Mogadishu attack showed Al Shabaab is not pro-Muslim

Paramedics and civilians assist a man injured in a car bomb explosion on Saturday. [Feisal Omar, Reuters]

The horrifying Saturday bomb attack in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu, which killed at least 90 people and injured 125, is fresh evidence that Al Shabaab is rejuvenated. 

The group is not pro-Muslim like it has made people believe.

The victims of the attack were all unmistakably innocent Muslims who were going about their business.

Among them were young university students who carried the hopes of a better Somalia; a future where pens would be mightier than the guns of Al Shabaab. Even so, that dream is inerasable.

Al Shabaab, which has been allied to Al-Qaida for more than a decade, has not yet claimed responsibility for the attack. This may be because it wants to be seen as a defender of Islam and not as a terror group.

The Saturday blast must be one of Somalia’s deadliest by Al Shabaab in two years. In October 2017 the terrorists planted a bomb inside a truck. It ended up killing at least 512 innocent Muslims and left 295 injured.

The group has also waged numerous attacks in Kenya under the pretense that it aims to push the Kenyan military out of Somalia. This, yet it is Al Shabaab, not the Kenyan military, that needs to be permanently kicked out of Somalia. Kenya and the international community should intensify their efforts to eliminate the terror group and its ideological setup.

Nowhere in Somalia has Al Shabaab built a school, a dispensary or put up any sort of infrastructure. All they do is destroy lives and property in the name of achieving their utopian political ideals.

These butchers are only perpetrators of violence and chaos. They seem to be ignorant of the Holy Qur’an, whose chapters virtually begin with the soothing reminder: ‘Bismillahi Rahmani Raheem’, which means in the name of Allah, the most gracious, and the most merciful. Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, foretold the evils of such extremists and described them with the disdain they deserve as “the dogs of hellfire”.

In 1930, Muhammad Pickhall, a British Quran translator, observed thus: “...it was only when Muslims fell away from their religious teachings that they declined in tolerance”.

The Holy Qur’an thus states: Whoever kills an innocent soul has killed mankind entirely. And whoever saves one, it is as if he has saved mankind entirely.”