Somalia rebuilds: ‘the glass is now half-full’

Officials in Somalia’s capital called it “yet another show of force” when in late January Islamist militants linked to al-Qaeda set off a bomb, then stormed the whitewashed building housing the mayor of Mogadishu, killing five civilians. 

Faisal Arale Afrah, a senior official at Mogadishu’s municipality, was sitting at his desk when the building was shaken to the core by the blast. A group of jihadis of al-Shabaab disguised as Somali soldiers and armed with Kalashnikovs stormed the hallway outside his office. “I heard one of them telling the others ‘finish them all’,” he recalls. As they charged in, he jumped from the first floor window to save his life. “This was my fifth terrorist attack in eight years,” he says.