Ambushed in Somalia
Aidan Hartley
As we entered the old city, the heat shimmered off coral towers half reduced to rubble by cycles of war. We had just exited Mogadishu’s presidential palace after a morning’s filming. Gemaal was at the wheel and Duguf rode shotgun. Cameraman Jim and I were in the back chatting.
Then came the bang. Except I recall no ‘bang’, only a shock wave. It sucked the air out of my lungs so hard that I tasted blood in my throat. Through our car’s rear window I saw black smoke and debris enveloping our escort vehicle 30 metres behind. ‘There’s wounded,’ said Jim. Gunfire erupted. Everybody abandoned the car. As Jim ran towards the blast site whatever he said was lost except for ‘... secondary attack!’ Total confusion. In the back of the escort car I saw one man pulling at a limp body. Nearby, a woman sat in the sandy road. Her right arm was half blown away but she still clutched a can of cooking oil in her left. Two men who might have been talking in the road lay near a crater in the roadside rubbish. One had his guts hanging out. His eyes were open. The other man was panting as blood poured from his chest.
Due to the heat I hadn’t worn a flak jacket. Now I returned to our car and put it on. As the smoke cleared, there was more gunfire. I thought, ‘Now where?’ Bystanders urged me to join them down a side street. I wondered if they might be intending to abduct me. But they just looked scared. In Somalia one rarely sees that, ever, but things are very bad in Mogadishu these days. A boy clutched his foot and cried. I asked, ‘Are you OK?’ He kept on crying.
Walking back to join Jim at the blast area, I met a youth on a bicycle. ‘We want life, not this,’ he said, pointing at the mayhem around him. ‘I don’t care about this fighting. My family is finished. Sorry, my English is broken.’ When I got to Jim I said, ‘It can’t have been for us. It was a mistake.’ But who would ever know. Here, assassins give a kid a mobile phone plus a number to ring — another phone that triggers the bomb — when a target passes. If he hits the right car he gets $50. Standing in a window a block away, he has little idea what he’s hitting. What’s worse is that local phones take seconds to connect. You hear them every day, roadside explosions that kill people who have nothing to do with this war.
In Mogadishu as journalists we try to be independent. But to avoid ambushes or kidnap attempts you need a police escort. Our escorts had uniforms. I tried to stop them from wearing them, but it’s the regulation. Then, minutes after the bomb an insurgent commander called a friend. ‘Praise be to Allah,’ he said. ‘We killed two Russians engineers working for the President.’ Local radios picked up the report and it took some work to convince them we were not Russian, not engineers and not dead.
The dead policeman, also with his eyes open, lay in a deep pool of blood. His death must have been instant. A lump of shrapnel had passed through his neck. He had joined us that morning. Nobody knew his name. He was quiet and polite. Only later did we learn he was called Abdi, and had recently married. The escort car was riddled with holes. It was a miracle the other passengers survived.
Armed men surrounded us, angrily shouting and shooting. As we got away, I tried to look through the crowd of soldiers for the wounded civilians. Back at our vehicle was another policeman, blood pouring from his thigh. I held him while we sped towards Medina hospital and tried to cut away his trousers with my knife to look at the wound. Between groans he objected to me vandalising what were probably his only clothes.
A battered taxi carrying the wounded bystanders was a couple of minutes behind us reaching the hospital. The woman with that she had been on her way home from market to cook lunch for her husband. She was knocked off her feet, and when the smoke cleared she saw her arm in ribbons. In the shade of a neem tree I also later met the man with the chest wound. ‘Mikhail’ said he was in pain. Medina hospital’s doctors, who patch up Mogadishu’s war victims day in, day out, said Mikhail would be left with a chunk of shrapnel in his thorax but he would recover fully. They also saved Faduma’s arm. The policeman with the thigh wound limped back to his base in a couple of days. Weeks later, I often think of the dead men’s open eyes and feel so very sad for Somalia’s people.
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