There is a Somali saying that when you finish hard work, life gives you more hard work. People remarked that I had become the mayor of my own city, but I didn’t think about power and influence—or even about the fact that 90,000 people were depending on me. I simply continued on my own, making rounds, meeting with the committees, fighting to support the people who were suffering.
When we began to hear rumors that Hizbul Islam was trying to brainwash young people in our camp, turning them against one another, we tried our best to protect our place. We recruited more young boys to work as nurse’s aides, as we had done for Ismael; we took their photos, so that they would be proud of their jobs and defend their home. Otherwise our elders, our committee, our guards, and I tried to approach the rule of Hizbul Islam in the same way that we had all the other groups who had lost and gained control of the area for two decades—we gave them what they wanted, within reason, and we didn’t ask for anything in return. Along the edges of our property, we hung white sheets to declare our neutrality.
Hizbul Islam pressured us anyway, harassing some of our staff, asking our guards to give them their guns. While it was a common menacing tactic among these groups, I told the guards I would never agree to it. My place was private, I said, and the guns belonged to the guards themselves. If they wanted to defend me, it was their choice.
A few of their men approached one of our young doctors, an MSF employee. “This lady is almost seventy years old,” they said. “Since you are a man, we want to talk with you. What has happened? Why does the lady say, ‘My guards, they are not giving you my guns’?” The doctor responded with my logic, which angered the men.
They began coming to our gate in the afternoons, wanting to see me, to negotiate. At first I refused to speak with them, but when they would not stop, I agreed to a meeting. I called for my guards and the elders, and we welcomed a few Hizbul Islam representatives in my sitting room, where I’d received so many guests over the years. But when we all sat down to talk, the men insulted us. “We want to take over this place,” they said. They thought that since a woman was in control, it was their right.
No one on our side agreed with this proposal, and I argued with them, citing my professional, legal, and moral authority: “I built this myself, to care for these poor people. I am the only doctor here. With what qualifications would you run this place?”
“You people are not obedient,” said one of their men. “You are not recognizing us.”
But what had they done, besides killing? I tried to explain to the men of Hizbul Islam that the people in our camp had a different idea about leadership, although when I could see that they weren’t listening, I stopped talking and returned to my crowded hospital, to work. I knew that after more than twenty years, the people in my place believed in themselves and in their own society. They would never recognize a leader whose only aim was to take.
The first call to prayer in Islam is before sunrise. Usually, I prayed in my room and asked for my breakfast after, while downstairs, the guards at the gate would pray together. On the morning of May 5, 2010, two of my guards were finishing their prayers. One of them, Macalin Hussein, was still reading the Holy Qur’an, and the other guard, Abdisalan, was walking back toward the gate with a big stick in one hand and prayer beads in the other. Suddenly another man they knew, who worked for Hizbul Islam, pushed through the gate without warning. About 50 meters away, I heard the sounds of gunshots and ran to my window. That man’s name was Sharab, and he’d begun firing immediately.
“What’s happened?” asked Abdisalan. “Sharab! What do you want? Whatever it is, take it!”
But the bullets didn’t stop; one struck Macalin Hussein in the shoulder. Abdisalan had been military trained, so he dove under a nearby minibus. While Sharab sent more bullets, hitting the car, grazing the top of the guard’s head, Macalin Hussein took his gun with the good hand and shot Sharab through the heart, killing him immediately.
“Sharab died!” I heard the scream, and someone came running to me. “Mama Hawa! Sharab died, Macalin Hussein is bleeding!” More Hizbul Islam men ran in after Sharab, capturing our guards. I had once seen them together, drinking tea in the afternoon, joking. What had happened today?
“Bring Macalin Hussein to the emergency room and stop the bleeding,” I told the boy. “Give the first aid immediately.” Who had provoked this? As I rushed to dress, my phone rang. It was one of Hizbul Islam’s big bosses, telling me to prepare my guards and their guns.
I knew we were outnumbered. “Okay, my child,” I said, “I will prepare them. But please, here I have women delivering, children sick—the most vulnerable groups. Don’t attack me, we can’t defend ourselves. Anything you want, we will do.”
I called all the elders, who agreed with my decision to surrender our arms, but still, their eyes were fearful, their hands shaking. We were all like chickens sitting on a nest of fragile eggs, thinking of the suffering people in the hospital, the defenseless people in the camp. We hoped we could talk rationally, to reach an agreement.
When our thirty elders collected all the guns and came to the gate, they were met by a big crowd of militants. They’d come to take the camp by force. While gunfire came from every direction, their men forced the elders onto the ground, beating them with the backs of their guns and then taking them away.
Hizbul Islam’s black flag hung inside our emergency ward while their mortar shells slammed into the cement walls and aluminum roofs of our hospital compound. A group of our staff was arrested and brought to another place, in another direction.
I learned all this while pacing inside my room, listening to the explosions. I called Amina to tell her what had happened, and to tell her that I didn’t know if I would live or die. “You are now a doctor, you have your family, your child,” I said. “I thank God you’re not here.”
“Mama, stay there,” she said. “Don’t run from them. You are stronger than they are.” She told me that she and Deqo would call everyone they knew, to try to get some help.
She reached a BBC producer, who called me immediately, during some of the heaviest shelling. I told him what my guards had told me: Hizbul Islam’s targets were the maternity ward, the surgical ward, and the pediatric malnutrition section. One woman recovering from a Cesarean section I’d performed earlier that day had stood up to run, her wound opening as she disappeared toward Mogadishu. Another shell had hit the cholera treatment center. Terrified mothers had detached feeding tubes and IV lines from their dehydrated children’s noses and arms to flee into the bush. We knew those children would not survive.
Imagining my voice on the radio, I tried to appeal to all Somali people, begging them to stand up to defend their society: “You hear what’s happening now? It’s a disaster.” When the next round of gunfire sounded, I said, “That is aimed at the house and the camps.” Then I stopped talking, having heard a loud noise. I shouted for the people around me to close the doors, fearing that the soldiers would come in.
“There was no confrontation between the two of you?” asked the BBC producer.
“They came the other day and said they would take control.” We heard more explosions in the camp, and then a heavy crash. “Pray for us,” were my last words before hanging up. “Pray for us.”
More staff members and friends pushed into my room, wanting to help me flee. I refused, begging them to save themselves. “These people want to kill me. I don’t want you to be wounded here, or something to happen to you. Please leave me alone.”
“Mama Hawa, if you’re going to stay, then we are going to stay with you,” said one young man, who had been with us since he was a child. I swallowed my fear, and we all huddled together and waited.
Around noon, about fifty Hizbul Islam men came to our apartments; they first broke the gate and shot through my iron door with a round of bullets, which shook the entire house, making a terrible sound. Then about twelve men stormed in and began beating our young men who were still inside. They were going through the different rooms and looting, hoping to find something—money, maybe, or gold. They destroyed a small container filled with grass and vegetable seed packets, which Amina had bought, and then they entered all the bedrooms, looking under the pillows and mattresses.
The men came into my room, shouting. “You’ve talked to the media outside?” Faduma Duale and several other nurses surrounded me for protection.
“Why?” I asked. “You did not tell me not to talk.” I had to act strong. I couldn’t be intimidated, with so many of my people watching me with terror.
He grabbed my phone and ordered the rest of the women to give theirs as well. “Dress up,” he said. “We’re taking you to our court.”
“I am dressed,” I said. “This is traditional Somali dress.” I even managed a smile, saying, “My sons, I don’t even know how to wear hijab.” The frightened nurses covered my body with a large shawl, and together we walked silently down the stairs and outside, where about 150 people stood in large groups. As we were pushed toward a waiting minibus, one of the boys in the camp came to my side, saying, “I will go with my mama.”
The militants refused him, shoving him aside.
“But she is my mama,” the boy said.
They permitted the nurses to follow me inside the bus. As we drove away to an unknown place, I heard Macalin Hussein’s screams. Hizbul Islam were holding the hospital staff hostage, refusing to allow them to help Macalin Hussein—to dress his bleeding wound or to even give him antipain medication.
A few days earlier, he’d brought his mother to me. She lived in nearby Merca, and she was skinny, her face hard from a lifetime of rearing cows, goats, and chickens. As we had talked for a few minutes before her examination, I could tell she was proud of her handsome, well-educated son. He was twenty-five, and married with two boys. Thank God his mother couldn’t hear his screams.
After about fifteen minutes we pulled into a small compound and were ordered to get out of the minibus. As we had walked into one of the buildings, some of the young men who knew me from the area approached me, saying sincerely, “Oh, Dottoressa, you are welcome.” We were led inside a big, open hall, furnished by only a carpet and two mattresses. We sat down on the mattresses, talking quietly to one another, for hours. We were interrupted from time to time by the men, who came in saying, “I am the administrative head,” or “I am the security head,” describing their position in the administration.
While we were listening, waiting, we worried so much about the situation in the camp—had our guards been returned? Did they all think that we were dead? One of the senior nurses, who had worked with me at Digfer and knew me well, was menstruating at that time. She went to one of the guards and told him that she was bleeding heavily. The guard came to me and said, “Doctor, what do we do with this nurse?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “it’s your job—you treat!”
“I was pregnant!” the nurse lied, crying. “And now I lost my child, because of you!”
Not knowing what else to do, the men released her and another nurse to accompany her. They ran back to the camp to tell the worried people that we were okay. The men had given us food, they said, and although we’d at first refused to eat it, we finally accepted. Then the same nurse changed her clothes and came back to me, reporting that the camp was quiet.
At five o’clock, when the BBC Somali service came on, I heard my own terrified voice from the next room—it was a recording of the interview from the attack. A few minutes later, one soldier entered the room and handed me a mobile phone. “You have many supporters,” he said. “Tell them that we didn’t kill you or beat you.” I talked and talked, reaching out first to my daughters.
“Stand! Don’t give up!” said Amina, her voice strong and bright. “You’re telling the truth.”
When I called Deqo, she cried, “Mama, what can we do?” She had e-mailed Eliza Griswold, asking her to alert the international community. “We have to speak out,” said Deqo. “It’s the only power we have.”
I continued to make phone calls as the guards stood outside. I asked the hospital’s staff about Macalin Hussein’s condition and then called as many supporters as I could, assuring them that I was unharmed and urging them to condemn the attack. Hizbul Islam, I said, didn’t have an ounce of humanity. They’d done things far worse to others than what they’d done to me.
We’d been at the compound for ten hours when we heard, “Let’s go.” As we stood up, we were silent, fearing that they would take us farther away or even kill us. When I got on the minibus, the driver gave me his mobile phone. “Take this—your son-in-law has called me a hundred times.”
“How are you, Mama?” asked Faysal.
“I am okay,” I said, “but I don’t know where they’ll bring me.”
“Do you want us to bring you home?” asked the driver. I hung up the phone. “We can also bring you to a hotel or the home of one of our bosses,” he said.
I couldn’t understand this kindness, after so much brutality. “Bring me to my place,” I said.
“To sleep in your room today will be very difficult,” he said. “All our soldiers are there.”
“It’s no problem,” I said. “They’re my people. I will be with them.”
The camp was dark and quiet when we returned. I was told that when our staff took out the fuel to start the engines for power and water, they were beaten. The men in the camp had taunted the residents by shouting, “No Hawa, no water.”
When the light and water came back on, people immediately knew that I had returned. As the word spread, they began to leave their homes and come to me, but the men now stationed outside immediately sent them away.
Inside, I walked from room to room, my eyes moving across my bookshelves, my desk, the walls: They’d destroyed every one of my family pictures, shredded my documents, shattered our CDs. My mattress was ripped open, my furniture slashed; though they went after my safe with a sledgehammer, they’d failed to open it. They’d even stomped on my daughters’ framed college photos, which showed their friends from Moscow, boys and girls. “This family is gallo,” they’d said.
Since my own room was destroyed, I walked into Amina’s room trailed by forty people, who covered every inch of the floor to protect me. One of the guards sat and told me what had happened to Macalin Hussein. These evil men had taken him to another small city on the way to Mogadishu, where they said they would treat his condition. His sister, brother, and uncle ran after him and finally found him lying there with no nurse. So much blood had drained from his body that he was very weak. When the doctor came in to see him, the family went out, as is customary. When they came back inside, he was crying, clutching his neck. “They injected him with something, Mama Hawa,” said the guard. “He took his neck, saying, ‘They didn’t treat me, they killed me!’ He fell into a coma, and at one o’clock, he died.”
I didn’t know what to say. Instead I lay on the bed, listening to the shooting into the sky, pah-pah-pah-pah, terrifying people in the camp all night. Without our guards, we didn’t even have protection from a regular thief.
When dawn finally came, it revealed a huge crowd gathered around the house. When I walked out onto the veranda, they began shouting, “We want to see Dr. Hawa!” It was like a protest, a rally with hundreds of people, maybe thousands. Since Hizbul Islam’s guards could not overtake a group of that size, they had no choice but to ask me for advice. “If you want them to be orderly, you have to let them in,” I said. I suggested they start with four hundred people at a time.
So although I was under house arrest, I was able to welcome visitors between the hours of 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. Eliza called me at night, to ask about the situation. I told her what was happening and what we needed in order to reopen the hospital; I trusted that she would bring the story to the outside world. I also gave a local reporter a short interview, reiterating that Hizbul Islam had entered my private property, and that the needy women and children they’d attacked were my guests. The area’s safety, I said, depended on the intruders’ removing their black flag and leaving. Since I didn’t have a force to fight, I could only raise my voice. It was as Ayeyo had said—although my physical body was weak, my mouth could defend against a thousand.
Most of the Hizbul Islam men left immediately after the attack; just five soldiers remained in my house. “Dr. Hawa, you are stubborn,” said one. “You’re not listening to what we’re telling you. Do not give any interview to any person outside.”
“I’m not going to stop,” I said.
“You are an old woman—you need to sit,” he said. “We are men. We are in control.”
“You are a man—you have two testes,” I said. “A goat also has two testes. What have you done for your society?” They looked at me, shocked, and though I could see fear registering in the faces of the nurses, I continued. “I do something for my people and my country. You need to give something to these people in need.”
They were angry, using harsh words, calling me an old woman and a murderer, responsible for the death of their Sharab. But they couldn’t do anything about all the people who were still lining up to see me and share their concern. Although those people could only say, “We are with you. We support you. God is with you,” their visits gave me strength. The hospital and the school remained closed, and the committee did not meet. We remained at a standstill, the camp’s wreckage a reminder of unimaginable cruelty.
“What are you doing today?” a local journalist asked a group of students. “Why aren’t you going to school?”
“We had a free school,” they said, “but it’s been closed since these people attacked.”
One of the elders who had come back to the camp said, “You know, Hawa, this kind of demonstration is very powerful. They will be sorry about what they did to you.” The interview with the students was published, along with many others, including one that Eliza wrote for an American website called The Daily Beast.
After that, the five soldiers returned to my room with a different demand: “We told the media that the place is open,” they said. “You need to open it.”
But nothing in this life is simple. I knew that if I accepted their request to open my facilities today, they’d have the power to return tomorrow, to tell me to close them. “I’m not going to open it until you write a letter of apology to me and to this international organization that is treating and helping our people,” I said. “You have to say that you recognize your mistake.”
“We are not writing any apology letter for gallo,” one man said.
“This is private property—not the government’s, not yours,” I said. “Until you write it, the place will be closed.”
My colleagues at MSF agreed with my decision, although it caused all of us great pain. I remained in my room, greeting my supporters and giving orders to staff in the ways that I could. The summons to Hizbul Islam’s court arrived, saying that as a result of my disobedience, one of their men had died. The punishment was 100 camels.
The leader of the whole group, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, came to me to discuss the matter. “I’m your Somali brother,” he said.
“What is this?” I said, showing him the paper. “That I will go to your court? Please cancel.”
“If they call us to go to the court,” he said, “we have to go.”
By law, if two people are fighting, one of them can’t go and charge the other of whatever crime he wants. A third, neutral party must decide. I would certainly be condemned if I went before Hizbul Islam’s court. “I’m not leaving anywhere; this is my private property,” I said. “People come to me, not to you. Go and form another place like this, and call me—I’ll go work with you.”
Hassan Dahir Aweys wrote something on a small piece of paper and stood up. “If you ever want to talk with me, this is my personal number,” he said.
The standoff continued for days, with no hospital, no school. I barely slept, thinking only about the suffering people, the destruction of all my work. “My son,” I asked their guard. “When will you stop killing the people? Will you tell me the time?”
“When our leader goes to New York or Washington, and Paris. He will capture the people who are living there and say, ‘You have to be Muslim, the way I want.’ When they accept, we will stop fighting. Before? No.”
After a week, their second in command came to me. He was the head of relations between Hizbul Islam and the international community—a tall man in his early fifties, eloquent and articulate. I knew from the beginning, when we were sitting at the negotiating table, that he was more intelligent than the others. He’d urged them to speak reasonably, to show respect.
He handed me a signed letter of apology, written in Somali. He stood by me as I read it, and then he gave me another paper, with the letter written in English. It apologized first to me, Dr. Hawa, and then to the nongovernmental organizations helping in the camp, the camp’s staff, and the Somali people around the area who had lost loved ones. When I looked up, our eyes met. “Thank you,” I said. He offered me his own heartfelt apology, saying that nothing like this would ever happen again.
I shook my head, telling him he’d made a mistake. “I am Somali,” I said. “I am a mother, I am a doctor, and I deserve to be respected. I care for so many people around you—this was a tragedy you could have prevented. Never do this again,” I continued, but my voice caught on the words. With his recognition, I felt pity—how I’d worked, how I’d sacrificed, only to be attacked. But if this man could understand me? I began to cry for the first time. Tears streamed down my face as he left the letter with me, closing the door behind him.
It was my time to die that day, but my people saved me. I’d told them from the beginning that fighting was not a way to lead our society, our nation. “If you want to go with me,” I’d said, “change your way.” When all we’d built was under attack, they understood that they could speak out and stand up against evil. They could come into my house, and they could tell the world what had happened.
Hizbul Islam understood that they could not kill thousands of people coming to me, and I understand that I am alive because of my people. When I think of it now, it still gives me life.