By Marie-Louise Gumuchian
WAJID, Somalia, March 30 (Reuters) - Pirates, gun-toting militiamen and endless checkpoints make delivering aid in anarchic Somalia a "logistical nightmare", a U.N. official said, as insecurity hampers efforts to feed 1 million hungry people.
A severe drought has killed dozens of people and hundreds of livestock in the Horn of Africa country after seasonal rains failed for three years in a row, leading to Somalia's worst harvest in a decade.
Lawlessness in the nation carved into fiefdoms run by rival warlords since 1991 is making food distribution extremely difficult, the U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) says.
"You can say that this is a logistical nightmare," WFP Country Director for Somalia Zlatan Milisic told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.
"We have problems on every corner -- pirate attacks, there are shootings on different convoys, there's shootings at the distributions, we get stopped at checkpoints."
Pirates hijacked two WFP ships last year, forcing the agency back onto Somalia's dangerous roads. There, food convoys are often stopped and sometimes held up for days at roadblocks mounted by militias, brandishing assault rifles and knives.
Often, the food is looted.
Inter-clan fighting is also common. One person was killed last week in an exchange of fire as WFP was handing out sacks of food in a village, forcing staff to flee.
"The security is still very precarious. We are succeeding so far but you never know whether a certain area is going to become inaccessible or for how long," Milisic said at a WFP base in Wajid, in southwestern Somalia.
Clashes like the heavy fighting in Mogadishu last week that killed scores of people typically force WFP to halt deliveries.
About 6,000 tonnes of aid was stuck for five days until last week's fighting between warlords and Islamist militias stopped.
SEA SHIPMENTS RESUME
Milisic said sea shipments - a third cheaper than land convoys from Kenya - had resumed, covering about 70-80 percent of WFP's cargo. But a ship which had just delivered food last week was attacked by pirates.
He said WFP was constantly exploring other ways to deliver food, including by air.
"Before this year, we only had two corridors for logistic deliveries in Somalia. Now we have five, six," Milisic said.
WFP plans to distribute 160,000 tonnes of food to one million people in the south, a five-fold increase on last year's operations. Other agencies will feed another 500,000.
Wells are quickly drying up, forcing many to flee their villages in search of water and pasture for their animals.
Milisic said despite last week's shooting, around 150 deliveries in the past month had passed without incident.
But even after the food is delivered, there is the fear militias may steal it.