U.N. Security Council ambassadors met the president of Somalia on Wednesday under heavy security in Mogadishu ahead of a new military offensive against al-Shebab fighters. The visit comes amid growing warnings of a humanitarian crisis in Somalia, three years after more than 250,000 people—half of them children—died in a famine. The U.N.-mandated African Union (AU) force provided armed guards for the diplomats as they visited their fortified base at Mogadishu airport, where they met President Hasan Sheikh Mohamud and top government officials. But the U.N. diplomats said they were committed to supporting the Somali government as it revises the national constitution—and holds a referendum on it by 2015—before elections in 2016, which would be the first popular vote in decades. "The members of the Security Council stand ready to support the people and government of Somalia to deliver this vision," British U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said in a statement, calling on the government to "urgently establish a national independent electoral commission."
