Hiiraan Online

Knowing nothing about the behavior of the Ugandan contingent we judged them by the standards of the Ethiopians who disproportionately fired back if militia attacked them. So we thought it was highly likely to receive retaliation from the Ugandans.

In an effort to bottle up all means of negligence, most of the people have deserted the streets and retreated to houses and buildings that had concrete roofing or stayed with their families hoping that the mortar will not land on them while at the same time contemplating with the possibility of media staff reporting a story about their family buried under the rubble.

But barely the Ugandan forces finished their second day in Mogadishu when militia of unknown identity attacked them. And in response to the attack they fired at everybody without knowing who was the culprit and who was not.

A bomb has exploded inside the Al-Fatxi Bar in K4 where I frequently have my morning coffee and chat with friends there. It is right in front of the dilapidated Statue of the great Somali hero, Ahmed Gurey in the area of Cinema Equatore.

Early this morning I rushed to the Fatxi  Bar to find out if someone I knew had been killed in the blast. In fact I feel deeply sympathetic to all Somalis dying in these senseless attacks but the pain would run deeper if someone you knew was among the victims.

What I saw was a real horror.  There were pieces of dead bodies scattered here and there, which were unidentifiable as which piece belonged to which body.  Here I have a poem to plead with the Ugandan peacekeepers to have some mercy and here it is: