Days after devastating truck bomb in Somali capital, death toll still climbing
By Kevin Sieff and Abullahi Mire, Washington Post, October 16, 2017
NAIROBI--The death toll from two truck bombs in Somalia’s capital reached 300 on Monday, as the deadliest attack in the country’s decade-long war with Islamist extremists signaled that the insurgency is far from defeated, despite years of U.S. counterterrorism operations.
Nearly all of the dead were killed by the first bomb, which exploded Saturday outside a popular hotel near a busy intersection in Mogadishu, sending a plume of smoke into the sky that could be seen across the city. The second truck bomb killed several more people nearby.
The Somali capital is a frequent target of attacks by al-Shabab, an extremist group linked to al-Qaeda, but residents said they quickly discerned that the twin blasts were of a different order of magnitude.
On Monday morning, officials said they were still trying to calculate the number of victims. Abdikadir Abdirahman, the director of Amin ambulances in Mogadishu, told Reuters on Monday that, “We have confirmed 300 people died in the blast.”
A large swath of a city block appeared wiped out, and a tower of charred automobiles could be seen at the bombing site. A BBC reporter said people were trapped under the rubble of the Safari Hotel. Throughout Sunday, bodies were being extracted from the ruins.
Medical workers spoke about the scale of the attack, which quickly overwhelmed the city’s few hospitals.
“Today is the worst day of my life. We are overwhelmed by the high number of the casualties. I have been working at this hospital for more than seven years, and I never saw or heard this number of deaths,” said Ahmed Osman, a nurse in Mogadishu’s Medina Hospital, where many of the dead and wounded were taken.
Somalia has been battling al-Shabab insurgents since 2007, with the help of 22,000 troops from the African Union and a U.S. counterterrorism campaign that has expanded under President Trump.
For years, drone strikes were the centerpiece of the U.S. military strategy, carried out with the expectation that the militant group would dissolve if its leadership was vanquished. That has not happened.
Although the U.S. and African Union operations forced insurgents from territory they once controlled, they have not curbed al-Shabab’s ability to launch deadly and frequent attacks in Mogadishu, mostly targeting restaurants, hotels and places where officials gather.
