Somali refugees forced to pile everything they own after government troops destroyed their shelters
This week the Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that many people in Somalia are ‘on the edge’. Despite knowing the hardships people there face every day, government soldiers destroyed dozens of temporary shelters and shops at a refugee camp in southern Mogadishu, forcing the inhabitants to pile all their belongings onto trucks and move on.
Shocking photographs show possessions piled 15-feet high on the back of trucks, with some of the now homeless owners sitting precariously on top.
It seems that nothing could be left behind, with fencing, mattresses, water canisters and chairs all crammed onto battered vehicles.
As they set off, several men ran alongside them to make sure nothing fell off.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation has launched an emergency appeal for $697million to help 30 million people in 31 crisis-hit countries, a senior official with the U.N. agency said on Tuesday.
It has requested that Somalia receives $118million of this.
Meanwhile, it emerged that a former Washington-area taxi driver who was on the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted Terrorists’ list has been detained and is in the custody of the Somali government, a U.S. government source said.
The FBI in said in January it added Somali-born U.S. citizen Liban Haji Mohamed, 29, to its watch list because he allegedly provided support to the Somalia-based Islamist militant group al Shabaab.
The U.S. source said Mohamed was arrested several days ago by Somali authorities and was now in Somali custody, but it was not clear if or when he would be sent back to the United States. The Washington Post first reported on Monday that Mohamed had been detained in Somalia.
Mohamed lived in the northern Virginia suburbs near Washington and drove a taxi. He left the United States in 2012.
He was said at the time to be an associate of Zachary Chesser, an American who pleaded guilty in 2010 to threatening the writers of the television show ‘South Park.’
