Somalis flee terrorism, pour into Kenya

updated 5:43 p.m. ET June 18, 2008

DADAAB, Kenya - Ayan Ali Hassan decided to leave Mogadishu when militiamen boarded her school bus and kidnapped two screaming boys. For Abdi Gadir Osman, the moment came when a mortar slammed into his mother's home, killing her while she slept on a hot afternoon.

They are among some 20,000 Somalis who decided to flee their homeland this year, heading to the Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya where they recalled a life of terror in Mogadishu.

For the refugees, this dusty, sweltering expanse is still a better home than their wretched capital. Just 50 miles from the Somali border, many see the camp as a last resort.

In more than a dozen interviews with The Associated Press, the newest arrivals from Mogadishu told of relentless shelling and gunfire. Several children said their friends were forcibly recruited into militias. And they all described frantic escapes, with many walking for weeks to reach Dadaab, hitching rides on donkey carts or squeezing into strangers' cars.

"I couldn't live in Mogadishu anymore, my whole family would have been killed eventually," said Osman, 25, who left Mogadishu three months ago, hours after identifying his mother's body. He begged a ride in a car with a crowd of strangers, holding up his daughters — age 2 and 4 — to persuade the driver.

Somalia faces huge crisis
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said Wednesday that Somalia faces one of the world's worst crises along with Afghanistan, Iraq and Darfur.

"Dadaab represents a desperate cry, a cry of these people for peace in Somalia," Guterres said as he toured the camp, visiting medical clinics and speaking to refugees who live in ramshackle huts made of sticks and plastic tarp.

The population in Dadaab has reached nearly 200,000 people, packed into about 20 square miles of desolate, wind-swept dirt where little grows beneath the withering sun. Last year, more than 30,000 Somali refugees sought asylum here as their country saw some of the most deadly violence in its history.

Thousands of civilians have been killed in Somalia since 2007, caught in vicious disputes over ancient clan loyalties, religion and government. The country has not had an effective central government since 1991, when warlords toppled dictator Siad Barre and carved Somalia into armed camps ruled by clan law.

Somalia's shaky transitional administration was formed in 2004 with the help of the United Nations, but has failed to assert real control. After Islamic militants seized control of Mogadishu and most of southern Somalia, the government called in troops from Ethiopia in December 2006 to oust them.

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