More than a dozen children are starving in the northeastern Nigerian city of Bama, where almost 200 refugees fleeing from militant group Boko Haram have died in the past month, according Doctors Without Borders.
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Médecins Sans Frontières – also known as Doctors Without Borders or MSF – said on Wednesday that it was able to access Bama for several hours on Tuesday.
MSF said “a catastrophic humanitarian emergency is now unfolding” at the camp, adding that around a fifth of 800 children who underwent medical screening were acutely malnourished and that nearly 500 children had died.
A total of 1,233 graves, many of them of for children, had been dug near the camp in the past year, the agency said.
“Since 23 May, at least 188 people have died in the camp – nearly six people per day”, MSF said in a statement, adding that the deaths were mainly caused by starvation and dehydration.
MSF on Thursday said that its team found 24,000 people, including 15,000 children, sheltering in the camp located on a hospital compound during a visit to Bama last month.
Speaking with Pulse.ng, the Press Officer at the NEMA Headquarters in Abuja, Ezekiel Manzo said: “These people came from liberated towns surrounding Bama while others were rescued by the military from the Boko Haram insurgents”.
The armed group seized Bama in September 2014 and Nigerian troops recaptured it in March 2015. Of those graves, 480 were for children, and new graves are appearing on a daily basis.
The refugees in Bama are among 1.8 million Nigerians forced from their homes and living inside the country, with another 155,000 in neighbouring countries, according to the UN.
Sixty-one young children and babies were said to be “critically malnourished”.
The Boko Haram insurgency has raged on in Nigeria’s northeast for about seven years now killing over ten thousand.
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Sixteen severely malnourished children at immediate risk of death were referred to the MSF feeding center in the city of Maiduguri, according to the statement.
