aid through.

"The declaration of famine in parts of Somalia by the UN is welcome and we would like to see aid coming to the people," a senior Shebab official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

"Aid must be provided purely on a humanitarian basis, and the religious value of Somalis as Muslims must be respected," the official added.

UN agencies will hold a meeting Monday in Rome over the drought-sparked humanitarian crisis as the world's top leaders called for mass mobilisation to contain one of the planet's worst unfolding humanitarian disasters.

In a statement released during a visit to India, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged more funds to tackle the crisis and called for the international community to follow suit.

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UN: Somalia drought is worst humanitarian crisis (AP)

By MALKHADIR M. MUHUMED and LUC VAN KEMENADE, Associated Press Malkhadir M. Muhumed And Luc Van Kemenade, Associated Press – 1?hr?6?mins?ago

DADAAB, Kenya – The head of the U.N. refugee agency said Sunday that drought-ridden Somalia is the "worst humanitarian disaster" in the world after meeting with refugees who endured unspeakable hardship to reach the world's largest refugee camp.

The Kenyan camp, Dadaab, is overflowing with tens of thousands of newly arrived refugees forced into the camp by the parched landscape in the region where Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya meet. The World Food Program estimates that 10 million people already need humanitarian aid. The U.N. Children's Fund estimates that more than 2 million children are malnourished and in need of lifesaving action.

Antonio Guterres, the head of UNHCR who visited Dadaab on Sunday, appealed to the world to supply the "massive support" needed by thousands of refugees showing up at this camp every week. More than 380,000 refugees now live there.

In Dadaab, Guterres spoke with a Somalia mother who lost three of her children during a 35-day walk to reach the camp. Guterres said Dadaab holds "the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of the vulnerable."

"I became a bit insane after I lost them," said the mother, Muslima Aden. "I lost them in different times on my way."

Guterres is on a tour of the region to highlight the dire need. On Thursday he was in the Ethiopian camp of Dollo Ado, a camp that is also overflowing.

"The mortality rates we are witnessing are three times the level of emergency ceilings," he said. "The level of malnutrition of the children coming in is 50 percent. That is enough to explain why a very high level of mortality is inevitable," he said.

Dr. Dejene Kebede, a health officer for UNHCR, said there were 58 deaths in camps in one week alone in June.

Most of the deaths take place at the registration office and transition facilities of the refugee camps in the southeastern Dollo region of Ethiopia, the health officer said.

Up to 2,000 Somali refugees are crossing the border into Ethiopia every day, UNHCR said. Thousands of families arrive in poor conditions often after walking for days in search of food.

Guterres said the influx is overwhelming for UNHCR and other international and local aid organizations: "Nothing can compare to what we have seen this month."

"I believe Somalia represents the worst humanitarian disaster in the world," he said.

The camps are full and lack capacity to provide the Somali people with food and shelter.

This makes effective health treatment almost impossible, said Jerome Souquet, head of Doctors Without Borders at the Dollo Ado camps.

"We can treat the severely malnourished children, but they will definitely come back to us underfed because there is not enough food and almost all of them suffer from diarrhea," he told The Associated Press.

Habiba Osman Ibrahim, a 76-year old Somali refugee from the al-Shabab-controlled Luk region of Somalia, said she walked for three days with her two underfed grandchildren. Al-Shabab is Somalia's dangerous militant group. It had forced out all international aid groups, but earlier this month said they could return considering the desperate conditions.

"We were dependent on food aid," she said. "But because al-Shabab forced out all relief operations and there was no food we had no choice but to flee."

Aden Dayow, 32, said he was a sorghum-growing farmer in Ufurow in Somalia, but fled to Ethiopia because his harvest failed because of a lack of rains.

The epicenter of the drought lies on the three-way border shared by Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, a nomadic region where families heavily depend on the health of their livestock. Uganda and Djibouti have also been hit.

The World Food Program said it expects 10 million people in the Horn of Africa to require food assistance. WFP currently provides food aid to 6 million people in East Africa.

The group said it is facing a shortfall of 40 percent on the $477 million needed to address hunger needs in the region.

Somalis desperate for food are also overrunning Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp in neighboring Kenya, which is seeing some 10,000 new arrivals each week, six times the average at this time last year.

The U.N.'s refugee agency says Dadaab's three camps now host more than 382,000 people, while thousands more are waiting at reception centers outside the camp.

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Van Kemenade contributed to this report from Dollo Ado and Bisle, Ethiopia.

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