Mogadishu life is a 'horror film'

[Castro]

Student Mohamed Abdi, 35, was in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, during the recent heavy fighting. He told the BBC News website how the fighting was relentless and how he feared for his life.

 

I can't express how horrible the heavy fighting was. It was like a horror film.

 

I was here in the city all those days when the fighting was going on.

 

Those 10 days were so difficult... Being bombed, the mortar shelling - the fighting did not stop, day and night.

 

If you went out to eat, you could not be sure if you would return to your home. When you saw a friend, you could not be sure if you would see your friend again... you would say goodbye to each other, wondering if it would the last.

 

One night I had to seek cover in Bakara Market as I couldn't make it home. But the market became a target and was bombed several times that night.

 

All night I couldn't sleep. I feared for my life and for all the others there with and around me.

 

'The watchman'

 

When dawn broke I ventured out - people were lying on the ground everywhere, mostly dead.

 

There was an old man who had been one of the market's watchmen. Fragments of shells had hit him where he had been guarding.

 

He had bled all night.

 

We wanted to take him to hospital but we couldn't find a car. Finally we found a man with a car and we convinced him to take the watchman to hospital. We pleaded with him to take the watchman.

 

That watchman, I still think of him how he was when we found him - old, with no family and bleeding.

 

I don't know if he lived. I went to the hospital but couldn't find him.

 

'Such a mess'

 

I am studying at the Somali Institute for Management and Administration Development which is on one of the main roads in the city - we call it 'The Military Road' because it is where the military convoys pass by.

 

Since the lull in the fighting our classes have resumed again.

 

About three of the buildings were damaged by the shelling and all of the campus is a wreck. None of it has been cleared away yet. It is such a mess.

 

I haven't been able to attend my classes though as all my time is being spent trying to get my family back home.

 

My wife and child fled to Jowhar, 90km away from Mogadishu, when the fighting became very bad.

 

Here in Somalia you don't know who to blame for all our misfortune. Sometimes you blame yourself. I ask myself why was I born a Somali.

 

But some people blame the government, the Ethiopians and the Americans.

 

I don't know how stability will come back. I hope for a stable government.

 

The violence is a daily occurrence - if you don't experience it today, you will tomorrow.

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

Somalia 'is not a human place'

 

Group asks PM for help before it becomes another Rwanda

 

San Grewal

May 12, 2007

Toronto Star

 

Desperate to escape Mogadishu after artillery shells had transformed the Somali capital into a graveyard, Toronto taxi driver Abdullahi Ahmed paid $500 to fly out of the hell that some of his family and friends are still living through.

 

The U.S.-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian forces started while Ahmed was on one of his regular trips to the city where he and other Somali-Canadians opened a school in 2003.

 

"It was late December, early January. I was in the school at about 11 in the morning when the artillery shells began falling to the east and west of us, just one or two blocks away," he said.

 

"First you heard the whistle of them coming and then boom, boom, boom. We brought all the students down to the main floor and told them to hide under the tables."

 

At a press conference Thursday, Ahmed recounted the harrowing months that followed the start of the ongoing invasion, which has displaced more than 400,000 Somalis.

 

After the school was shut down on the first day of the shelling, Ahmed said, he moved from one abandoned home to another, throughout the city, avoiding the latest artillery targets and Ethiopian soldiers roaming the streets. This went on until late March when he was able to flee to Dubai on a private plane.

 

The Somali Canadian Diaspora Alliance organized the press conference in hopes of putting pressure on the Canadian government to help avert what they say may escalate into the next Rwanda or Darfur.

 

After frantically trying to call family in Mogadishu day and night from her home in Toronto, Sadia Osman received bad news three weeks ago.

 

"My family's home was destroyed and my father's legs were hurt," she said after the conference. "He was taken to hospital."

 

Her nine siblings fled the area, but a week later Osman found out one of her brothers was shot by an Ethiopian soldier while looking for their elderly aunt.

 

"It is not a human place."

 

As a result of the devastating invasion, which has escalated in recent weeks, the United Nations has declared Somalia the country with the worst refugee crisis in the world.

 

"It was a nightmare," Ahmed said. "I was taken to a brick home that had already been bombed. People had gone there afterward for shelter. I saw 18 dead people inside, shot at close range. Soldiers killed people randomly on the streets and in their homes."

 

The organization is asking Prime Minister Stephen Harper to pressure the U.S. and the rest of the international community to get the invasion halted and avoid what could escalate into a Somali genocide.

 

"The international community is paying very little attention to the Somali invasion," said Omar Yassin Omar, a spokesperson for the group.

 

"The U.S. is involved because they believe Somalia is housing terrorists and they are now fighting a proxy war through Somalia's old enemy, Ethiopia."

 

Omar says many of the more than 50,000 people of Somali descent living in the Greater Toronto Area are increasingly frustrated by the lack of attention paid to the bloodshed.

 

"I'm wary that we'll stay silent until it's too late and this becomes another Rwanda or Darfur."