Geneva: The UN food agency is stopping aid distribution to about 1 million people in southern Somalia because of attacks against staff and demands by armed groups that aid groups remove women from their teams, the agency said on Tuesday.
The World Food Programme is moving staff and supplies to northern and central Somalia from six areas in the south that are largely controlled by the Al Shabab Islamist group, said Emilia Casella, a WFP spokeswoman.
The US State Department says Al Shabab has links to Al Qaida.
"Up to a million people that have been dependent on food assistance in southern Somalia face a situation that is particularly dire," Casella told reporters in Geneva.
The WFP said that Al Shabab controls up to 95 per cent of those areas.
At least four of WFP's staff have been killed over the past 18 months, and militants threatened and attacked three of its offices in the south.
Armed groups have also increasingly been demanding that the WFP and other aid groups remove women from their staff and pay tens of thousands of dollars in protection money to guarantee the aid workers' security, she said.
Demands of armed groups
The agency had tried to resolve the demands of armed groups through meetings with village elders, but was unable to win the necessary guarantees for the security of its staff and protection of its humanitarian work, Casella told The Associated Press.
"It's up to the armed groups who control that area to provide the assurances that our staff will be safe and that humanitarian principles will be maintained," she said.
"We are hoping we can return, so we consider it a temporary situation."
In the meantime, the WFP is preparing for the possibility of large numbers of hungry Somalis moving from the south to other parts of Somalia and to neighbouring countries.
Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which has operations in neighbouring Kenya, said the agency is closely watching the situation amid concerns that Somalis might head for the border.
The World Food Programme supplies aid to some 3 million people in the war-torn country, which is also struggling with drought and produces only a third of the food it needs every year.
