Mohammed Hussein winces in pain as he limps through the dusty gravel of this desolate Kenyan border town, an arduous 20-day trek from the home he has fled in neighbouring Somalia. The septuagenarian patriarch of a family of seven massages the stump of the left leg he lost two years ago as he recalls the bloodletting and chronic insecurity that finally forced him to lead his brood to safety in Kenya.
"Even after I lost my leg, I stayed," he says, lifting his trousers to reveal a makeshift prosthetic limb fashioned from scraps of wire and a wooden crutch. "But now I cannot because the fighting is worse than ever before."
Hussein, 78, his daughter and son-in-law and five grandchildren are just some of the latest to arrival in Liboi, a ramshackle outpost from where they will join a surging population of Somali refugees at a UN camp in Kenya.
As fears of conflict between the weak Somali government and powerful Islamists intensify amid growing concerns of full-scale war, more than 30,000 Somalis have crossed the border this year in search of shelter from unrest.
Tired, hungry and often ill, the new arrivals -- expected to surpass 50,000 by the end of the year -- threaten to overwhelm the overcrowded Dadaab refugee camp, already home to 153,000 mainly Somali refugees.
And those numbers may shoot up further as the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Friday that the flow of people crossing the border had jumped to more than 1,000 a day in the three preceding days, from an average of 300 to 400.
Like Hussein and his family, most have made the difficult and desperate voyage on foot, bouncing in the bays of cargo trucks and buses crammed with tense Somalis, all eager to make it to Kenya.
Yet conditions at home demand such uprooting, Hussein says, rubbing what is left of his thigh as he takes a seat beside his family to wait for transport to Dadaab, about 70 kilometers (44 miles) south-west.
Hussein arrived here from the key southern port of Kismayo earlier this month ago after fleeing advancing Islamist gunmen who surrounded and seized the town, further expanding their grip on south and central Somalia.
"We couldn't even eat because the militias would grab whatever we put on the fire," says his daughter, Marian Mohammed, 23, offering her two-month-old daughter a breast dry of milk.
Hussein lost his leg in 2004 during fighting between rival warlords in Mogadishu.
"I was sitting in my house, taking tea, when a large bomb came in through the window," he said. "When the smoke faded, I looked down and my leg wasn't there anymore."
He pulled himself through the rubble and a neighbour took him to hospital -- all the while dodging a continual spray of bullets -- and then delivered him to his daughter in Kismayo.
But while he left the capital, he never thought of leaving Somalia, which has been wracked by anarchy and conflict since the 1991 ouster of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre and is now in the clutches of Islamist-government tension.
"In 1992, we knew who was fighting," Hussein says. "But now, bullets are flying everywhere so you don't know who to run from or who to run to."
According to UNHCR, most of the Somalis now fleeing come from Mogadishu, which was seized by the Islamists in June, and its surrounding areas, fearing violence, conscription and harassment by rival factions.
As the Islamists have expanded their reach to the south, they have been joined by people from Kismayo and neighbouring towns, boosting the numbers arriving in Liboi and another border crossing Amuma.
The flood of refugees -- nearly all of whom are fleeing towns seized by the Islamists in recent days -- has strained the facilities at UNHCR's Dadaab camp in northeast Kenya and now threatens to overhelm it, the agency said Friday.
"We are concerned that if the arrival rate of more than 1,000 people a day continues, it will severely strain our limited capacity in Dadaab," it warned.
The surge in newcomers and the limited resources has led to fears of violence in the camps.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) recently appealed for more than eight million dollars in emergency donations to fund its Dadaab operations, warning of ration cuts if the money was not forthcoming.
"With WFP intending to reduce rations, we are looking at a dangerous situation in the camps later in the year," said Geoff Wordley, a senior emergency officer with UNHCR.
Indeed, the atmosphere at Dadaab, a sprawling complex of three refugee camps about 470 kilometers (290 miles) northeast of Nairobi, is already strained with long-time residents increasingly resentful of the newcomers.
"The older refugees will not allow us to collect water from the taps," says Ikiira Abdumalik, who arrived in June and is forced by her neighbours to walk to a nearby borehole to collect untreated water. "They think they are theirs."
For 13-year-old Abdufatah Mohammed, another Dadaab newcomer, those types of injustices just compound the problems back home.
"I know I am a refugee now and that means sleeping on the dirt," he said with a sigh. "I only have one shirt and one trouser. It means I don't even have a bedsheet and that I am hungry all the time.
"This life is very hard."
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