At times, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On the one
hand, I saw a city that has undergone what one might consider a Kafkaesque
ordeal—two decades of civil war had cemented the city’s seemingly catastrophic
plummet from grace. On the other hand, the city was brimming with an atmosphere
of hope and a sense of newfound optimism. There was a tangible feeling that the
residents of Mogadishu believe the city is in the process of becoming an emblem
of triumph over adversity. In a way, I needed some psychic distance from a
nostalgic past to face today’s reality.
The first hour
In my first
hour after arriving in Mogadishu, I encountered two minor incidents.
First, immediately after I landed, I stood in a long line
designated for foreigners entering the country. I thought the word “foreigner”
had a painful ring to it. After all, I was the one who had left Somalia as a
teen and gained citizenship elsewhere. Most of the Somali passengers in that
Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Mogadishu were like me and were standing
with me before the immigration officer. Only a small number of Somalis from the
flight stood at the window for “Somali nationals and citizens.” We “foreigners”
had to pay $60 to enter our native country.
As I waited to be processed for entry, I heard my name being called
by an airport employee holding a cell phone:
“Hassan Abukar.”
“Yes, I am
Hassan Abukar,” I responded.
“Here,” the
man said, “talk to the director of the office of the presidency.”
“Are you ‘Hassan Abukar’ from America?” the
voice said.
“Yes.”
“Well, welcome
home.”
The airport employee
smiled and took the phone back. He said he would meet me at the baggage claim.
After I was done with immigration, the man came back and told
me the official I had just spoken with had sent him my picture. I know I had not
met the official, nor sent him my picture. However, I wondered why the employee
was calling my name if he had my photo. Perhaps, my images in some of my
writings online had generated a little notoriety.
I am not a cleric, but I remembered an anecdote about a
famous Yemeni cleric who was undertaking a trip to Saudi Arabia. Being a man
with vanity, he wondered if the Saudis would recognize him as a “sheikh.” At Jeddah airport in Saudi Arabia, he was
received by a young Saudi who called him “sheikh.” The cleric was so pleased
that he had been recognized as a man of cloth, and relaxed. Then, as he and the
young man strolled in the city, a dog tried to cross the street but was
repelled by the Saudi yelling: “Idlac yaa
sheikh.” (Get out of here, sheikh). The Yemeni cleric realized that the
Saudis were hopeless because they used the word “sheikh” on everything— people
and animals.
The airport employee was kind enough to take my luggage to
the parking lot and asked a young man in an SUV to drop me at a hotel in the Waberi
District. Another young man from the same flight—who was born and raised in
Saudi Arabia, but lived in Europe—rode with us. Neither of them had yet been born
when I last saw Mogadishu.
Second, as we left the airport, I saw a landscape that seemed
utterly strange to me. Makka al-Mukarrama Road, a major road artery in
Mogadishu, was narrow, dusty, and thronged with people. Pedestrians paid little
attention to cars that rushed through perilous, chaotic traffic. On the other
side of the road, I saw a goat strolling on the pedestrian side unattended—a subject
I will come back to later.
I saw a soldier holding a machine gun, signaling for cars to
stop. When he raised his hand toward my car, the young driver simply ignored
him and sped away. Suddenly, the soldier started chasing our SUV. In seconds, I
thought we would be fired upon and I ducked for cover. The driver was
nonchalant; he had the disinterested look of a youngster who had spent years
fighting in the streets of Mogadishu.
“The soldier just wants a ride,” the young driver said
sarcastically, with a glint in his eye.
I felt a small wave of relief; the incident had made my skin
crawl. I was bewildered by the small extent it took for the younger generation
of Mogadishu to see life endangered or lost.
The driver and the other passenger started talking about the
hotel I was headed to. It was (and still is) a temporary home for some
government officials, legislators, and United Nations contractors. A year
earlier, several Al-Shabaab terrorists had attacked the hotel with a fusillade
of gunfire, hand grenades, and finally a car bombing. Fortunately, the armed security
guards fought back tenaciously and killed three of the terrorists. Moreover,
the hotel’s strategic location—not being on Makka al-Mukarrama Road—saved the
day. However, the building in front of the hotel though, was wrecked. A dozen people, mostly women selling
vegetables, perished.
“So, when
was the last time you were in Mogadishu?” the driver asked me once again.
“Thirty-one years
ago,” I said.
He offered little in the way of reassurance, saying: “I think
we shouldn’t be talking about bombings and other violent acts.”
“When your
time comes,” I replied, putting on a brave face, “you will find no human can
prevent it.”
I have written extensively about Al-Shabaab and its terror
campaign, but from the comfort of my home in the U.S. Now, I was headed to the
very hotel that they had targeted a year earlier.
Wake up, it is a car bombing
Six days after my arrival, I met a friend from San Diego, California,
who loves baked chicken. He and his
companion walked to a restaurant a block away from the popular Wehliya Hotel
with me. It was a nice outing in which we reminisced about good times in Southern
California.
The next day, my friend asked me if we could meet again at
the same restaurant for lunch. I told him I was tired; I asked him and his friend
to meet me instead at the restaurant in my hotel. The two came and we had
lunch. We then sat outside the restaurant and drank tea. After a while, I
excused myself and went upstairs to my room. Lying down, I dozed off. Thirty-eight
minutes later, I heard a huge, loud blast that sounded as if the hotel was under
attack by Al-Shabaab terrorists. I felt my time was up and that I had to face
death. Ironically, I remembered the words of American filmmaker/comedian Woody
Allen: “I am not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it
happens.”
The big blast was followed by a fusillade of gunfire and yelling
among the hotel’s dozen security guards. My California friend later told me he
had heard a hotel manager ordering guests to get their handguns. It was then
that I realized that some of the guests were indeed armed and ready to fight. Those
of us who were neither government officials nor armed were left to our own
devices; ducking, hiding, and expecting the worst. We became like the wife of
one Somali man in Salt Lake City, Utah, who had called 911 to complain about
her. When asked, “Is she armed?” The husband quickly responded, “No, but she
has long nails.” I believe all the hotel guests, who were men, did not even
have long nails to defend themselves! In short, the frenzy that ensued following
the bombing had all the making of a Hollywood horror film—except that this was
real.
I got text
messages from my friend asking me not to leave my room.
“It is a suicide
car bombing at the Weheliye Hotel,” he said.
In fact, it was a building a block from the Weheliye Hotel, a
stone’s throw from where we had dined the previous day. The incident destroyed
a business and left 14 people dead, and ten others wounded. The victims, who
were drinking tea at an outdoor café, were civilians who were caught in the war
between the government forces and Al-Shabaab. A young couple visiting from
Europe were among those killed.
Minutes after the incident, ambulances arrived, but the
gunfire persisted. Since there were many guns available to the security guards
of nearby hotels, the display of firepower was palpable. It seemed an attempt by these armed men to
mark their territory to avert further attacks. When the army and police finally
came, they too started firing into the air to disperse the crowd that had
rushed to the crime scene. Some pedestrians came to aid the victims, because
the ambulances and the authorities were somewhat late.
