UN humanitarian chief John Holmes urged the international community not to turn its back on Somalia at a time of desperate need, saying the government appears to be seriously underestimating the humanitarian suffering in the country.
Holmes told the Security Council on Monday that the UN believes almost 400,000 people fled Mogadishu in recent fighting and the vast majority have not returned while the government claims that only 40,000 were displaced and about half have returned to the capital.
Holmes visited Mogadishu earlier this month and met President Abdullahi Yusuf, but his planned two-day trip was cut short when two explosions went off -- one of them near the UN compound that killed three people.
During his brief stay, Holmes said, clan elders and representatives of civil society and women's groups expressed concern about intimidation and several said they were convinced the UN and the international community had abandoned Somalia and weren't interested in the fate of the Somali people.
"I assured them that this was not true and that my presence in Mogadishu was a symbol of the UN's deep concern, political as well as humanitarian," said Holmes, the most senior UN official to visit Somalia since the early 1990s. "We all have a responsibility to ensure that this is indeed the case, and not to turn our backs on Somalis in their latest hour of desperate need."
Somalia has been mired in chaos since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned against each other. The government was set up in 2004, but has failed to assert any real control.
The latest surge in fighting, between March 12 and April 26, killed at least 1,670 people and sent at least 400,000 fleeing the capital as the government and its Ethiopian allies tried to quash an Islamic insurgency.
The government declared victory more than two weeks ago, and there has been relative calm. But in a city teeming with guns after more than a decade of chaos, the government has declared victory before -- only to have the insurgents reappear.
Holmes said the recent massive displacement "has further compounded one of the most difficult humanitarian situations in the world, in a country affected not only by long-running internal conflict but also chronic food insecurity, alternating droughts and floods and endemic disease."
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the