Mogadishu Mayor dies from injuries sustained in bomb attack

Mogadishu, Aug 01 (Somaliland.com) Mogadishu mayor, Abdirahman Omar Yarisow, has just passed away in Doha, Qatar after sustaining serious injuries from a bomb attack in his office last week.

A suicide bombing at municipal government headquarters in the Somalian capital, Mogadishu, on July 24, 2019, killed 6 people including three district commissioners and local government chiefs.

Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militant group, Al Shabaab, which aims to topple Somalia’s UN-backed government claimed responsibility for the bombing, the latest of many such attacks.

The governor Abdirahman Omar Osman aka Engineer Yarisow was appointed in late January 2018 by president Farmaajo after firing governor Thabit Abdi from the city top job.

Governor Osman Yarisow is a veteran in the Somali politics and is actively involved in the government for over two decades holding many positions including ministerial ones.

Osman had been an outspoken opponent of al-Shabaab. In the wake of a truck bomb attack that killed almost 600 people in Mogadishu in 2017, he wrote an article in the Guardian urging Somalis to speak out against the militant jihadi group. “The fight must go on, in everything we do, from reporting anything suspicious to the security forces to educating our boys and girls so they are not vulnerable to the violent, alien ideology of al-Shabaab,” he wrote in his previous role as minister for information.

Osman, who was nicknamed Engineer Yarisow (“Young Engineer”), had tried to clean up the city and rebuild its battered infrastructure.

Abdinur Mohamed Ahmed, a spokesman for the president, said the mayor’s death would unite Somalis in the fight against extremism. “We extend our condolences to the family and friends of the Mogadishu mayor, Abdirahman Omar Osman, and we share our grief regarding this painful death with the entire Somali public,” he said in a statement.

His son, Mohamed Omar, a student at London’s Queen Mary University, said: “Today the people of Mogadishu lose their mayor; but I lost my father. May Allah grant him the highest rank of paradise.”

The US mission to Somalia in a tweet called Osman “an excellent partner and tireless advocate for the people of Mogadishu and all Somalis”. Somalia’s president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, declared three days of mourning for the mayor, ordering that flags be flown at half mast.

Ben Fender, the UK’s ambassador to Somalia, pledged to help to continue the reconstruction work that Osman had begun.

More condolences on twitter