Somalia student attends class in a war zone

The young man with the books slips past bullets and smoke, hurries beyond the looters to make it home before dark to study and hide until daybreak, when the newly dead lie scattered amid casings and mortar dust on the streets of Mogadishu.

Omar Nor follows a dangerous map toward a better life, but sometimes he despairs that war is all he’ll ever know. Since his childhood it has thumped in his chest and claimed his friends, like in December, when a suicide bomber sneaked into a graduation ceremony and spattered his suit and tie with the blood of classmates.

“The explosion still thunders in my ears,” said Nor, a third-year computer science major at Benadir University. “Since then, I sometimes become absent-minded and leave class, thinking of my friends lying doubled over around me.”

At least 20 people, including students, teachers and three Cabinet ministers, were killed in the bombing, which was believed to have been the work of Shabab, an Islamist rebel group with links to Al Qaeda. The organization denied responsibility. It’s hard to know whom to believe. Men with guns make constant pronouncements; nothing ever makes sense.

Nor left the university for a month after that but when he returned things were no better; it was still a city where militants carry out public stonings and floggings and the government controls only a few blocks along the seashore.

“Being a student in Mogadishu is wonderful,” said Nor, fronting his only weapon, satire, while armored vehicles roared around him. “When I go early morning to the university, I’m afraid I’ll be trapped between two opposing sides, and on my return home I’m scared that looters have stolen my belongings. The day before yesterday, uniformed troops took my cellphone and I was terrified they’d arrest me and accuse me of being one of those who hurls grenades.”

News about Somalia is often greeted with knowing yet puzzled expressions of having heard it all before: gunrunners and pirates, religious fanaticism, criminal clans, and wiry men with bright teeth and heavy bandoleers. This is Nor’s life, though -- shrinking options coexisting with the possibility of sudden death.

“Living in Mogadishu is always high risk, but there is no alternative,” said Nor, 25, a wide-mouthed man in a blue shirt and oval glasses. “You can either go with the militant groups, die in deserts and seas trying to escape, or study. If I had a scholarship to a university in another country, I would leave without hesitation.”

Benadir University has been a hopeful sign of defiance. Founded in 2002 by a group of doctors, the university offers a number of degrees, but its aim is to produce medical students for a nation in drastic need of them. In 2008, the university graduated Somalia’s first class of medical students since 1991, when warlords toppled the country’s last stable regime.

The dead at the graduation ceremony in December were among more than 19,000 people killed in fighting since 2007.

The government of President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, bolstered by troops reportedly trained in Kenya and Ethiopia, is preparing an offensive against insurgents. The United Nations said this month that a “sharp rise in violence” in January had uprooted more than 80,000 civilians across the country.

Fadumo Muhiyadin Abdulle, a third-year medical student at Benadir, thought about dropping out, but with more than half her studies completed, she decided to risk continuing to attend classes. The 5,300 peacekeeping troops from the African Union offer a measure of protection to the 500 students, but each day is fragile, resting on the whims of insurgents: In January, militants responded to Ahmed’s one-year anniversary in power by bombing the presidential palace.

“I would like to see that I am helping my community and working in my country to assist my people,” said Abdulle, wearing a brown chador. “I was sitting at the back when the bomb detonated at the graduation. The decorated room turned into a garbage dump with white chairs overturned like scattered papers. . . . I don’t like recalling that day.”

Nor knows what she means, but sometimes memories slide in, uninvited. He sat in a cafeteria the other day, the city rattling around him. He wanted to cry, but he held it back, and told the story of a boy known as Mr. Sadiq, a classmate and a comedian.

During the graduation ceremony, a group of students put on a skit about whether the young Somalis should stay in their country or flee to Europe. Mr. Sadiq played an engineer urging fellow students to remain in Somalia and use their educations to build a better place. His soliloquy made the audience laugh and think.

Minutes later, the explosion shook the stage. Mr. Sadiq was dead; Nor could tell by the blood in his mouth and the way he didn’t move.

jeffrey.fleishman

@latimes.com

Mohamed is a special correspondent.