War & Health

UNOSAT gives us a snapshot of the security situation in Mogadishu since the Transitional Federal Government and Ethiopian forces captured the capital in December 2006. The data comes from news reports from the Shabelle Media Network (SMN), Garowe Online (GO), SomaliNet (SN), East African Standard (EAS), The Nation (Nairobi), Kenya Times, Reuters, BBC, AP, AFP, Washington Post & Aljazeera. I’ll hand it off to UNOSAT for a more detailed description. Click the image for the full map in PDF.

This map provides an overview of the reported security events in Mogadishu since the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and allied Ethiopian forces took control of the capital on 29 December 2006. Security events have been classified according to the type of weapon used: 1-mortars; 2-rocket propelled grenades (RPG); 3-hand grenades; and 4-small arms. Urban areas with increasing concentrations of security events (”hot spots”) have been highlighted with a color scale increasing from blue to red. This intensity image has also been weighted by the type of weapon used, giving prominence to mortars and RPG-based events. Each point symbol represents a specific event in a given location and time. In those instances when multiple mortar shells fell in a specific area on the same day (e.g. 4 mortars fell at the Airport) a single event point symbol was assigned. The spatial accuracy of most points is within 100m of the true location; however a significant minority of events have large degrees of uncertainly and may be accurate only to within a few kilometers. All security-related information used in this analysis has been acquired exclusively from public media sources. The security events depicted on this map have not been independently verified on the ground nor are they likely representative of all security and humanitarian events in this area. Casualty figures recorded for each security event are also likely to be significant underestimates. All security-related data collection, analysis and map production has been done by UNOSAT to help provide the humanitarian community with a spatial context to the ongoing security events in Mogadishu.