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30 April 2013

Islamic Fundamentalism Kills

The 2011 Somali famine killed an estimated 260,000 people, half of them age 5 and under . . . The aid community believes that tens of thousands of people died needlessly because the international community was slow to respond to early signs of approaching hunger in East Africa in late 2010 and early 2011. The toll also was exacerbated by extremist militants from al-Shabab who banned food aid deliveries to the areas of south-central Somalia that they controlled.
 
From here.

Somolia is a country with about 10.1 million people.  Roughly one in ten of its pre-school aged children starved to death in 2011. The only disaster or disease outbreak in U.S. history with a comparable impact was the Spanish flu of 1918.

In al-Shabab controlled territory, the number of pre-schoolers who starved to death was probably closer to one in five.  This group is Somolia's version of the Taliban, imposing strict Islamic fundamentalism on the people it rules with its roughly 14,000 soldiers.



Map showing territorial gains made by al-Shabaab from January 31, 2009 to December 2010; the period when a civil war against the Transitional Federal Government commenced (from the link in the paragraph above).

While the East African drought of 2011 was unavoidable, the deadly consequences of that drought in Somolia in 2011 were mostly a result of its ongoing civil war.

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