According to the police, the dead include women, children and the elderly.
At least a hundred people have died in a car bomb attack in Somalia on Saturday, says the country’s president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. In addition, 300 people were wounded in the attack. The president said on Sunday that the number of dead and wounded was still rising.
Two cars packed with explosives were detonated a few minutes apart near a busy intersection in the country’s capital, Mogadishu. After the explosions, the Somali Ministry of Education was also shot at.
The attack was carried out at the same busy intersection where a car packed with explosives exploded in October 2017, killing a total of 512 people in the country’s bloodiest attack.
According to the police, the dead include women, children and the elderly.
– These merciless terrorists killed mothers. Some of them died with their children on their backs, said a police spokesman Sadik Dudishe.
The al-Shabaab group, which has been tormenting Somalia for a long time, and which has links to al-Qaeda, has declared itself as the perpetrator of the attack. According to the terrorist organization, the target of its fighters was the Ministry of Education.
Al-Shabaab has been trying to overthrow Somalia’s internationally supported central government for 15 years. The group’s fighters were driven out of the capital, Mogadishu, in 2011, but it still holds large swathes of the Somali countryside.
In August, the group launched an attack on a popular hotel that lasted more than a day. 21 people died and 117 were wounded in the attack carried out by gunmen with the help of bombs.
Somalia has been unstable ever since 1991, when the military regime led by President Siad Barre fell. This led to civil war and the rise of al-Shabaab. Along with the violence, Somalia, like other countries in the Horn of Africa, is tormented by a historically bad drought. The country’s livestock and crops have been destroyed in four consecutive dry rainy seasons.
Somalia has been assessed as one of the most vulnerable countries to the extreme effects of climate change.