The banks of the Shebley River in the city of Beledweyne in central Somalia overflowed, forcing thousands of residents to abandon their homes, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Floods, like wars, are driving more people to displacement, which rose to a record high in 2022.
It is not only natural disasters that drive people to displacement, but there are wars as well, and observers say that overlapping crises forced millions of people in the world to flee during the past year 2022, as the number of newly displaced people reached a record number of more than 71 million people.
In the city of Beledweyne, central Somalia, the flooding of the Shipley River caused by heavy rains killed three people and forced thousands of residents to abandon their homes, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
One of the expatriates said that all he could do was save his children and move to a safe place, indicating that he could not move his belongings from the city where the flood waters continued to flow for four days, submerging the city and villages by 90%, according to the residents.
And just as the floods in Pakistan caused large areas of the country to be flooded with flood waters and forced the population to leave for safer areas (the displacement of 8 million people), the Russian war in Ukraine (the displacement of more than 17 million Okani) and other conflicts around the world also caused waves of displacement. collective.
--In sub-Saharan Africa, about 16.5 million people have been displaced, and more than half of them have been displaced due to conflicts, especially in the Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia.
It is expected that the number of displaced persons in general will increase on the continent this year, due to the current conflict in Sudan, which is ravaged by violence, and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee (700 thousand displaced in less than a month, while about 150 thousand others have sought refuge in neighboring countries).
One third of the quarters of the world’s displaced people live in ten countries: Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine and Colombia, where conflicts and natural disasters alike exacerbate the deterioration of people’s conditions and deepen the disparities within their societies, prompting them to leave.
The number of displaced people increased by 60% last year, compared to about 38 million people who were displaced in 2021, which is a very high number, according to the United Nations Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.
