Somali OSU grad among terror victims
Islamic extremists blew up the gate of a Somali hotel with a car bomb and took over the building for more than 14 hours, leaving 26 people dead, before Somali forces killed the attackers. The dead included a prominent member of the Columbus Somali community and a popular Canadian-somali journalist.
Two Americans, three Kenyans, three Tanzanians,and a Briton also were among the dead in the East African country’s southern port city of Kismayo, said Ahmed Madobe, the president of Jubbaland regional state, which controls Kismayo. Two Chinese people were among 56 others injured, Madobe told reporters.
At least four assailants attacked the Asasey Hotel on Friday evening, beginning with a suicide car bomb at the entrance gate and followed by an assault by gunmen who stormed the hotel, which is frequented by politicians and Somali expatriates. Some news reports said local elders and politicians were meeting at the hotel to discuss upcoming regional elections.
Somali forces besieged the hotel overnight before killing the attackers.
Somalia’s Islamic extremist rebels, al-shabab, claimed responsibility for the attack. Al-shabab, which is allied with al-qaida, often uses car bombs to infiltrate heavily fortified targets such as the hotel in Kismayo, a city that has been relatively quiet in recent years since al-shabab was ousted from control.
The group, which has killed thousands across East Africa, seeks to overthrow Somalia’s Western-backed government and has accused the president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, of being an apostate and an American “puppet.”
The attack is a blow to Somalia’s government in its efforts to hold nationwide, one-person, one-vote elections next year.
Security officials cordoned off the site of the attack and tried to prevent journalists from taking photos or video of the damaged hotel and in some cases destroyed journalists’ cameras.
The Columbus-connected victim, Abdullahi Isse, graduated from Ohio State University in 2010 and was the executive director of the Social-life and Agricultural Development Organization in Somalia. SADO is a sister organization of Peace Direct, which works to support people in their countries in making a difference.
Dylan Mathews, the CEO of Peace Direct, said in a statement that Isse was “dearly loved” as a member of the Peace Direct family.
Jibril Mohamed, a professor at Ohio State and friend of Isse’s, said SADO was just one of the ways that Isse had been involved in humanitarian work in his country, where he had tried to become a member of parliament and worked for peace and prosperity.
When Isse came to Columbus in 2006, Mohamed already knew him. Isse returned to Somalia about eight years ago but frequently returned to the area to visit his sister and a network of family members and friends, Mohamed said.
Although Isse lived primarily in Somalia and neighboring Kenya, he had spent several weeks in the United States and the Columbus area before flying back to Somalia on Friday.
“He landed, went to the hotel and it came under attack,” Mohamed said.
“A lot of people are grieving. We lost a brilliant person,” he said. “People really cared about him, and they knew that he cared about them.”
Members of the local Somali community held a vigil Saturday evening.
Isse spearheaded efforts to bring clean water to his area in southern Somalia and began programs to help Somalis take on paid community-improvement work rather than wait for United Nations aid during the the country’s long civil war.
Horsed Noah, the executive director of the Abubakar Assidiq Islamic Center on the West Side, said he is related to one of the owners of the hotel in Kismayo and lost several extended family members in the attack.
Noah was also friends with Canadian journalist Hodan Nalayeh, who was killed in the attack along with her husband, Farid Jama Suleiman.
Nalayeh was born in Somalia in 1976, but spent most of her life in Canada, first in Alberta and then in Toronto. She founded Integration TV, an international web-based video production company aimed at Somali viewers around the world. She was the world’s first female Somali media owner.
Ahmed Hussen, Canada’s minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, mourned Hodan Nalayeh’s death on Twitter, saying she “highlighted the community’s positive stories and contributions in Canada” through her work as a journalist.
Hodan Nalayeh spent the last days of her life doing what she loved most: sharing a side of Somalia rarely depicted in the West. On Twitter, she posted photos of boys grinning on the island of Ilisi, fresh fish and lobsters pulled straight from the Indian Ocean, and a colorful sunset from Kismayo.
“It was an incredible day to witness #Somalia’s beauty,” she wrote.
Her presence in Somalia sparked hope among those in the diaspora looking for proof that they, too, could one day return to their ancestral homeland, said Mukhtar Ibrahim, the executive director of Sahan Journal, a nonprofit news organization covering immigrant communities in
Minnesota, home to a large Somali population.
“She left her comfortable life in Canada to go to Somalia, and that’s a big risk for a lot of people in the diaspora,” Ibrahim said. “That’s the saddest part, that a lot of people cannot wrap around their heads around. She was doing her best, she wasn’t taking sides, she wasn’t into politics, she wasn’t critical of the groups that were fighting. She was just trying to do good storytelling about her community.”
Asad Hussein, a Somali writer and student at Princeton University, said Nalayeh strayed from narratives that portrayed Somalis only as “victims trapped in a vicious circle of conflicts.”
“She understood, as every good storyteller does, that the little moments in life matter just as much as the big ones,” he wrote in a message to The Washington Post. “Hodan noticed the people bathing in the ocean, the orchards in the courtyards, and the radiance of the setting sun, and she knew those were stories, too.”
A top official of the African Union, which has a multinational force in Somalia, condemned the attack, saying it was “meant to derail progress in Somalia as the country rebuilds and consolidates the gains made on peace and security.”
Francisco Madeira, special representative of the chairman of the African Union Commission, also said: “Somalia has made tremendous progress in seizing territory and pushing out the terrorists from many places across the country.”
Information from The Associated Press, The New York Times and The Washington Post was included in this story.