Somalia Descends Into Africa's Worst Crisis

Traveling Somalia’s roads is fraught with danger once again. Aid groups and former residents say that Somali government forces, far from ending militia rule, are starting to behave like militias themselves.

Checkpoints have popped up throughout southern Somalia, with government soldiers and allied militiamen demanding payments and harassing civilians and relief workers. According to UNICEF, sick children and pregnant women often are turned away at checkpoints. In some areas, trucks carrying food and other humanitarian aid have to pay tolls of $500 each, U.N. officials said.

A year after the U.S.-backed Ethiopian army toppled a hard-line Islamist regime in Somalia, the country has become Africa’s worst humanitarian catastrophe.

Some 200,000 refugees, mostly women and children, have fled from a pro-government offensive to makeshift camps along a 10-mile stretch of sun-baked asphalt that leads from the seaside capital of Mogadishu toward the inland town of Afgoye.

The crisis is brutal on young people.

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Born and raised very humbly in a “small town” in southern California, I was a product of different worlds. Literally, part of my family descends from Mexico the rest from Portugal and Uruguay. This mixture had kept me from supporting any racist psyche found...