The Saturday Somalia blast that killed at least 90 people did not only leave behind a trail of death and destruction but turned a young woman into a widow just after four months of marriage.
18-year-old Qali Ibrahim frantically dialed her husband’s mobile phone. Minutes earlier he had left home, carrying hammer and saw, headed out for a day of construction work.
And she only heard these words as she made that call “The number you are dialing is not reachable”, his mobile responded.
Hours of anguish would pass before she could confirm her worst nightmare, Ibrahim later recounted.
From hospital to hospital, there was no word of Muktar Abukar, a 35-year-old home-builder.
At Mogadishu’s biggest hospital, Medina, she and her sister-in-law were told to look among a row of dead bodies that had not yet been identified after a huge truck bomb blast.
Ibrahim said she pulled back the sheet on the first corpse she came to, finding a badly burned body she recognized as her husband’s from a deep scar on one of his fingers.
“We were together last night,” the new widow, three months pregnant, wept as she rocked back and forth, her head veiled by a red scarf and buried between her knees as her sister-in-law squeezed her shoulders. “The world is so painful.”
Saturday’s attack was the 20th vehicle-borne explosives attack of 2019 in Somalia and the year is ending with more deaths from such attacks than 2018, according to the Hiraal Institute, a Mogadishu-based security think-tank.
