Somalia to receive Iran medical assistance

Iran has agreed to send medical aid and humanitarian relief to Somalia as the drought-ravaged North African country sinks deeper into an all-out humanitarian crisis.

After signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU), Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and Somali counterpart Mohamed Abdullahi Omaar announced that the government of Tehran will soon be taking immediate steps to help restore stability and better the humanitarian situation in Somalia.

The MOU is also aimed at strengthening political, economic and cultural cooperation between the two countries.

According to the announcement, efforts are currently underway to help the volatile Horn of African country to tackle the issues that it is facing including terrorism and piracy.

This comes only weeks after a gloomy report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that Somali civilians, and particularly children, are taking the brunt of what is widely believed to be “the worst humanitarian crisis since the 1990’s.”

The report goes on to say that Somalia has some of the worst statistics in the world when it comes to children with one in every five acutely malnourished.

“As everybody else was celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, there is no child in central south Somalia who knows what it is to live in peace.,” said UNICEF representative to Somalia, Rozanne Chorlton.

“And to now try to recover from that as communities and society, of course, will take at least a generation,” she added.

Somalia is known to host one of the world’s longest-running humanitarian crises due to a civil war that began in 1991 and is stretched to the present

Severe drought has made matters even worse for Somalia’s population of seven million. Relief agencies say about half of the beleaguered Somali people are in desperate need of food aid and thus are in a state of humanitarian emergency.