January 9, 2011 From doctor’s ordeal, a different view of Somalia

[Jacaylbaro]

AFGOYE, Somalia (AP) — Dr. Hawa Abdi has treated sick and wounded Somalis since 1983, through famine and civil war. But it only took one day for Islamist rebels to wreck her life’s work.

 

And only a week for her to rediscover an older, more civil Somali society that has survived despite the horrors that have beset her east African homeland.

 

Speaking to The Associated Press, Abdi recalled the attack in stark detail:

 

It was the morning of May 5. Bullets from automatic rifles tore through the concrete walls and woven grass screens. A woman crawled away from her bed in the middle of giving birth. Another burst her stitches from a Cesarean birth as she ran, blood spilling from her body. Mothers were forced to tear IV tubes from their babies’ arms as they fled into the thorny bush.

 

“They just started shooting,” she said. “There was screaming everywhere.”

 

The rebels smashed the four glass incubators, the only ones in Somalia. In their looting spree they pried open the metal containers of the centrifuges used for blood tests, looking for cash. They bent the doors and windows out of their frames and carried them off. Food, medicine, equipment were stolen or destroyed. A guard and a bystander lay dead.

 

 

 

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/01/09/from-doctors-ordeal-a-different-view-of-somalia/#ixzz1AXpc71te