200,000 flee fighting in Somalia

About 204,000 adults and children have fled their homes in Mogadishu to escape fighting between Islamist militias and government over the past eight weeks, the UN refugee agency said today.

The violence has also triggered the closure of some of the Somali capital's few health centres, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) added. The SOS Medical Centre in Mogadishu remains open, however.

The eight-week long push by Al-Shaabab and Hisb-ul-Islam guerrillas sparked what the agency calls "the biggest exodus from the troubled Somali capital since the Ethiopian intervention in 2007". Many of those leaving are fleeing their homes for the first time since the country's descent into anarchy with the start of the Somali civil war in 1991.

"The escalating conflict in Mogadishu is having a devastating impact on the city's population causing enormous suffering and massive displacement," Ron Redmond, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said.

Al-Shaabab, also known as the Mujahideen Youth Movement, is officially classed as a terrorist group by the USA and is waging a war against Somalia's government aiming to bring in a stricter form of Islamic law. In the past week alone, 105 people had been killed and 382 wounded as violence reached the once peaceful neighbourhoods of Kaaran, Shibis, Shangaani and Boondheere.

The agency said the number of internally displaced people in the horn of Africa nation amounts to more than 1.2 million people. Almost half a million people are living in temporary shelters made from sticks and plastic sheeting along the road to Afgoye, west of Mogadishu.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said there was a "desperate" shortage of food and water there. The charity added that continuous shelling and open combat had forced it to close three clinics and a paediatric hospital in north Mogadishu last week.

"The population is terrorised, and in the past two weeks the number of dead and wounded has drastically increased. It has become impossible to provide medical and humanitarian assistance to those in need," Monica Camacho, from the MSF mission in Somalia told CNN news channel.

Meanwhile, the number of refugees arriving at the Dadaab refugee camp near the Somalia / Kenya border was also rising, the high commissioner said, even though the Kenyan border is already officially closed to asylum seekers.

Since May, more than 11,000 Somalis have been registered at the refugee camp, bringing the total number of people seeking refuge at the camp to 284,306, according to figures from Agence France Presse news agency.

"The actual number of new arrivals is much higher since many of them head directly to urban centres in Kenya such as Nairobi and Mombasa", the UN commissioner said.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children