AKIPRESS.COM - More than 50 people have died in Somaliland, livestock has been wiped out and hundreds of farms destroyed by heavy rains and floods caused by a tropical cyclone that hit the Horn of Africa, officials and aid agencies in the breakaway Somali region said, Reuters reported.
Somaliland broke away from Somalia in 1991 and operates as an independent state but has not won international recognition.
“The death toll from the cyclone is so far over 50 people,” vice president Abdirahman Abdullahi Ismail told reporters late on Tuesday in Somaliland’s capital Hargeisa. “(The) death toll may rise because there are other people who are still missing.”
Tropical cyclone Sagar made landfall on Saturday in north-western Somaliland and Djibouti, three days after it formed in the Gulf of Aden, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).
UNOCHA said 669,000 people have been affected in Somaliland, giving a toll of 25 people so far confirmed dead and 27 missing, with numbers likely to rise as information arrives from areas that are now inaccessible.