A SUICIDE bomber wearing a woman’s veil and shoes blew himself up at a medical school graduation ceremony in Mogadishu yesterday, killing three government ministers and 16 others in a devastating blow against the country’s weak transitional government.
The al-Shabaab militia, a rebel group linked to al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the attack.
“We did not target the students – our target was the TFG [the transitional federal government], and each day and every hour we will keep fighting,” said a man who identified himself as Sheikh Abdifatah, a senior al-Shabaab official in Mogadishu. “Our goal is to target the enemy of Allah. We will never give up pursuing the enemy of Allah.”
Al-Shabaab has steadily advanced across Somalia in recent months. The choice of targets appeared to be a demonstration of the group’s power because it occurred in one of the few remaining areas the transitional government still controls.
“We denounce in the strongest terms the blast which was carried out by the armed rebels fighting the government,” Somali president Sharif Sheik Ahmed Sharif said. “We cannot tackle those violent elements alone and we call on the international community to rush to help us fight them.”
The ceremony was meant to celebrate the graduation of 43 students at Benadir University, a school founded in 2002 to help replace the Somali doctors who died or fled Somalia’s civil war, which has dragged on for nearly 20 years. The country’s health system is all but non-existent. Benadir’s motto is “Towards a better future”. Witnesses said the bomber sat through several of the speeches before he stood up, approached the podium and detonated the explosives strapped to his body. They described a scene of horror, with body parts strewn across the hall.
“A lot of my friends were killed,” said medical student Mohamed Abdulqadi. “I was sitting next to a lecturer who also died. He had been speaking to the gathering just a few minutes before the explosion.”
The African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia, AMISOM, put the death toll at 19, with dozens wounded. Among the dead were education minister Ahmed Abdulahi Wayeel, health minister Qamar Aden Ali, and higher education minister Ibrahim Hassan Addow. Two Somali journalists and a cameraman with TK al-Arabiya also died.
Yesterday’s attack also underscored just how the Islamic rebel groups in Somalia are adopting tactics perfected by al-Qaeda and its allies. Somalia rarely saw suicide bombings until recently, a fact that security experts say shows how al-Qaeda is spreading its influence and training.
Western powers offered their help after the blast, though they gave no specifics. The West has been unable to solve the al-Shabaab riddle or figure out how to bestow enough power and authority on the transitional government so that it can wrest control of the country back from the militants. “I want to assure the transitional federal government of Somalia of the EU’s determination and commitment to support its efforts to fight extremism and reconstruct a peaceful Somalia,” European foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said.
In the meantime, the humanitarian crisis in Somalia gets worse.
On Tuesday, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs announced it was seeking $689 million (€457 million) in 2010 to address the country’s problems. It said more than 3.6 million Somalis – more than a third of the population – need emergency help.