Doctor helps establish Somalia baby hospital

Here's a nice story about Doctor's Without Borders doing good work in Jowhar. Hopefully this is a start of more good things to come in Somali.
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Pediatrician Ruriko Nishino is flanked by fellow members of the medical-aid group Doctors Without Borders at a maternity hospital.

Ruriko Nishino received an e-mail recently from Somalia, which has been in a state of chaos for more than 15 years, telling her the maternity hospital she helped set up there is having an impact.

"There are three to four births now at the hospital," the message said. Nishino reacted with a smile, saying, "There was definitely a need for the hospital."

Nishino, a pediatrician in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, was in Somalia from December to March as a member of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres). She took an active part in the establishment of the maternity hospital there.

Somalian women typically give birth at home in the absence of public medical facilities. One in 10 dies during pregnancy or at the time of delivery, and one in 10 newborns dies within a week after birth, according to the group.

Because of this situation, the group began building a maternity hospital last August in Jowhar, about 90 km north of Mogadishu. The medical center was designed to admit expectant mothers and has surgical facilities.

After some setbacks, the group resumed efforts to build the hospital and interviewed prospective nurses. Equipped with 20 beds, delivery and operating rooms and capable of performing emergency surgery 24 hours a day, the center opened in mid-February.

The first patient was a woman suffering a serious case of gestational toxicosis and high blood pressure.

Doctors thought an immediate Caesarean delivery was necessary, but they had to get the consent of her husband in a country where the majority of people are Islamic and women's rights get little protection.

The husband said, "The operation isn't necessary. If (she) died, that would be Allah's will."

Nishino and other members of the group managed to persuade him to give in. The operation was performed and the mother and baby were discharged safely.

Source: Japan Times

Suicide Bomber Misses Somalia’s Premier...Again

The NY Times is reporting that once again Somali Prime Minister Gedi has survived an assassination attempt on his life, which is at least the 3rd attempt in the past 12 months. The reason the insurgents are targeting him is because he is from the Mogadishu-dominated Hawiye clan. A majority of his own clan is against his role in the transition government, yet he has remained a strident cog in the new government. His stance is a modern 'profile in courage.'

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NAIROBI, Kenya, June 3 — A suicide bomber narrowly missed killing Somalia’s transitional prime minister on Sunday afternoon after he rammed a pickup truck packed with explosives into the gates of the prime minister’s house in Mogadishu, the capital.

The prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, who was inside at the time, was unhurt. However, the explosion killed six of his bodyguards, along with a student at a Koranic school across the street.

Witnesses said that the pickup sped through a roadblock outside Mr. Gedi’s house and that bodyguards opened fire as the truck hurtled onward. It then slammed into a set of gates just feet away from the residence and exploded in a fireball that flattened several buildings and scattered debris for blocks.

Afterward, Ugandan peacekeepers shuttled Mr. Gedi from his house to an undisclosed location. Speaking on national radio, he blamed Islamist militants for the violence.

“These cowards, they’re trying to sabotage our government,” he said. “But we won’t stop our mission to stabilize this country and defeat them.”

Mr. Gedi said the pickup was able to sail through the checkpoints outside his home because it was carrying men dressed in government army uniforms.

“My security guards thought these guys were friends,” he said.

The authorities did not say how many attackers died.

According to Somali security officials, remnants of the Islamist forces that briefly ruled Somalia last year are regrouping and changing their tactics from conventional warfare to terrorist strikes. In December, Ethiopian forces routed the Islamists and helped install Somalia’s weak but internationally recognized transitional government in the capital.

Since then, the Ethiopian troops, thought to number in the thousands, and the government’s fledging security forces have struggled to bring the same level of peace and security that the Islamists delivered.

Many of Mogadishu’s neighborhoods are still bullet-pocked no-go zones, and several government officials, including police chiefs, have recently been assassinated. On Saturday, Mogadishu’s mayor blamed members of the Hawiye clan, the dominant clan in the city, for the killings. Hawiye elders denied it.

A contingent of 1,600 Ugandan soldiers, the first part of a larger African Union peacekeeping force, has been beefing up efforts to protect officials.

It was at least the third time in a year that someone has tried to kill Mr. Gedi, a veterinarian-turned-politician.

UPDATE: American among those killed by U.S. attack

The NY Times is reporting that most of the Somali insurgents killed in the missile attack were Somali's living abroad. These Somali's gain asylum in the west, get indoctrinated by middle-eastern fundamentalists who speak hate freely in their host countries, and then return to their homeland to try to ensure that Somalia continues to be a country of anarchy. It is a shame. But is there any solution?

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MOGADISHU, Somalia - Somali officials confirmed on Sunday that an American was among the suspected Muslim radicals killed on Friday when a U.S. Navy warship fired missiles at a militant encampment in northern Somalia.

The American was not identified, but Hassan Dahir Mohamoud, the vice president of Puntland, the northern Somali region that declared itself semiautonomous in 1998, said that the American's passport had been recovered.

Five other foreigners were also killed in the strike, Mohamoud said, including citizens of Great Britain, Sweden, Morocco, Pakistan and Yemen. Two Somali nationals reportedly survived the U.S. missile strike.

"We have found an American, British, Swedish and some Middle Eastern passports on the corpses," Mohamoud said.

The presence of at least six foreigners among what officials now estimate was a group of perhaps a dozen men who arrived by boat in Puntland Wednesday night raises questions about who the men were and what their purpose was.

Their deaths in a U.S. attack highlights what apparently is an aggressive U.S. military program to help Somalia's government combat a stubborn and growing Islamist insurgency. U.S. forces twice struck suspected militants in southern Somalia in January.

The violence has increased since December, when a U.S.-backed invasion by Ethiopia toppled a fundamentalist Islamic regime that Bush administration officials said was run by al-Qaida.

On Sunday, Somalia's interim prime minister escaped an assassination attempt when a car bomb detonated outside his heavily guarded residence. News reports said five Somali soldiers and two civilians were killed.

Somali officials immediately blamed al-Qaida-linked insurgents for the attack, the second in as many weeks on the prime minister, Ali Mohammed Gedi.

"We have been patient for so long," Gedi later said on a radio broadcast. "We can no longer cohabit with these terrorists. ... We have to eliminate them."

U.S. officials have declined to confirm the U.S. role in Friday's attack on the militants' encampment outside the village of Bargal in a mountainous region 250 miles northeast of Mogadishu.

But Puntland officials on Sunday said they had coordinated closely with American forces about the group.

They said the group came ashore on Wednesday night and was apparently traveling by fishing boat to the tiny coastal nation of Eritrea, where top leaders of Somalia's former Islamist regime are believed to be hiding.

On Friday, the suspected militants came under fire from Puntland security forces, who then alerted the American military base in neighboring Djibouti. After the security forces chased the group up a brushy mountain, a U.S. Navy destroyer floating in the Red Sea fired cruise missiles at their location.

It was unclear whether the militants included any of the three al-Qaida suspects whom U.S. officials are seeking in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and who are believed to be hiding inside Somalia.

The clashes in Puntland were the first in the north of the country, which has largely escaped Somalia's recent violence. Somali officials pledged to continue to seek American help to root out other militants.

"The American air strike follows a series of attacks targeting any terrorist group in every hideout," said Mohammud Ali Yusuf, Puntland's finance minister. "We want any help from U.S. without harming innocent people."

"Quite a number of international terrorist groups have been looking for Somalia as an alternative base," said Somalia's foreign minister, Ismail Mohammed Hurre.

By Mahad Elmi and Shashank Bengali

McClatchy Newspapers