MOGADISHU, Somalia—It was two in the morning when Abdinasir finally found his friend’s body.
Badly burned and wedged between concrete blocks, Ahmed Abdikarim Eyow’s remains were barely recognizable. The rescue team Abdinasir had recruited to search for the friend, with whom he was reunited only days before after a decade apart, hadn’t seen his remains in the wreckage. Only when Abdinasir turned on the light from his phone and began searching himself did the finality of his friend’s death at the hand of Somalia’s unrelenting extremists hit home.
Ahmed was one of over 250 people who were killed in Mogadishu Saturday when a truck loaded with explosives detonated at a busy intersection outside the popular Safari Hotel in Mogadishu Kilometer Five district. It was the biggest terrorist attack in the history of a city that has long and terrible experience with explosions orchestrated by the al Qaeda-linked terrorist organization Al Shabaab.
Shock waves from the blast could be felt even in the city’s Mogadishu International Airport compound, long considered the most secure area in the city. As diesel from the vehicle-born IED burned in the explosion’s aftermath, the initial white smoke from the blast turned into plumes of thick, black fog reaching as high as the city’s tallest buildings. Firefighters raced to put out the flame as it engulfed the Safari Hotel and spread to neighboring buildings. Somali armed forces and African Union Peacekeepers scrambled to close checkpoints and control mobs of people both running from the site of the explosion and clambering to get to it.
The scene felt like a horrific flashback to times past, people thought, not something that would happen here and now.
Known internationally for a quarter century of civil war, two devastating droughts, and a capital once run by warlords and Al Shabab, those who live here, or who want to come back home here, have begun to think Mogadishu today has little resemblance to its notorious reputation.
