Clashes in northeastern Somalia are forcing thousands to flee: report | News

A local official says thousands of residents of the town of Bosaso have fled in clashes between two rival groups of security forces.

Clashes between two rival security forces in a port city in northeastern Somalia have forced hundreds of families to flee their homes, according to a local official.

Fighting has rocked Bosaso, the commercial capital of the country’s semi-autonomous state of Puntland, for several days, the AFP news agency reported on Saturday.

“Thousands of residents of the village of Bosaso fled … because there were occasional clashes in some parts of the village,” Abdiriza Mohamed told AFP.

“Most people decided to leave their homes after the war parties used heavy machine guns and mortars,” mostly from two neighborhoods in the town, he said.

Mohamed said it is not clear how many people left the village on the shores of the Gulf of Aden, but estimated that there were “hundreds of families.”

On Thursday, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said it was “deeply concerned” by the escalation of the violence that fled thousands in search of security.

“As fighting continues in the town of Bosaso, more than half of the city’s population has been displaced,” said Adam Abdelmoula, a Somali OCHA representative in a statement.

He added that the fighting had also uprooted families who had already been displaced by previous incidents.

“Forty percent of the 70,000 internally displaced people taken in the village of Bosaso have also reported secondary displacement,” Abdelmoula said.

Located in the far north of Somalia, the Puntland Horn of Africa is one of the five semi-autonomous states in the country.