Twenty-nine people, mostly children, were killed and 35 wounded in weekend flash floods in the eastern Ethiopian city of Jijiga, officials said. ”We have recovered 29 bodies so far from early Friday’s floods in Cheraketo [district]. A majority of those were children,” regional president Abdullahi Hassan said.
The road from Harar runs for more than 960km east towards the border with Somalia, penetrating deep into the desiccated badlands of the Ogaden desert, the dusty heart of Ethiopia’s war-torn Somali regional state. This is the land that the self-styled separatists of the Ogaden National Liberation Front claim as their own.