By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, New York Times
NAIROBI, Kenya — Suicide attacks rocked government and United Nations offices in two regions of northern Somalia on Wednesday, killing or wounding dozens of people and shattering a sense of relative calm there, according to officials and witnesses.
Five suicide car bomb attackers struck within fifteen minutes in Hargeisa, the capital of breakaway Somaliland, and in Bosasso, in Puntland, said Faisal Hayle, a security official in Mogadishu for the transitional government of Somalia.
Several buildings were leveled by the attacks, and there were casualties inside the crushed structures. According to Mr. Faisal, the bombers struck at 10:30 a.m., attacking the intelligence headquarters in both Bosasso and Hargeisa, and also an Ethiopian Woyanne consulate office and a United Nations office in Hargeisa.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks. Mr. Faisal blamed a militant Islamic group called the Shabab, which the United States considers a terrorist organization.
The Shabab has been waging a relentless war against Somalia’s weak transitional government, but most of their attacks have been confined to south central Somalia. Hargeisa, in northern Somalia, had until now been considered an oasis of peace and stability, and the gunmen that haunt the streets of the rest of Somalia are absent there.
The local government has been credited with setting up a small but functioning democracy, and delivering a modicum of peace and safety to more than a million people. Hargeisa is also home to several United Nations agencies. Neighboring Puntland is a semi-autonomous area known increasingly as a center of piracy and kidnapping.
In a statement on Wednesday, the United Nations Development Program said a suicide bomber had entered its compound in Hargeisa and there were known casualties and deaths but no precise figures for the toll.
The attack may have been timed to coincide with a meeting underway in Nairobi, Kenya, between Somalia’s transitional leaders and foreign forces supporting them. Militant Islamic groups were not invited to the talks and organizations such as the Shabab have shunned the talks. The militant group says it wants to turn Somalia into an Islamic state and has demanded the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops TPLF.
Ethiopian Woyanne forces have been backing Somalia’s transitional government and have been one of the targets of previous suicide attacks claimed by the Shabab. Last year, there were several large suicide attacks on EthiopianTPLF-Somali government army bases, but there has never been such a coordinated assault with five suicide attacks in a single day.
Witnesses in Hargeisa said that many of the buildings that had been hit were badly damaged with dozens of dead and wounded. Mr. Faisal said that authorities in Bosasso were still trying to determine how many people had been killed but, he said, “it looks very bad.”
3 thoughts on “5 Suicide Bomb Attacks Hit Somalia”
For the last 17 years Somalia has been a playground for Woyanne, Kenya and their masters, they exploited the clan differences between Somalis and further excerbated the situation that culminated in the illegal invastion and occuptation of southern Somalia by the prime puppet of the west in the Horn of Africa. Now Woyanne and their masters are finding out there is a price to pay for the genocide they commited and the humiliation they inflicted on the people of Somalia. There is not safe place for them anymore, not in northern Somalia or other areas of Somalia where their puppets set up shop to do their dirty work.
Now the puppet Kenyan regimes is scared to death because the destruction their visited upon the Somali people, the Somali population in northeastern Kenya and the Oromo population in northern Kenya will pick up arms and Kenya itself will be engulfed by violence, this is above the tenious ethnic situation in the rest of the country.
Now this makes me very very sad. It is a scary thought that this same type barbaric butchery may migrate north and we all gonna find out that such senseless murderous actions will not stop until it close that corridor and reach Khartoum. This country has been a sharp bone in the throat since the 7th century to those who want the whole area to be one and only one in faith. I hope I am wrong but I foresee millions and upon millions of humanity huddled together in the remote mountains to save their lives from the impending scourge. And this time there will be no Portuguese musketeers to give them those saving hands. Those who want to establish a uniformity of faith in the region has the backing of very rich regional barons and armed to the teeth with the latest portable armaments. Their children disunited and full of excuses with unabated baseless arrogance. They have been telling me and the rest of the world that they have 3,000 years of this and 3,000 years of that. But they have produced well-educated miscreants. They have been telling me and others alike that they have almost limitless natural resources but they are still unmatched in their skills of pan-handling. And they are still telling me that the cause for this wretched life has always been external factors(forces, countries, USA, England, Maldives, Iceland, Nubia, Russia, Taiwan, Uruguay – I got tired of counting what they told me!!!). Mr. Elias, I hope you will let this comment pass to appear on your esteemed website. Thanks a lot.
Somali Freedom Fighters we are all with you and behind any and evry action you take against the Weyanes and the “Somali” breakway regions. The way to go is to unite your people and be the masters of your destiny! We, here in Ethiopia, and I am sure our cousins in Eritrea and hopefully the Sudan as well, give you unqualified support for your desire to be free!