A Somali woman reacts near the site of a car bomb in central Mogadishu
on March 18, 2013. Of the numerous assaults and the bomb attacks that
will haunt every Somali’s mind, none has been dastardlier than the one
on October 14. PHOTO | MOHAMED ABDIWAHAB | FILE AFP
On the second day of my visit to Mogadishu within a couple of
days of the truck bombing, I visited the site of the explosion in the
company of Prof Abdullahi Shirwa, the chairman of the National Emergency
Operation Centre.
At some point, a man explaining things to me glanced nervously around, and bent down to pick up “something”.
He said to me, “Here,” and offered me whatever it was that he had picked up from under a piece of wood.
I did not like his bothered look and I asked: “What is it?”
He replied: “These are pieces of human flesh.”
Shocked,
I averted my eyes, unready to accept the man’s extended hand and was
relieved when Prof Shirwa assured me that these were fragments of
charred metal thrown out by the massive explosion.
Of
the numerous assaults and the bomb attacks that will haunt every
Somali’s mind, none has been dastardlier than the one on October 14.
A
heinous act of incomparable devastation, nearly 400 lost their lives
and an equal number of people suffered serious injuries, many needing
major surgeries, with many others either unaccounted for or missing.
Al-Shabaab
served notice on everyone that the terrorist organisation is still
capable of striking panic into the nation’s heart, despite its
territorial loss.
As we mourned the dead, we sought answers to the question we have been asking for the past decade.
Now
we ask now if this would be the watershed event that would drive
African Union Mission in Somalia and the national army towards the
decisive final push to rid the country of Al-Shabaab once and for all.
Al-Shabaab
Neither did Al-Shabaab, masters in dark arts of stonewalling, claim responsibility for the attack, fearing a popular backlash.
It
is worth remembering that the terrorists did not own up to the December
4, 2009, Hotel Shamo blast in which a male suicide bomber disguised as a
hijab-wearing woman detonated a device, killing three government
ministers, two professors of medicine and nine students at a medical
school graduation ceremony.
Even so, nearly everyone suspected them of being the perpetrators of the atrocity.
A Somali proverb has it that lies have short legs and that sooner or later the truth will catch up with them.
And so it is something of a relief when the truth has caught up with Al-Shabaab’s taciturnity.
The
Somali Internal Security minister released the names of the six men
behind the truck bombing a month after the deadly incident and two weeks
following the Hotel Naasa Hablood assault, in which 17 people died and
23 were wounded and which Al-Shabaab claimed to have carried out.
The minister, Mohamed Abukar Islow, identified Osman Hajji, aka Maadey, as the suicide bomber and driver of the truck.
He
also named five other individuals, who are now in custody, accused of
having a hand in the bombing: Hassan Adan Isack, the driver of the
second car; Ali Yussuf Wacays, aka Duaale, thought to be the second
suicide bomber; Abdiweli Ahmed Dirie, aka Fanax, the group’s head of
explosive experts in Mogadishu; Mukhtar Mohamed, also known as Gardhuub,
a senior leader of the team; and Abdullahi Abdi Warsame.
The minister added: “Apart from those in custody, our forces are hunting down the owner of the truck who is on the run.”
Alone
in my hotel room late that evening following my meeting with the
Internal Security minister, his bodyguards hovering nearby, I remembered
a conversation I had in London with a leading scholar on Jihad
insurgency in Somalia.
Bin Laden
My
English friend said: “Do you know why the majority Muslim countries
such as Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan serve as religious
battlefields, when no majority Arab country has ever been torn apart by
similar religion-based conflicts until ISIS appeared on the scene?”
“It
is because Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia pay the wages of the Jihadist on
the proviso that all the religious battles are fought elsewhere, away
from their countries. (Osama) Bin Laden operated from his Afghan base
until his stay in that country became untenable. Then he moved his base
to Pakistan.”
“Where does Somalia fit in?” I asked. The
analyst claimed that it all began when General Mohamed Farah Aideed met
Bin Laden at the latter’s retreat home in Soba, an ancient Nubian city
about 20 kilometres away from Khartoum.
In 1997, the
leader of Al-Qaeda would later tell two CNN journalists that his men had
trained the Somalis in downing Black Hawks by aiming at the tail
rotors.
In the event, Bin Laden dispatched Abu Hafs Al
Masri, an Egyptian, to provide on-the-ground training to Aideed’s
militiamen on downing a helicopter.
When
the two met, Bin Laden was living openly in Khartoum and putting
together a plan to launch the attacks on the American embassies in
Nairobi, Kenya; and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which followed before his
men carried out the game-changing 9/11 assaults on the Twin Towers.
A lot has happened in Somalia since the Black Hawk Down days caused the United States to withdrew its army.
It
seemed Somalis were left to their own devices to deal with the
nefarious interference in the country’s affairs by Ethiopia, Kenya,
Eritrea, Uganda, the US, the European Union and a handful of Arab
states, each having its own self-serving design, some in an underhand
way, others with worrying blatancy.
A
rap sheet of crimes was committed against Somalia. The country’s wealth
was looted, its seas emptied of fish, its shores polluted with nuclear
and chemical waste and the chance of it putting a government together
continuously sabotaged by one foreign party or another.
Divided city
When
I visited Mogadishu in 1996 after a 22-year exile, I found a divided
city run by two warlords, each claiming his half as his fiefdom.
And
with no government to provide any civic amenities and no state-run
schools functioning, the Qataris, the Saudis and the Emirates entered
Somalia, especially in the educational sector, as if to bring Bin
Laden’s plans finally into fruition.
Under Siyad Barre, Somalia had been a secular state, quite unlike any other Muslim nation.
Now
the Arabs had free rein to impose their language, harden the Somalis’
moderate way of worship and change the traditional manner in which our
women and men dressed.
Unchallenged,
the Saudis, the Qataris and the Emirates introduced their school
curricula, which was adopted by the teachers whose salaries they paid.
Within 10 years, the Islamic Courts Union exerted control over much of southern Somalia.
The
US awoke to the ‘dangers’ the courts could present and gave its tacit
approval to Ethiopia to invade. And Al-Shabaab, as the court’s offshoot,
emerged.
Thus, while the Arab
States’ threat to Somali sovereignty has its origin in Bin Laden’s
secret pact with Aideed through a series of permutations, the snake
ended up biting its tail — morphing into Shabaab.
Reported by Nuruddin Farah, a leading Somali novelist.
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