JAWHAR, SOMALIA — Five months old and weighing less than 10 pounds, Shukri Mohammed stretched her tiny mouth to make a giant scream Tuesday when a health worker measured her limp arm for malnutrition.
But scarcely a sound escaped from the baby's throat, and she sank back exhausted into her mother's arms.
It's been a struggle since the day Shukri was born. The next morning, her mother walked three days to escape shelling in Mogadishu that had recently killed her husband. Now settled with her mother in a displacement camp in Jawhar, north of Mogadishu, Shukri is likely to die soon unless admitted to a hospital.
As world attention focuses on the Darfur region of Sudan, Somalia is quietly disintegrating into Africa's worst humanitarian emergency, experts say.
Last week, United Nations emergency coordinator John Holmes said that conditions in Somalia had eclipsed those in Darfur and Chad as the most pressing African humanitarian crisis. Malnutrition and disease are soaring here amid political insecurity and a string of natural disasters, including flooding and drought.
Jawhar had long been an island of stability and agricultural prosperity in southern Somalia. Now, the nation's breadbasket requires food assistance for the first time since a nationwide famine from 1991 to 1993. Nearly 8,700 children here are at risk of starvation, according to UNICEF.
"Around here we've never seen this," said Owliyo Moalim, 44, a mother of five, as she lined up Monday with hundreds of other women to receive a U.N. World Food Program distribution of corn, beans and oil.
Her family used to harvest crops every three months. But consecutive floods have prevented harvesting since October 2005, she said.
With many Western charities afraid to work in the dangerous country, the transitional government is struggling to cope, but lacks experience and money. Recently, aid groups complain, the government made the crisis worse by trying to tax incoming humanitarian assistance, setting up roadblocks that hindered food deliveries and even intimidating charities and the displaced by accusing them of supporting "terrorists."
About 350,000 Somalis remain refugees from fighting this year in Mogadishu between government soldiers, supported by thousands of Ethiopian troops, and an insurgency consisting of anti-government clans and Islamist fighters. About 1.5 million people require humanitarian aid, an increase of 50% in recent months.
