Sunday, February 19, 2017

Suicide bomb in market in Somalia capital kills 18, wounds 25

By Feisal Omar
Reuters
By Feisal Omar
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - A blast from a suicide car bomb ripped through a market in Somali capital Mogadishu on Sunday, killing 18 people and wounding at least 25, a local official said, days after the country elected a new president.
Casualties were confirmed by Ahmed Abdulle Afrax, the mayor of Wadajir, the district of the city where the bombing happened.
"I was staying in my shop when a car came in into the market and exploded. I saw more than 20 people lying on the ground. Most of them were dead and the market was totally destroyed," witness Abdulle Omar said.
Al Shabaab, the Islamist insurgent group that is fighting the U.N.-backed Somali government, did not immediately claim responsibility.
Al Shabaab has been able to carry out increasingly deadly bombings despite losing most of its territory in the country to African Union peacekeepers supporting Somali government.
This month, Somalia elected a new president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed. The dual U.S.-Somali citizen and former prime minister is better known by his nickname, "Farmajo".
The Horn of Africa country has been torn apart by civil war since 1991. Aid agencies are warning that a severe drought has placed large swathes of the country at risk of famine.
(Writing by Katharine Houreld; editing by Jane Merriman)
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Angelina Jolie Blasts Trump’s Travel Ban: Action ‘Should Be Based on Facts, Not Fear’

Variety Thu, Feb 2 2:36 PM PST 
Angelina Jolie took aim at President Trump’s immigration ban, suspending the admission of refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries, in a new op-ed, published Thursday by the New York Times.
Jolie is known for her humanitarian work, especially her efforts to aid Syrian refugees. In the piece, she urged that policy decisions should be based on “facts, not fear,” and invoked former President Ronald Reagan in her opposition to the ban.
“The global refugee crisis and the threat from terrorism make it entirely justifiable that we consider how best to secure our borders,” she wrote. “Every government must balance the needs of its citizens with its international responsibilities. But our response must be measured and should be based on facts, not fear.”
“It is simply not true that our borders are overrun or that refugees are admitted to the United States without close scrutiny,” Jolie added.
She went on, “If we create a tier of second-class refugees, implying Muslims are less worthy of protection, we fuel extremism abroad, and at home we undermine the ideal of diversity cherished by Democrats and Republicans alike: ‘America is committed to the world because so much of the world is inside America,’ in the words of Ronald Reagan.”
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Jolie is a special envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Trump signed the controversial executive order on Friday, and Hollywood at large has been vocal in its criticism of the ban. Among organizations to speak out against the order are the Academy, which decried the fact that the ban might keep Iranian “The Salesman” director Asghar Farhadi from the Oscar ceremony later this month.
Read the full op-ed here.
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Saturday, February 18, 2017

Tragic Suicide Case Highlights Mental Health Needs of Refugees

Stephanie Pappas Live Science Contributor
LiveScience.com
Tragic Suicide Case Highlights Mental Health Needs of Refugees
The woman was nine weeks pregnant. She and her husband had recently been kicked out of her in-laws' home in the refugee camp where the whole family lived on the Thai-Myanmar border.
Two days after a routine checkup and ultrasound at a camp clinic, in which she raised no alarms with the clinicians who saw her, the 18-year-old woman and her 22-year-old husband each drank a cup of herbicide and went to their bed in her father's house to die.
The couple left no real explanation for their suicides, but a recent report on their case in the journal BMJ Case Reports highlights the risks for refugees: Cut off from their homelands and from many of the usual sources of social support, most refugees also lack access to mental health care. It's a problem that persists not only along the Thai-Myanmar border, where decades of conflict have created semi-permanent camp settlements, but also in the Middle East and Europe among Syrians displaced by the civil war in their country. [5 Myths About Suicide, Debunked]
"I often think, 'Could we have said something more or been more proactive somehow and helped her?'" said Gracia Fellmeth, a public health researcher at Oxford University in the U.K. and lead author of the case report published in September 2016.

The refugee experience

Fellmeth and her colleagues met the woman while they were doing a study of depression and mental health in refugees at the Maela camp, which is home to about 38,000 people, mostly ethnic minority refugees from Myanmar. Conflict in Myanmar has been ongoing for decades, and the camps have become a permanent home for many refugees who have nowhere else to go, Fellmeth told Live Science. There is very limited access to health care, with two non-governmental organizations providing the bulk of services. Mental health professionals are nearly nonexistent within the camps, she and her colleagues wrote in BMJ Case Reports. There is no psychiatrist, only a small team of counselors with three months' training.
A similar dearth of mental health care persists for Syrian refugees. A 2015 report by the International Medical Corps found that 54 percent of Syrian refugees interviewed in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and within Syria itself (where many were internally displaced by fighting) had a severe emotional disorder, typically anxiety or depression. The displaced people cited stressors ranging from the continued fear of violence, limited access to education and health care, inability to work and discrimination from people in the host country.
"You really got a sense of hopelessness, just really feeling at a loss," said Alessandra Von Burg, a communications professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, who studies citizenship and who visited refugee and migrant camps in Italy and Greece in 2016. "The one thing that we did also hear a lot is that [hopelessness and loss becomes] translated into cynicism and distrust."  

Life in limbo

The causes of mental health disorders in refugees are not necessarily the same as the causes of these conditions in people who are not refugees, according to a 2015 report by UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee commission. Depression and anxiety are natural responses to displacement and disruption, the authors wrote.
"Difficult life circumstances often lead to demoralisation and hopelessness, and may be related to profound and persistent existential concerns of safety, trust, coherence of identity, social role and society," they wrote. [Psychology of Immigration: Why Responses to Migrant Crisis Vary]
For the permanent refugee populations along the Thai-Myanmar border, life is on hold, with little opportunity to move forward. Refugees can't legally work, Fellmeth said, though many act as illegal laborers because the food rations at the camps aren't enough to feed a family.
"People are just bored," Fellmeth said. "There's not much to do in the camps."
Similarly, refugees from Syria and migrants from other war-torn places like Libya are in limbo, Von Burg said. According to the United Nations, more than half of the displaced people from Syria are children, and three-quarters of those are under age 12. Nearly half of the Syrian refugee children evaluated in one study in Turkey met the criteria for having clinical anxiety, according to a 2015 paper in the journal Global Mental Health. Young men traveling alone were particularly hopeless and frustrated at the camps Von Burg visited.
"A lot of the males, particularly those traveling by themselves, really had no support system," she said.
In the Maela camp, Fellmeth's research found, around 30 percent of women have symptoms of depression. Mild or moderate symptoms are the most common, but that fact no longer comforts Fellmeth or her colleagues: The 18-year-old who drank herbicide with her husband exhibited only mild symptoms two days before their suicide.
"That suddenly made us look at all the women who had these very low-grade symptoms and take even the mild end of the spectrum more seriously," Fellmeth said.
Paired suicides are rare, representing less than 1 percent of all suicides, Fellmeth and her colleagues wrote. (According to the World Health Organization, there were around 800,000 suicide deaths globally in 2012, the last year for which complete data are available.) The woman did not seem to be physically coerced into the act, but psychological coercion is possible, the researchers wrote. No one ever psychologically assessed the woman's husband, and it's unclear why the couple killed themselves. The husband did use drugs and alcohol, a risk factor for suicide, and the woman had cited family tensions as a cause of her own feelings of unhappiness.
Some aid agencies in Europe, Turkey and the Middle Eastern countries that are taking in large numbers of Syrian refugees are attempting to provide mental health services. The Israel-based humanitarian agency IsraAID, for example, has sent psychologists to Lesvos (also called Lesbos) Island, where many migrants and refugees arrive in Greece after dangerous sea crossings. International Medical Corps provides services as well. Even the MV Aquarius, a rescue boat operated by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), takes counselors aboard when it ventures into the Mediterranean in search of stranded or swamped dinghies overcrowded with refugees and migrants, Von Burg said. At the Maela camp on the Myanmar border, the community is becoming more aware of mental health issues, Fellmeth said, and there are an increasing number of counselors available to provide talk therapy.
But whether on the border of Myanmar or the shores of Greece and Italy, access to care remains scant, Fellmeth and Von Burg said.
"It's never enough in terms of numbers," Von Burg said, "because the numbers are so big."
Original article on Live Science. 

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Battle in west Mosul could see siege, mass displacement: U.N.

Reuters
A member of Iraqi security forces stands guard during Friday prayers at the Hajj Diab al-Iraqi mosque in Mosul
A member of Iraqi security forces stands guard during Friday prayers at the Hajj Diab al-Iraqi mosque in Mosul, Iraq, February 10, 2017. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed
ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq's U.S.-backed offensive against Islamic State in western Mosul could displace up to 400,000 civilians and involve a siege in the densely populated old city, the United Nations' Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq said on Saturday.
The military and security forces last month recaptured the eastern half of the city, Iraq's second largest, and are expected to advance on the western side in coming days.
Western Mosul contains the old city center, with its ancient souks, Grand Mosque and most government administrative buildings. Commanders expect the battle to be more difficult than in the east because, among other things, tanks and armored vehicles cannot pass through its narrow streets and alleyways.
"This is a different battle with enormous implications for civilians," Lise Grande told Reuters by telephone. "We have to face the possibility of a siege in the old city."
She said the United Nations had considered several options for ensuring civilians' access to food, medicine and water in such a scenario.
In Mosul and previous battles against Islamic State, the military has surrounded the enemy but left an escape route for fighters to reduce civilian casualties and destruction to homes and infrastructure.
There may still be an option for the militants to flee west towards Tel Afar, but they may decide to put up a last stand in the heart of Mosul, the largest population center ever to come under their control.
Capturing the city would effectively end the militants' ambitions for territorial rule in Iraq, but they are expected to continue to wage an insurgency, carrying out suicide bombings and inspiring lone-wolf actions abroad.
The United Nations estimates that up to 800,000 civilians are living in western districts. Grande said up to half of them could flee their homes "in a worst case", twice the displacement seen in eastern Mosul.
The government and humanitarian agencies are constructing emergency sites south of the city and stockpiling key supplies.
Food and fuel supplies are dwindling in the west, markets and shops have closed, running water is scarce and electricity in many neighborhoods is either intermittent or cut off, the United Nations said in a statement.
Few commercial supplies have reached Mosul since the main road to Syria was cut at the end of November.
"The battle hasn't started but already there is a humanitarian crisis," Grande said in the statement.
(Reporting By Stephen Kalin; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
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