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They arrive in trucks and cars, by donkey and on foot. Some children have even been carried in wheelbarrows.
There is little in the way of food, just a handful of latrines and hardly any shelter - but still they come.
In three short weeks this 10km stretch of road - a pot-holed, cactus-lined, dirt track that leads west out of Mogadishu - has become home to the world's largest concentration of displaced people.
Almost 200,000 people who have fled the violence in Mogadishu now live in 70 makeshift camps that have sprung up along the side of the road, many of them little more than shelters fashioned from twigs, rusting corrugated iron and plastic.
There are one million displaced people in the country, according to the UNHCR; 60 per cent of Mogadishu's population. Another 600,000 are believed to have fled.
United Nations officials now consider Somalia to be the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, surpassing even Darfur in its horror and hopelessness.
The rate of severely malnourished children is higher, the fighting is fiercer, and interest from the rest of the world is incomparably lower.
Eric Laroche, the UN's aid co-ordinator for Somalia, said: "Since it is in Somalia no one cares. Many of these kids are going to die."
A country of 10 million, perched on Africa's easternmost tip, Somalia has in the past 12 months been battered by drought, floods, even a plague of locusts. But its role in the US "war on terror" has caused it the most pain.
Ethiopia invaded its neighbour on Christmas Day last year, aiming to drive out the Union of Islamic Courts, a coalition of Islamist groups.
The Courts' fighters were easily defeated by one of Africa's strongest armies. But within weeks, its hardline military wing, known as Al Shabaab, had re-emerged, launching a deadly Iraq-style insurgency.
The civil war has lasted 17 years. But this time, say those in Afgoye's wretched camps, is different.
Halima Ibrahim watched her husband die four days ago. "They are killing old women, they are killing children," she spat. "Those Ethiopians deserve to die."
- INDEPENDENT
