A suicide bombing at a popular coffee shop in Mogadishu, Somalia killed five people and injured 20. It gives me great pause that even a well-guarded coffee shop is not safe from terrorist activity.
Coffee Shop Targetted For Suicide Bombing In Mogadishu
I don’t write about most suicide bombings in Mogadishu, but the situation in the Somali capital has been quiet lately and I’ve quite honestly been considering a visit.
I’m on a quest to visit every country in the world, including the tough ones…and Somalia is one of them. Mogadishu has been relatively calm for the last several months and I was seriously looking at a trip there in the near term.
But this really isn’t about me. Imagine you’re just sitting in a coffee shop called Top Cafe enjoying Euro 2024. It’s nearing 10:30 pm local time and England is playing Spain. All of a sudden a truck drives up and detonates. It is full of explosives and creates a massive explosion.
Five people died and 20 were injured.
Say you survived. You look around and see bodies scattered on the ground, blood over everything, and the building severely damaged and on fire.
My thoughts and prayers go out to every victim and their families.
I remember dining in Argana Cafe in Marrakech in 2010. It was bustling with people much like Top Cafe in Mogadishu. Then on April 28, 2011, a man walked in with two bombs in his backpack at 11:50 am and detonated them, killing 17 and injuring 25.
Our days are numbered. Not even a coffee shop is safe.
As I think about the assassination attempt over the weekend against President Trump and about hanging out with my son at a packed In-N-Out burger, I realize how easy it is to kill or maim. How easy it would have been to walk into In-N-Out with a backpack full of explosives and kill scores of people instantly.
So yes, I focus on the coffee shop in Mogadishu because it is exactly where I would be as well. But real lives were lost. Real families were forever turned upside down.
Life is fragile. There’s nothing theoretical about that.
When your time comes, your time comes. But people who have responsibility for others or seek to have responsibilities for others should behave responsibly and think about what it means for others given the risks and what happens when the risks are realized (in terms of negative outcome).
Assessments of Somalia had it set as being more dangerous this year than last year at this time. So if someone weren’t going to go last year at this time, then going this summer sounds even less advisable.
Speaking of Trump, I am glad he is alive and escaped more serious harm and feel for the family of the 50-year-old former fireman and the other wounded men). But that assassination incident showed that he’s one scary dude. He even seemed to want to encourage domestic violence as much as ever if he were to go down, and thus his “fight, fight” calls within 2 minutes of his being shot in the ear. That’s not the sign of a responsible person, and it’s times like that where the person’s true character is hard to mask.
@GU … the people “whose true character is hard to mask” are the unwashed supporters of Hamas .
Trump is much more “out front” than those new y0rk judges who “pretend to be good” jurists .
Among individuals with high name recognition across the US, Netanyahu has been unmasked as the biggest unwashed supporter of Hamas. And crooked Netanyahu and Putin wants Trump to win the election in November. Go figure, but it seems like Christianists, Islamists and Judaists are fellow “religion of peace” types in killing lots of unarmed civilians in their own ways.
The Leftists want to “investigate” the good people : the religious and the gender-normal people who dissent from the Left school boards .
Trump appears to represent the good people .
It is so funny to me how leftists say dumber and dumber things the closer they get to losing, as if they know the future and start trying to cope early.
The joke is sadly on all of America. Or didn’t you notice who shot Trump? He was a gun-obsessed registered Republican son of a Republican/“Libertarian (to keep the peace)” father and Democratic mother who tried to be in with MAGA-hat wearers in high school and held out on paying up for his $15 bet that Biden wouldn’t become President until Biden got sworn in as President. Then around 3.5 years later the rifle club reject — which fortunately rejected him for being a really bad shot — decided to play assassin against his fellow Party member. Who says history can’t have more interesting convolutions than a piece of fiction.
And also like clockwork he’s got his mixture of CNN talking points, fibs, and outright fabrications. You’re so predictable.
Fibs and fabrications are not to be found in what I said above. What I stated are facts about the shooter Thomas M Crooks of Bethel Park, PA, And those facts I didn’t get from CNN, but CNN followed in course. 😉
Nope, like everything you say there’s a mix of dishonesty and ignorance, but let’s not dwell on that. Let’s all just celebrate the Trump survived your side’s latest attempt to destroy him. You must be so disappointed.
@Chi … The Left has always said dumb and dumber things . That is how to identify a Leftist : dumb and dumber .
Since “dumb and dumber” want to dispute facts the stupid way — without having evidence of any sort to contradict the mentioned facts about their Lord Trump’s shooter, let them deal with this record of their Lord’s fellow Party member:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3gw58wv4e9o.amp
His lost bet of $15 via ActBlue was on January 20, 2021 only upon Biden having been sworn in. The FEC has the record. And Pennsylvania has the record of his being a registered Republican within a week of turning 18 years of age.
Dare “dumb and dumber” to read with an open-mind instead of burying their head in the sand about who went after their Lord on Earth.
***** Max Smith, who took an American history course with Crooks, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that his former classmate “definitely was conservative”.
Mr Smith recalled a mock debate in which they both took part, saying: “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side.”
“It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate,” he said.
****
One of a mix of former classmates and schoolmates who in different ways noted the shooter’s political disposition in school.
So strange…what is the motive?!
The FBI still had no clue about his motivation when the sun rose today, and I most certainly don’t.
My wild guess is he may have had some accelerator philosophy to assure a broader “conservative” victory or got triggered by a sense of betrayal by Trump on either abortion or more recently highlighted ties between Jeffrey Epstein and Trump that seemed to be making the rounds online with what I assume to be mostly 15-25/30 year old guys trying to be “macho”. But then there is also the “did it for Jodi Foster” passibility (a la the guy who shot Reagan): to impress a female in whom he may have had a romantic/sexual interest.
“He was a gun-obsessed registered Republican son of a Republican/“Libertarian (to keep the peace)” father and Democratic mother who tried to be in with MAGA-hat wearers in high school and held out on paying up for his $15 bet that Biden wouldn’t become President until Biden got sworn in as President. Then around 3.5 years later the rifle club reject — which fortunately rejected him for being a really bad shot “
His mom and dad’s politics are not mentioned in the article, only that he was a registered republic.
Nor is the “$15 bet” mentioned. He donated to leftist groups and you made up that part about the bet. Nor does the article say anything about him wanting to be part of the MAGA hat group in school, or that he was rejected by a rifle club for being a bad shot.
(Also, rifle clubs don’t reject people for being bad shots – the point of a rifle club is to learn to shoot safely, also he was apparently a good enough shot to nearly kill the President from 130 yards)
So there you go – a tiny bit of truth surrounded by half truths, speculation, and lies. Just on par for you. Perhaps you shouldn’t be so sloppy with your reading.
You said something about acceleration here. I read elsewhere that you wanted to know if he saw the Joker movie and was a fan. Did you think he had a Joker motivation to seed chaos and keep the fight going? Did you already know that he was looking online for details about the Butler rally was announced July 3rd for July 13th and the DNC Convention dates in Chicago when you said that?
@Iwatch
Yes to your first question. And sort of yes to your second question.
The Republican shooter who tried to assassinate Trump had last month also looked up details about the DNC Convention in Chicago and for info about Christopher Wray, Hakeem Jeffries, Joe Biden, and various others in the political realm. It’s also pretty clear by now that the Republican shooter at Trump’s rally did this only after looking up conditions under which his parents could or could not get in trouble for their son being a mass shooter using guns from home.
In maybe somewhat related news to what I indicated earlier here about a bunch of young gun-loving male’s views about Trump having changed this summer, I will note that MAGA world star Kyle Rittenhouse has since come out and said he opposes Trump and will write in Ron (or was it Rand?) Paul for President. Now MAGA World is eating its own and trolling him.
One of the shooter’s neighbor claims there were MAGA-supporting signs in the lawn at the shooter’s house for some time earlier this year:
https://www.wtae.com/article/thomas-crooks-fbi-investigation-trump-shooting/61603194
Maybe with the MAGA signs in the shooter’s front lawn in Pennsylvania it’s a bit like Somalia: if you put up an Israeli flag sign in front of the house in Somalia, you or someone in the house probably really are a committed supporter of the cause indicated by the sign.
From the BBC: *****The Community College of Allegheny, or CCAC, has confirmed that Crooks attended the school between September 2021 and May 2024. He graduated with an associate degree in engineering science.
In a statement sent to the BBC, the college noted that he graduated “with high honours” and that a review of his records turned up no disciplinary, student conduct or security-related incidents.
The University of Pittsburgh also told the BBC that in February he was was accepted as a transfer student there for the fall 2024 semester. The following month, he elected not to attend.****
The 2016 Trump campaign’s voter targeting database had the shooter’s family considered as being within the top 20 people — of about 19k people in Bethel Park — to be likely already very receptive to the Trump campaign’s gun rights messaging. Will be interesting with info about the 2020 campaign data.
And the shooter’s older sister, who moved away from home into an apartment not too far away, is also a registered Republican just like her brother the shooter.
Sometimes people just get lucky while others don’t get lucky — much like with some of those who survived the bombing outside the cafe in Mogadishu during the England v Spain match. The killed 50-year old in the Trump rally stands and the two men nearby who got critically injured that day weren’t so lucky as Trump. Trump himself got lucky that the police finally got around to try to go up toward the roof on which the shooter was positioned and probably gave the shooter enough of buck fever in the last few seconds to mess up his shooting just enough to save Trump. But as with the assassination attempt against Trump, so in Mogadishu: no amount of security when out and about in the open can guarantee your safety 100% — especially if the attacker is competent and committing to the attack even the attack is probably or certainly suicidal.
@GUWonder: which assessments are you seeing? I just heard a BBC report a couple of weeks ago about how the situation in Somalia had improved tremendously and President Mohamud was courting foreign investment.
The anticipated and since realized spike in piracy problems was one of things taken into consideration as indicative of a change to the on-shore situation. That and there have been signs of the Houthis wanting to get foreign hostages from Somalia now more than before. That along with a resurgence in Al-Shabab and its willingness to go against the SNA in the last 24 months has put Somalia on a reversal course.
US consular services for US citizens in Mogadishu aren’t currently on offer there. Instead for security reasons it’s referrals to Kenya/Nairobi.
Speaking of proper services for US citizens , the “special counsel” harassing Trump was never conformed by the Senate , so the classified documents case has been thrown out .
Good news for proper services for US citizens . We cannot have willy-nilly unconfirmed prosecutors harassing people.
Trump-appointed Judge Cannon is a loose cannon and her lack of experience shows even 3.5 years after Trump lost his ability to nominate/appoint judges. She even noted her ruling was made in the absence of supporting case law to do so. Talk about an activist judge.
@GU … She is an eminent legal scholar with common sense . This was lacking with the past two special counsels and the two New York pretend judges .
You may want to read this:
https://www.voanews.com/amp/al-shabab-reverses-somali-force-gains-is-working-with-houthis-in-somalia-/7659656.html
There is now way more foreign backing for Somalia (such as with debt relief) and there are more OECD countries’ government and military personnel in Somalia nowadays than there has been for most of your adult life. And this has delivered an economic boost to the country, but there are concerns with setbacks and corrupt resource diversion and troublesome partnerships of convenience even as Somalia isn’t bad like it was in the 1990s.
Ah yes , the “religion of peace” , ( as the left is fond of saying ) .
Dave referred to Chicago and most major US cities — places where a majority of the population way more commonly identify with being Christian than being Jewish or Muslim — as being less safe than Mogadishu (or Somalia). Could it be that if you want a more peaceful and safe neighborhood in America, the way that happens is with having a larger population of — and larger proportion of the population — being Jewish or Muslim? Seems so.
Chicago wants businesses to stay , so the people will have enough places to shoplift . Chicago doesn’t want to run out of places to shoplift , as did San Francisco when many businesses left .
Rather than the 10 Commandments , Chicago schools teach shoplifting in shop class .
Chicago blames gang violence on the Chinese gangs who invented gunpowder , and they say it is all the fault of Republicans .
Ah yes, Chicago looters and gang shootings, definitely followers of Jesus.
The cope machine is hard right now.
Being religious, a supporter of a religion or having a religious affiliation is not mutually exclusive with being a criminal.
The Mexican drug cartels and Italian mafia seem to have quite a history of materially supporting their religious communities and even having favorite saints and a religious identity. And religious “leaders” most certainly aren’t all saints — and that includes the flying pastor grounded for in-flight hitting of his wife on an Alaska Airlines flight earlier this year.
You can just go to Somaliland to check the every country box, it’s much safer and easier to get to logistically
“Five people died”
Should say: “Five people were brutally murdered”
Terrorism is murder.
Still safer than Chicago and most major US cities. Just saying…….
Thankfully the annual incidence of murders per capita in Chicago has now dropped to levels significantly lower than what it was when George “read my lips, no new taxes” HW Bush was President.
In Chicago , the official drive-by shooting hours officially start at 8:30 p.m. They used to start at 9 p.m. , but the younger gang members would violate curfew after 9 p.m. , so Chicago moved them earlier so the younger gang members would not feel left out .
Criminologists used to note how hotter temperatures in the US correlated with crime. So maybe global warming is a threat to law and order in the US and we need more global air conditioning in a way? And climate change is going to do what it has done throughout the ages: drive mass migration. Just what MAGA world wants: more Somali migration across the continents?
I was just there a few weeks ago, very tragic, especially because Mogadishu has become a lot better.
Side note: if you need any tips or security there feel free to reach out.
I’ll never understand the desire to willingly go to sh*tholes.
What you see as a dump others consider their home. It’s interesting to see what it is that people put up with and yet love in their own way for their own reasons. It is also interesting to see what it is that motivates people to leave a country and understand that if you were in their shoes you would also take your chances as they do to move elsewhere, to remain, to leave and only intermittently visit, or to leave and never go back.
Personally, I think going to your idea of “dumps” can make a person more resilient to shocks in life, better prepare a person for challenges faced — whether the opponent is nature, another person/party or one’s self — and also provides a chance to see that there is more in common across cultures than would make you comfortable. 😉
“What you see as a dump others consider their home”
I wish all of them saw it that way so they would leave civilized nations alone.
“Personally, I think going to your idea of “dumps” can make a person more resilient to shocks in life, better prepare a person for challenges faced…”
…Yeah, personally, no thanks. I don’t need to go to the literal shittiest shithole of a nation in the planet to learn particular life lessons.
There is the Israeli prison camp of Gaza — and Gaza is so extremely messed up that Somalia is paradise in comparison.
Not that I personally recognize Gaza as a “nation,” and Palestine as a whole is a handful of spots down the list, but to appease your “ackchyually”:
I don’t need to go to arguably the second literal shittiest shithole of a nation in the planet to learn particular life lessons.
@Jan … You ask why go ? Two possibilities might be Masochism or Stupidity ?
Chi H wants to be spoon fed like a baby but then can’t swallow the facts and instead throws the food onto the ground like an annoyed or furious toddler and demands more.
Let me pick up some of the food for the tantrum thrower and hope the toddler can learn to pick up and move on his own soon. In the meantime, to slow things down for the developmentally challenged:
There is the “shooting club” with the schoolmates where he got rejected for being a lousy shot for the junior varsity team. But that’s not all, There was a separate, pay-to-play private shooting club where he trained and whose ownership don’t want to say much for fear of alienating the NRA-loving customers. The latter didn’t reject him. The former did, Maybe this is Crooks crooked way of trying to show off to the classmates and team supervisors who flagged him as a bad shot while in high school. He managed to get in rushed shots and draw blood from
the second or third most protected civilian in the country and do so despite all the police and Secret Service in the vicinity. So maybe the inspiration was his not making even the JV team with his high school classmates.
His parents’ political affiliation history and their differences in party affiliation are also out there in the public records. It’s perhaps why they refused to put up political signs in front of their house despite the neighborhood being littered with them at around election time. Either way, the shooter was a registered Republican and noted by classmates as being “conservative” and “to the right” politically. His mother a Democrat, and his father a gun-buying Republican/Libertarian with the shooter only donating to “the progressive” Democrats on January 20, 2021 and that too online with only $15 before immediately and deliberately unsubscribing from the site.
I understand a lot of anti-Biden folks are upset that the shooter didn’t turn out to be “antifa” or a Democrat, but it did turn out to be a registered Republican gun-lover child of a Democratic mother and Republican/Libertarian father. He donated $15 on January 20, 2021 to a pro-Biden party before immediately cutting off affiliation with the Democrat-supporting donation site. And it was well after the one and only $15 donation that he registered to vote and registered as a Republican. The FEC data is public. His birthdate is easy to find. So is his house address. His voter registration info is also out there.
Maybe the QAnon clowns want to say the “Deep State” has been setting up Crooks for years — after all, they are their Lord’s followers and so they will parrot the Party Line. 😉
@GU … Basically , the punk was a Loser Retard . There … explained it to you .
Retard? Not that. Given he did pretty well in a range of subjects from math to history while in high school, his mental capacity wasn’t lacking then. And all this year he seems to have calculated and been calculating to such extent that the FBI is still running blind on motivation despite access to his smartphone’s contents and other devices and accounts. And given he did his ladder and ammo purchases the day of the rally, he seems to have shown mental acumen sufficient to adjust to the circumstance quickly and either gotten very lucky or had honed skills and maintained a capability beyond you to do his nasty deed even while under pressure.
Loser? Certainly sort of stereotypically so. Even as he lived with his parents, they are said to be pretty oblivious to his doings and comings and goings except that he was working as kitchen/food service staff at a nursing home.
it’s gonna be ok
…. for the 10 or so guns in his family’s possession on the day of the assassination attempt. They won’t be melted down anytime soon, so the meltdown is reserved for those freaked out that it was one of their fellow gun-loving registered Republicans who went after Ye Lord Trump on the evening of the eve of Bastille Day.
Another terrorist attack in Mogadishu:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/03/africa/mogadishu-attack-beach-intl/index.html
It’s now public that in June the Houthis were working on sending arms to Al-Shabab in Somalia. Then last month — in late July — Russia cancelled an arms shipment to the Houthis following American-backed Saudi pressure on the Russians to get the Russians to cut off Russians from supplying the Houthis with weapons.
The Houthis ties with Al-Shabab are troublesome for those thinking of visiting Mogadishu.