Category Archives: Internally displaced people

Revealed: 46m displaced people excluded from Covid jab programmes

Posted on by

WHO review finds many national vaccination plans exclude asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and IDPs

Tens of millions of asylum seekers, migrants, refugees and internally displaced people around the world have been excluded from national Covid-19 vaccination programmes, according to World Health Organization research seen by the Guardian.

The gaps mean that a scattered group numbering at least 46 million people, about the size of the population of Spain, may struggle to get vaccinated even if a global shortage of doses eases.

Continue reading...

Mozambique insurgency: 20,000 still trapped near gas plant six weeks after attack

Posted on by

People fleeing militant violence near Total’s Afungi project in Cabo Delgado have been blocked by government forces

More than 20,000 Mozambicans have been trapped near a huge natural gas project in the country’s Cabo Delgado province, more than a month since it was abandoned after a militant attack.

People camped at the gates of French energy company Total’s Afungi site have had been unable to escape, despite fears of imminent violence, and have limited food because the Mozambican government has blocked humanitarian access.

Continue reading...

Isis claims deadly attack in northern Mozambique

Posted on by

Attack on port town of Palma has forced hundreds of people to flee amid fierce fighting

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for an attack on a town in northern Mozambique last week that forced hundreds of foreign contractors to flee amid fierce fighting.

Local police and soldiers were reported to have secured control of most of Palma on Monday, after hundreds of Islamist insurgents who overran the small port last week withdrew to surrounding forests and fields leaving a trail of devastation.

Continue reading...

‘Shot at by both sides’: Families flee as Taliban battles for territory in Kandahar

Posted on by

Villages in southern Afghanistan have become frontline of conflict as peace talks stall and uncertainty surrounds US withdrawal

The people who lived in Spairwan village spent two days huddled in their homes, besieged by fighting, before the Taliban came and told them all to leave the area. Qayoom and his family were among 10,000 families pushed out of their homes as government and Taliban forces battled for territory in southern Afghanistan last month.

Qayoom found his new home was to be a couple of large sheets propped up over cold, bare earth, a shelter among many others in a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) on the outskirts of Kandahar city. But the shelter barely checks the icy blasts of bitter winter winds.

Continue reading...

DRC is rich with farmland, so why do 22 million people there face starvation? | Vava Tampa

Posted on by

For two decades the global community has stood by while militia groups have got away with killing, raping and looting

I was food shopping when I read the news. Nearly 22 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are facing starvation and malnutrition. Now. In 2021.

You have to wonder how a country with eight months of rain, more than 50% of all the rivers, lakes and wetlands in Africa, and more agricultural land than any African country, with the potential to feed up to 2 billion people, gets to the point where it is unable to feed its population of 100 million.

Continue reading...

Congolese people have been brutalised since 1996. Why isn’t the west helping?

Posted on by

Despite accusations of war crimes in the central African country, the international community seems unmoved

On New Year’s Eve, a gang of militia left its jungle base and swept across Beni, a forested north-eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, looking for Nande people to kill.

Locals alerted the Congolese army but they were ignored. In small farms in Tingwe, a few kilometres from a DRC army base, the gang found 25 people – men, women and children – out harvesting food. One by one they hacked them to death with machetes and axes.

Continue reading...

Aid agencies warn of Covid-19 crisis in refugee camps as winter approaches

Posted on by

Displaced populations across the Middle East, already in cramped, unhygienic conditions, face a health catastrophe as infections rise

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic an abiding fear had stalked the world’s most vulnerable populations. Millions of people displaced by conflict in the Middle East watched with alarm as Europe and the west withered under a caseload that stretched first-world healthcare systems to their limits. They saw field hospitals being set up in capitals. Governments buckling under the strain. The developing world offering aid to the developed.

It seemed inevitable that the contagion would reach those less able to absorb its impact. And now, as second and third waves of Covid-19 surge around the globe, worst fears are being realised. Several months into the crisis, the virus has crept into the populations of refugees and internally displaced people, where stopping its advance will be close to impossible. Up to 15 million people across the region, many of whom were already at risk of disease, now face a rampant spread through their communities.

Continue reading...

Internal displacements reach 15m in 2020 with worst ‘still to come’ – report

Posted on by

Extreme weather, locust invasions and violence have forced people to flee their homes

Millions of people were uprooted from their homes by conflict, violence and natural disasters in the first six months of this year, research has found.

Nearly 15m new internal displacements were recorded in more than 120 countries between January and June by the Swiss-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Continue reading...

Uganda calls in troops as violence flares between refugees and locals

Posted on by

Tensions between locals and South Sudanese refugees have left at least 10 dead as authorities act to prevent escalation

Uganda has sent security troops to its north-west region where tensions are on the rise following deadly attacks on refugees by local people.

More than 10 South Sudanese refugees were killed, including a teenage girl and a 25-year-old woman and her baby, and 19 others were seriously wounded in clashes at a water point in Madi-Okollo district last week.

Continue reading...

Sudan government agrees to peace deal with five rebel groups

Posted on by

Pact covers security, land ownership, power sharing and return of displaced people

Sudan’s government has agreed to a peace deal with five rebel groups in a move seen by observers as a significant step towards resolving multiple deep-rooted civil conflicts that have caused immense suffering in the country for decades.

The agreement will provide a welcome boost to the transitional government that took power after the fall of the authoritarian ruler Omar al-Bashir last year.

Continue reading...

Forcibly displaced now account for 1% of humanity – UN report

Posted on by

Almost 80 million people are refugees or internally displaced, with the number doubling in the past decade

The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes has doubled over the past decade to almost 80 million, according to the UN refugee agency.

A 9 million rise in the number of those forced to flee in 2019, fuelled by conflict in Syria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burkina Faso, means that one in every 97 people around the world – about 1% of all humanity – is now displaced, according to numbers in UNHCR’s annual report, published on Thursday.

Continue reading...

Nigerian forces accused of torture and illegal detention of children – report

Posted on by

Amnesty International alleges that at least 10,000 died while being wrongly held – some of them in a centre part funded by the UK

Widespread unlawful detention and torture by Nigerian security forces has aggravated the suffering of a generation of children and tens of thousands of people in north-east Nigeria, according to a new report.

At least 10,000 victims – many of them children – have died in military detention, among the many thousands more arrested during a decade-long conflict with jihadist groups, according to Amnesty International.

Continue reading...

Children of Darfur: revisiting those orphaned by the conflict

Posted on by

Photojournalist Paddy Dowling travelled to Sudan to find out what happened to those growing up in the midst of genocide

The Darfur genocide claimed the lives of an estimated 300,000 civilians, forced 1.6 million people to flee their homes inside the country and a further 600,000 refugees to spill across borders of neighbouring countries.

Of those internally displaced people (IDPs) affected by the large-scale conflict in this region of western Sudan, more than 60% were children, according to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Continue reading...

Record 50 million people internally displaced in 2019, study finds

Posted on by

Covid-19 is likely to impact aid for people forced from their homes by conflict and disaster around the world, experts warn

A total of 50.8 million people around the world were recorded as internally displaced last year, forced from their homes by conflict and disaster. This is the highest number ever, and 10 million more than in 2018.

Annual statistics published by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) calculated that by the end of 2019, 45.7 million people were internally displaced – effectively becoming refugees in their own country – as a result of violence in 61 countries. An additional 5.1 million people in 96 countries had been displaced by disasters.

Continue reading...

Coronavirus fears grip Middle East as Iran denies cover-up

Posted on by

Shrine city of Qom believed to be virus hub, as concern grows for region’s refugee population

Fears are growing across the Middle East that coronavirus has infiltrated a main pilgrimage route, which could lead the deadly pathogen to vulnerable refugee populations, causing perhaps unprecedented public health crises across the region.

Concern is centred on the Iranian shrine city of Qom, which is thought to be a hub of the disease and the likely source of its spread elsewhere in the country and in neighbouring states, where infected travellers have been diagnosed in recent days.

Continue reading...

On the ground in Idlib: ‘This is the last call to people with humanity to help’ – video

Posted on by

The UN has estimated that 170,000 of the 900,000 civilians forced from their homes in a recent wave of displacement in north-west Syria are living out in the open. Laith, an activist who is part of the White Helmets volunteer group, has called for the international community to 'stand with [those] who left their homes and be with them in the camps'. The massive displacement follows an escalation of Russian-supported offensives by the Assad regime to the destroy the last rebel bastions in Idlib and Aleppo provinces 

Continue reading...

Mogadishu left reeling as conflict and climate shocks spark rush to capital

Posted on by

Forced from their homes by floods and fighting, 800,000 people have crammed into informal settlements in the Somali capital. Now efforts are afoot to bolster local resources

The number of Somalians being pushed out of the countryside and into the capital Mogadishu has reached an unprecedented high, putting pressure on the city’s already poor infrastructure and threatening its faltering recovery from three decades of conflict.

More than 800,000 internally displaced people dwell in informal settlements across Mogadishu, according to the office of the mayor. They are crammed into makeshift shelters with little or no sanitation and limited access to the most basic services. There are “critical” levels of malnutrition, according to an assessment by Somalia’s food security and nutrition analysis unit.

Continue reading...

‘We might be next’: families flee as Burkina Faso tips into chaos

Posted on by

Schools targeted by extremist groups as half a million people are driven from their homes by violence and the climate crisis

Roukiata Sow looks tired. The mother of five has welcomed 26 people under the roof of her small brick house. “What will those kids become? Some haven’t been to school for more than two years … Are they all going to be bandits?” she asks.

She is sitting, her head draped in a long grey veil, with other women and girls in a small courtyard in front of her home in Dori, the capital of the Sahel region of northern Burkina Faso.

Continue reading...

‘I hate Isis’: uprooted survivors of Marawi siege long to return home

Posted on by

Two years after their city on the Philippine island of Mindanao was liberated, tens of thousands of people driven from their homes remain in limbo

Thousands of survivors of an Islamic State siege in the Philippines are stuck in makeshift dwellings more than two years after their city was liberated, with many forced to drink contaminated water despite the presence of EU-funded aid agencies.

They were among an estimated 350,000 people driven from their homes when Islamist fighters seized control of the city of Marawi, on the island of Mindanao, in May 2017.

Continue reading...