DOLO ADO, Ethiopia (Reuters) - Rasheed Hassan had to walk out on his son when he fled war in his native Somalia to go to neighboring Ethiopia. Two other children had already been shot dead in crossfire near his home.
Fearing for his life, Hassan, 42, walked for eight days, his belongings in a donkey cart, to the refugee camp that has become home to thousands more escaping war and now a second killer -- drought.
"I even left a son behind -- there wasn't enough space," he said, two days after arriving at Dolo Ado, just a kilometer north of the border with Somalia.
The cluster of crowded camps scattered around the town now shelter almost 100,000, but officials say the deadly cocktail of daily bloodshed and a ruinous regional drought will force even more to arrive in the coming months.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and Ethiopia have set up a cluster of camps at Dolo Ado to accommodate the influx of refugees, which officials say has now topped some 1,600 people each day.
"This is the worst humanitarian disaster we are facing in the world," UNHCR head Antonio Guterres said during a trip to the area on Wednesday. "We have one-fourth of the population of Somalia displaced."
The agency is building more camps to hold another 120,000 people as drought ravages the region.
Hospitals in the Somali capital Mogadishu are also reporting more malnourished children among refugee arrivals fleeing the drought. Pastoralist communities in northeastern Kenya face starvation as it continues to engulf the region.
Although the civil war in Somalia has raged for two decades since the downfall of Siad Barre's rule, fighting between the internationally backed government and the rebels has intensified during the past year, with civilians bearing the brunt.
Hassan left behind the whistles of incoming mortar fire that had shaken the town of Bohol Bashir for days, and fled the house-to-house searches and bloody street battles as government troops fought al Shabaab, a group that claims links to al Qaeda and fights to topple Somalia Western-backed government.
"I was just a trader and had no involvement in the conflict so I chose to stay," he said.
"But then two of my children died, caught in the cross-fire as they fought it out just meters away from our house," Hassan said, shrugging his shoulders in desperation at the loss of Mohammad, eight, and Abdi, 12.
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