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Mustafa HAJI ABDINUR – June 9, 2022<\/p>\n
Arbay Mahad Qasim has already lost two children to a vicious drought, and now the Somali villager fears she could lose a third as her malnourished toddler Ifrah awaits treatment in a Mogadishu hospital.<\/p>\n
Barely out of her teens, Qasim is among dozens of weary parents crowding Banadir Maternity & Children Hospital, which has become ground zero for the starvation crisis sweeping across Somalia as a record drought grips the Horn of Africa.<\/p>\n
Entire villages have been forced to uproot their lives and flee their homes after poor rainfall destroyed crops and killed livestock.<\/p>\n
When the rains failed for a fourth consecutive season last month, UN aid agencies and meteorologists warned that a famine was looming in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia.<\/p>\n
But for many Somalis like Qasim, who has been surviving on government handouts for the past few months, catastrophe has already struck.<\/p>\n
Two of her children died of hunger in the last 18 months.<\/p>\n
When two-year-old Ifrah’s tiny body began to swell, showing symptoms of severe malnutrition, Qasim wasted no time, spending a day traveling to Mogadishu from her village in the southwest in a desperate bid to save her youngest child’s life.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.spacedaily.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mustafa HAJI ABDINUR – June 9, 2022 Arbay Mahad Qasim has already lost two children to a vicious drought, and now the Somali villager fears she could lose a third as her malnourished toddler Ifrah awaits treatment in a Mogadishu hospital. Barely out of her teens, Qasim is among dozens of weary parents crowding Banadir … Continue reading Dying children reflect brutal toll of Somalia drought<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[16752,16755,36,31,1726,1555,16754,6624,16753],"class_list":["post-21068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-black-horse","tag-arbay-mahad-qasim","tag-banadir-maternity-children-hospital","tag-disaster","tag-ethiopia","tag-kenya","tag-malnutrition","tag-mogadishu","tag-somalia","tag-vicious-drought"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8fAkI-5tO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21071,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21068\/revisions\/21071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/setapartbytruth.org\/wordpress-watchman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}