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Around 14 million people will need humanitarian help in the former northeast Nigerian stronghold region of Boko Haram militants and tens of thousands of children will be at risk of dying from famine, a United Nations official said on Tuesday.
The Islamist militant group has killed 15,000 people and displaced more than 2 million from their homes during a seven-year insurgency in Africa’s most populous nation and biggest energy producer.
Nigerian military forces backed by those from neighbouring states have pushed Boko Haram back to the northeast’s vast Sambisa forest in the last few months, enabling aid workers to access areas previously controlled by the jihadists. That has revealed thousands of people living in famine-like conditions.
“Next year 26 million people will be affected by the ongoing crisis and 14 million of these will need international and national humanitarian assistance,” Peter Lundberg, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Nigeria, told a news conference.
He added that there were 75,000 children who, “if we don’t do something rapidly and seriously… are going to die in the few months ahead of us”.
UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, said in September that 75,000 children could die in northeast Nigeria over the next year if they did not receive aid. A total of 400,000 children aged under five could suffer severe malnutrition in the three states worst hit by the insurgency, it said.
Earlier today, Doctors Without Borders said thousands of children in the northeast were dying of starvation and disease, quoting a new survey that has brought Nigerian officials to stop denying the crisis.
Emergency program manager Natalie Roberts says a survey of two refugee camps in northeastern Maiduguri shows that a quarter of the expected population under-5 children is missing, assumed dead.
Doctors Without Borders first sounded the alarm in June but Nigerian camp officials as late as September denied any child was suffering malnutrition.
Roberts says the organization hopes that official recognition of the calamity in which “thousands are dying every day” will help bring urgently needed aid before older children also start to succumb.
