A senior UN official has urged humanitarian agencies to take advantage of security provided by African Union troops in Mogadishu to improve the delivery of aid to tens of thousands of displaced people camped in surrounding areas.

"Response [to the crisis] has not been adequate because of difficulties of access and too many security incidents," Eric Laroche, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, said on 2 August, a day after a visit to Mogadishu.

Aid agencies should be mobilised to scale up their operations in the Somali capital, he said, adding that this would help get relief supplies both to the city and the surrounding areas.

He said the availability of African Union security escorts facilitated his visit to Mogadishu and the Afgoye.

"We are starting to have access and we need to use it," Laroche said. "If we can operate from Mogadishu, we can reach more people.”

He also said arrangements were being made for expatriate aid workers travelling to Mogadishu on humanitarian missions to stay longer in the city, rather than just fly in and out on one-day trips.

According to Laroche, the main humanitarian needs of the displaced included food, water and sanitation facilities, as well as shelter and medical assistance. The departure of medical personnel from Mogadishu meant that city hospitals could only provide treatment to 250 in-patients, compared to 800 before the start of the cur

rent conflict.

Laroche, who is also the UN Development Programme's (UNDP) resident representative for Somalia, said he visited a camp where 4,000 people were sharing four latrines and another where 2,000 had only one toilet.

Insecurity had created "a real sense of despair" among those who fled violence in Mogadishu, many of whom were considering leaving the city permanently, he added.

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), meanwhile, said at least 20 children have been killed in the last month in continuing violence in Mogadishu.

"The indiscriminate killing of children makes a mockery of any movement toward reconciliation," UNICEF Representative Christian Balslev-Olesen said in a statement on 3 August.

"For Somalia to move forward, it must ensure its most vulnerable do not come under attack. Many children in the country today cannot simply play outdoors or walk to a mosque without the persistent threat of being killed," he said.

According to the UN, about 38,000 people have congregated in 23 camps between Mogadishu and the town of Afgoye, to the west of the capital. In the camps, 21.5 percent of the children are malnourished, a rate much higher than the most vulnerable populations in food insecure regions such as Gedo and Bay, which had malnutrition rates of about 17 percent.

Reports say at least 1,000 people have been killed and at least 400,000 displaced since fighting erupted in February 2007 between forces of the Transitional Federal Government, who are backed by Ethiopian troops, and insurgents. Some 21,000 people fled Mogadishu in July alone as a result of the escalation of violence that followed the opening of the ongoing reconciliation conference in the city, according to Laroche.

Delegates at the conference recently reached an agreement for clans to return property looted from each other during the past 17 years of civil warfare in the country. A committee would be set up to work out the details on making and paying claims, Abdulkadir Walayo, spokesman for the conference told IRIN on 2 August.

The conference has moved on to demobilisation and disarmament, he said.