Terrorists Kidnap a Hero

[Dhuujiye]

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Hawa Abdi and her operating team before a procedure. (Seamus Murphy / VII Network) Militants are holding the Mother Teresa of Somalia hostage, and as a result, dozens of children have already died. Eliza Griswold talks to Dr. Hawa Abdi from the home where she is being held captive.

At dawn last Wednesday, Dr. Hawa Abdi, a 63-year-old Somali gynecologist, woke to the whistle of shells falling around her at her family farm. This was nothing new. For the past four years, Islamist militias have been battling Somalia’s weak and ever-changing government for power over the world’s longest-running failed state. But 10 minutes later, those familiar sounds turned into 500 militant members of al Qaeda-linked Hizbul Islam, one of the two lethal Islamist groups vying for control in Somalia, bursting into her home and surrounding her hospital. They rounded up dozens of Dr. Hawa’s employees and killed two of them. (Twenty security guards are still being held hostage.) They told Dr. Hawa that she could no longer be in charge of the hospital she has spent the last 15 years building, or the refugee camp that has sprung up around it.

“We came three months ago and told you that as a woman you can’t run this place,” the militant leader said. Dr. Hawa recounted this story to me last night by phone from her bedroom, where she was being kept under house arrest by five militant members of Hizbul Islam who were stationed outside her room and in the hospital. “It’s very dangerous for me now. I am still not free,” she said. “It’s strange how they think, these people. They think that women can’t do anything, have property, or be leaders.”

“I’m in my room and afraid to go anywhere,” she told me. “The refugees have come to sleep with me. But the militants are stronger than us, so we are praying to God.”

Hours earlier, the militants had told her to quit talking on the phone, but she refused. She said she had nothing left to lose. “This isn’t government,” she said. “This is my home.”

Dr. Hawa is one of Somalia’s few heroes. A divorced mother of two, she trained in Ukraine as a gynecologist during the Cold War. In 1993, she opened the one-room women’s hospital. Given Dr. Hawa’s reputation as a doctor and humanitarian, people suffering from the famine of the early ’90s flocked to her farm. She buried more than 10,000 people who died of starvation there. The latest wave of refugees has built their homes, which look like overturned bird’s nests, on the hill that serves as a mass grave.

I first walked up this hill with her in 2007, when the camp seemed full to bursting with 20,000 recent arrivals. When I visited again, in 2008, the number of displaced people had grown. Now the population has more than tripled. The numbers are indicative of the spiraling humanitarian crisis that is threatening to outdo the infamous early 1990s. When that famine ended, Dr. Hawa’s work did not. She kept adding on to her hospital.

Hawa Abdi and her operating team during a gynecological procedure. She opened her private clinic for women and children in 1983. (Seamus Murphy/VII Network) All 400 beds were full when last week’s shelling started. Eighty-two children suffering from malnutrition or cholera were waiting for the doctor in her feeding center. Seventy-two thousand other people were squatting on her crammed farm. She sold all her family gold long ago to feed them. She offers every family a small plot of farmland so they can grow their own corn and vegetables. Until two months ago, the World Food Program supplied at least nominal help to Dr. Hawa, providing corn for 500 families. Then things got so bad it couldn’t get shipments of food through. Doctors Without Borders ran a clinic on Dr. Hawa’s land, too—until last Wednesday, when Hizbul Islam had the depravity to take the popular doctor hostage.

The militants have been holding Dr. Hawa under house arrest for the past five days. In the beginning, they hung their black flag outside the clinic to show their power. In response, Dr. Hawa had the nerve to hang up a white one. “This is my protest,” she told them. “Take your flag down. Even the holy Quran says you can’t enter a private house without an invitation.” The militants told her she should not dare to speak to them in this manner. But as usual, she refused to back down.

[Dhuujiye]

waa qiso layaableh, waxaan umalaynayaa Xisbul Islaam hunguri baa ka galay Hospitlaka.

[Jacaylbaro]

Sh. Aweys baa islaanta jeclaaday oo si kele oo uu ugu yimaado ayuu garan waayay ,,,

[dambarsame]

ilaa imminka habartu waa hareeraysan tahay

[Jacaylbaro]

Tolow isagu gudaha ma ugu jiraa marka ?

[dambarsame]

maya qaxootigii ay haysey baa il fuur (dhacadiid) ku noqday oo meesha ka tegi waayey