MOGADISHU —
Somalia’s president has issued an urgent plea for international help for
wounded victims of devastating car bombings at the weekend that claimed the
lives of 100 people.
اضافة اعلان
Bulldozers were
still clearing the blast site in the capital Mogadishu on Monday in the hunt
for bodies feared trapped under the rubble.
Saturday’s attack,
which also wounded more than 300 people, was claimed by the Al-Shabaab
terrorist group and was the deadliest in the fragile Horn of Africa nation in
five years.
“We appeal for the
international community, Somali brothers, and other Muslim brothers and or
partners to send doctors to Somalia to help the hospitals treat the wounded
people,” President
Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said in a statement on Sunday.
He warned that the
death toll could rise, as ill-equipped hospitals were swamped.
Somalia has been
mired in chaos since the fall of president Siad Barre’s military regime in 1991
and has one of the world’s weakest health systems after decades of conflict.
“We cannot airlift
all these numbers of wounded people. ... Anyone who can send us (help) we
request to send us,” said Mohamud.
Prime Minister
Hamza Abdi Barre has ordered schools closed so that students can take part in a
national blood donation drive.
Mohamud said he
himself was among several hundred people who had donated blood to hospitals for
the victims.
The
World Health Organization said on Sunday it was ready to help the government treat the
wounded and provide trauma care.
We are ‘at war’
Al-Shabaab, a radical Islamist group linked to Al-Qaeda, claimed
responsibility for the attack in which two cars packed with explosives blew up
minutes apart near the city’s busy Zobe intersection, followed by gunfire.
It said it had
targeted the country’s ministry of education.
The explosions
tore through walls and shattered windows of nearby buildings, sending shrapnel
flying and plumes of smoke and dust into the air.
In August, the
group launched a 30-hour gun and bomb attack on the popular Hayat hotel in
Mogadishu, killing 21 people and wounding 117.
The insurgents
have been seeking to overthrow the fragile foreign-backed government in
Mogadishu for about 15 years.
They were driven out of
the capital in 2011 by an African Union force but the group still controls
swathes of countryside and continues to wage deadly strikes on civilian,
political and military targets.
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