Mogadishu bomb toll rises to at least 300
The country has suffered almost 30 years of horrific violence. But nothing quite like this, says Colin Freeman
Two bomb explosions in the centre of Somalia’s capital Mogadishu killed at least 300 people in the deadliest attack since an Islamist insurgency began in 2007, observers said yesterday.
Somali officials had put the death toll at more than 200 on Sunday without giving a firm number after the blasts at two busy junctions on Saturday.
“We have confirmed 300 people died in the blast,” Abdikadir Abdirahman, director of the city’s ambulance service, told Reuters. “The death toll will be higher because some people are still missing.”
Aden Nur, a doctor at the city’s Madina hospital, said they had recorded 258 deaths while Ahmed Ali, a nurse at the Osman Fiqi hospital, said five bodies had been sent there.
“160 of the bodies could not be recognised and so they were buried by the government yesterday. The others were buried by their relatives. Over a hundred injured were also brought here,” Dr Nur said.
The government said that 300 were injured by the huge lorry bomb that caused carnage and devastation.
Mogadishu’s mayor, Tabid Abdi Mohamed, also visited those wounded in the blast and said the horror of the attack was unspeakable.
“There is no tragedy worse than when someone comes to the dead body of their relative and cannot recognise them.”
Hundreds of people, chanting anti-violence slogans and wearing red or white bandanas around their heads in a show of grief, took to the streets of Mogadishu to condemn the deadly attack.
There has been no immediate claim of responsibility, but Al Shabab, the militant group aligned with Al Qaeda, has carried out dozens of suicide bombings in its attempt to overthrow Somalia’s internationally-backed government.
“Somalia federal government confirmed that 276 people were killed in the blast ... and 300 wounded people were admitted at different hospitals in Mogadishu,” the ministry of information said, and that there would be “national mourning and prayers for the victims” in the coming days.
Police official Ibrahim Mohamed said that many of the victims were “burnt beyond recognition”.
Rescuers worked through the night to try to pull bodies from the rubble after the bomb exploded outside the Safari Hotel on a busy road junction, flattening buildings and leaving many vehicles in flames.
“This is the most painful incident I can remember,” the deputy speaker of the Somali
I pray that one day Allah will bring His justice to the perpetrators of that evil act MUNA HAJ Mother of bombing victim
It was a busy Saturday afternoon in Mogadishu and the streets of the Somali capital were packed with motorists stuck in downtown traffic. But for the driver of one lorry heading towards a checkpoint near the foreign ministry, the journey was over. Stopped by a policeman for a routine search, the driver put his foot on the accelerator and his hand on a detonator – unleashing the worst terrorist bombing the country has yet suffered.
The lorry smashed through the checkpoint and exploded, its half-tonne payload, creating a blast that was heard citywide.
That, however, was just the start. The explosion also hit a fuel tanker parked near by, igniting a fireball that engulfed the entire street and everyone in it.
As of yesterday, the death toll had climbed to 300, making it one of the deadliest vehicle bombings not just in Somalia, but in the world.
Even by the standards of Mogadishu, where terrorist violence is nothing new, the bombing brought carnage on an unprecedented scale. While some victims were buried beneath the wreckage of buildings, many others were flayed beyond recognition by the fireball.
Rescuers, who are still sifting through the debris of a hotel razed by the blast, said they would probably never know exactly how many people were killed – or who many of the victims were.
“This is really horrendous, unlike any other time in the past,” said Dr Mohamed Yusuf, director of Mogadishu’s Medina hospital, whose staff dealt with the worst of Mogadishu’s civil war years in the 1990s. He said they had been “overwhelmed by both dead and wounded”.
Sources said that at one hospital a mother turned up with pieces of her child’s remains. With more than 300 injured, the death toll was expected to rise.
Abshir Ahmed, a Somali senator, said it was the “deadliest incident” he could remember since Somalia’s lapse into civil war in 1990.
Suspicion for the bombing is focused on Al Shabab, the Somali Al Qaeda franchise that has waged war on the country’s United Nations-backed government for a decade.
The group, which used to control much of Mogadishu, was pushed out by a Ugandan-led African Union force in 2011, but continues to operate in the countryside and frequently launches terrorist attacks on Mogadishu.
It also carried out the 2013 Westgate shopping mall attack in the Kenyan capital, w Nairobi, where gunmen killed 67 people.
As of yesterday, Al Shabab’s normally hyperactive media wing had not admitted to carrying out the Mogadishu bombing.
Many speculated that this was because even Al Shabab had been taken back by the scale of the attack.
The group suffered a backlash over a suicide bombing in Mogadishu in 2009, which killed 24 people at a graduation ceremony for medical students.
“This attack has all the hallmarks of Al Shabab and yet their very upmarket media machine hasn’t claimed responsibility,” said John Steed, a former military adviser to the UN in Mogadishu. “I’d like to think that even they are too ashamed of the carnage, but I doubt it.
“Somalis are pretty stoic people but this bomb has really shaken them. Nearly everyone there knows someone who was killed or injured.”
Investigators are now trying to find where the bomber sourced such a large quantity of high explosive. At least some of it is believed to have been military grade rather than home made, leading some to claim it had been stolen from Amisom, the 20,000-strong African Union force.
The savagery of the bombing also prompted speculation that it might have been the work of Somalia’s fledgling ISIL chapter.
At present, the group is confined to remote mountains in Somalia’s northern Puntland region and considered incapable of such an attack.
The scale of the casualties ranks the bombing second only to one carried out in Iraq last year, when a lorry bomb killed 324 people in a busy market area in Baghdad during Ramadan.
An attack against the Yazidi community in the northern Iraqi town of Kahtaniya in 2007 killed at least 500 people, but involved several bombs.
The Somali president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, declared three days of national mourning and joined thousands who responded to a plea by hospitals to donate blood for the wounded.
“I am appealing to all Somali people to come forward and donate,” he said.
On Sunday, hundreds took to the streets to protest against the attack.
Muna Haj, 36, whose son was killed, said: “The oppressors have taken his life away from him. I hate them. May Allah give patience to all families who lost their loved ones in that tragic blast. And I pray that one day Allah will bring His justice to the perpetrators of that evil act.”
The attack came despite a renewed effort by the United States under president Donald Trump’s administration to defeat Al Shabab once and for all, involving regular targeted strikes by drones and special forces teams.
About 300 special forces troops are understood to be in Somalia, operating alongside local forces, some of whom are trained by the UAE.
After a drone strike in July that killed Ali Jabal, an Al Shabab commander responsible for operations in Mogadishu, the Pentagon’s Africa command said it hoped his death would prove a major setback to the group’s ability to hit the Somali capital.
That hope now seems to have been somewhat premature.