Heavy rains claim lives

At least six people have been killed and many others injured in heavy rains that have been pounding the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

The six were killed "when a wall collapsed on them", the information minister of the Transitional National Government, Abdirahman Adan Ibrahim "Ibbi", told IRIN on Tuesday. He said Mogadishu had experienced heavy downpours for three nights in a row.

"The rain seems to start at around 7:00 and continue till 11:00 p.m.," he said, adding that the dead were all from a displaced camp near the Tribunka area of south Mogadishu. "The displaced people in the city are the worst affected", he said. "Many of them live in flimsy houses that cannot withstand this sort of rain."

"The situation is not very serious, but could become so very quickly," Ibrahim said. He appealed to the international community to "assist those already affected by the rains, especially the displaced".

He also said he had received reports that the Shabelle river was overflowing in Hiran and parts of Lower and Middle Shabelle regions, with dead fish being washed ashore. As yet, there were no reports of human fatalities, he added.

A.H. Shirwa, the former representative for Somalia of the US Famine Early Warning System Network, told IRIN that even though some flooding was to be expected at this time of year, the situation had been exacerbated by a decade "in which there has been a systematic breakdown of the irrigation system".

He said ever since the collapse of the Somali government in 1991, no-one had been able "to de-silt the riverbeds or manage the sluice gates on the rivers or adjoining canals". Moreover, local farmers had cut into river embankments in order to irrigate their land, thereby unwittingly helping to generate floods, he added.

Shirwa told IRIN that serious flash floods were likely to occur in Nugal Region in the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland, northeastern Somalia, and in Togdher, in the self-declared republic of Somaliland, northwestern Somalia. Both regions had "seasonal river beds", in which people had settled and which during rainy seasons were vulnerable to flash floods, he said.