Was I created for suffering?

Meet Sa’diyo, sixteen years old. The year is 1991. The city is Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.

You can imagine what Mogadishu was like in those days — a city consumed by a civil war so vicious that the word civil feels like mockery. For in a true civil war, there are still threads of kinship — restraints that keep people from feeding each other to the fire. But here, no one spared anyone, and nothing was sacred. Even wars between enemies with no blood ties often held to certain limits; this one did not.

A deafening blast erupted. She guessed it was not far from where she stood. She was certain the sound had come from the direction of her home. The noise was the same kind she had been hearing for days — a mortar shell, perhaps. She told herself it was nothing unusual, nothing personal. And yet, her sixth sense whispered otherwise. An unease gripped her chest, but she clenched her jaw and stayed in line, waiting her turn to buy dough.

She glanced at the faces of the other young women in the queue. They chatted and squabbled as usual, no trace of fear on their features. She pushed away the whispers of Satan, telling herself to stay put. But her heart wouldn’t obey. Before her mind had decided, her legs carried her out of the line and into the street.

She looked around. She was alone. A little farther off, people were running in panic, eyes wide, breaths ragged. A tear slipped down her cheek. She broke into a run. As she neared her neighbourhood, she saw smoke curling skyward, dust hanging heavy in the air. The shouts, the cries, the chaos; they grew louder with every step.

She turned corner after corner, heart pounding harder the closer she came to her home. Then she saw her aunt, Mako, who rushed to her, wrapping her in a desperate embrace.

“May Allah grant us patience and faith. This is what awaits us all. No one escapes the hour decreed for them. Death comes to those Allah has chosen. Oh Mogadishu! Where can one run? What kind of world is this, where shells are fired to annihilate the homes of the innocent?”

Then, still speaking, Aunt Mako added:

“You weren’t home, were you?”

People began to gather.

“Praise be to Allah, thanks be to Allah, He spared her,” said one.

“A fire lit by hypocrites, burning believers, this is not new,” said another.

“The house of the Yariisoow family — it took a direct hit from a mortar,” others confirmed.

Sa’diyo barely heard them. Her eyes were fixed on the shattered remains of her family home. She slipped away from the crowd and headed to where she thought her mother might have been before the shell struck.

She had guessed right. Her mother lay there — lifeless — her body intact from the ribs upward, the rest swallowed by rubble. Sa’diyo dropped to her knees. Around her, smoke and debris. Scattered human remains lay wherever she turned her gaze.

She reached toward her mother, but then she saw — beneath a dusty piece of cloth that looked like it had fallen to the ground — her baby brother, the youngest of the family. She pulled the cloth away, heart hammering. His eyes fluttered.

Carefully, she lifted him to her chest. At first, a faint whimper escaped his lips. The moment she heard it, a flicker of joy pierced her grief. Everything else faded. She checked his tiny arms, then his legs — no fractures. She stroked his head and no bleeding, no visible wound. She whispered God’s name over and over. Finally, she thought to check his neck.

That’s when she saw it: the right side of his neck and cheek seared by fire, the skin peeled away, leaving a pale, raw surface, a scar that would mark him for life, and a nickname that would follow him forever: Qooreey (Scarneck).

All of this happened within a single minute. Then shadows fell over her. People were around her now, some carrying her and the child away. They did not know it yet, but a spreading fire was about to consume what was left.

The next morning, the bodies of those killed in the shelling were collected and buried in a patch of sandy ground. It would become a new cemetery for those slain or left unclaimed in that part of the city. It lay just in front of the Police Training School — Scuola di Polizia.

From that day, Sa’diyo dedicated herself to raising the boy. She pushed everything else aside. Life threw hardship after hardship her way. She endured insults, exploitation, and endless toil, for there was no escape. Her little brother was her anchor, and her chains.

When Qooreey grew into a man, able to fend for himself, Sa’diyo remembered she was a woman. She began to adorn herself again, to take joy in the small vanities of life. She rose before dawn to sell vegetables in the market, then returned to her hut in the displacement camp to sell charcoal in the afternoon. Qooreey worked among the youth who scraped a living from Bakara Market.

In 2007, she married Mursal. She left the camp and moved into his small corrugated-metal house in a settlement near Mogadishu airport, a neighbourhood built by the displaced, for the displaced.

It is now Wednesday morning, 6 August 2025.

Sa’diyo is raising eight orphans; five her own, and three belonging to her late brother. She sits before the remains of her home, a flimsy shack crushed by a bulldozer while she was away trying to feed her children. She never imagined the world could devise a fresh cruelty for her. Illnesses she thought she had conquered have returned, striking harder than before.

“Today, another displacement, another homelessness. And with eight orphans depending on me. What sin have I committed to deserve this? Where on earth can I turn?”

I had come to witness the destruction of Siinaay Market by the Somali government, to see for myself the faces of the newly displaced. That’s when I saw her, a mother sitting in the shadow of the bulldozer’s work, hands pressed to her temples, children clustered around her, their faces carrying the weight of too much life too soon. Two of the children clung to each other; another held her hand.

I greeted her. No reply. I greeted her again. Silence. I sat beside her and asked, “Mother, are you among those whose homes were demolished?”

She turned her face away.

“You see where I sit, why ask?”

The two children holding each other drew closer to me. I handed a cold bottle of water to the older girl. She didn’t drink. Instead, she tipped the bottle to the lips of the smaller child she was carrying. After he had swallowed, she gave the bottle to the girl holding her hand.

I tried again to speak with their mother, hoping to understand her story:

“When I was a young girl, just come of age, a shell hit our home,” she began, with the same indifference on her face. “Only I and a nursing baby survived. The rest of my family was buried across from the Police School, where executions used to take place, you must know it.” She looked at me, making sure I was listening, then continued. “I became mother and father to that boy. When he grew up, I married. Alhamdulillah, that was the first peace I’d known. My husband Mursal was kind and took responsibility for me. I rested for the first time. He freed me from the labourer’s work I’d been doing. I lived like a married woman should. He was a trader, he had two small kiosks in Bakara Market and also worked as a broker. I bore him five children. But as if I was destined to misfortune, Mursal, too, was killed in Bakara Market.”

Tears escaped her eyes. She hid her face in her headscarf.

I waited, then said, “May Allah have mercy on him. Who killed him?”

“A government soldier. He demanded a bribe. But Mursal, a man of faith, feared no one except Allah. ‘I will not pay,’ he told him, and they quarrelled. The soldier shot him, five bullets in the chest. Mursal died on the spot. And so, the care of our children fell to me. My brother helped me. But now…”

Her voice broke. I asked one of the children to fetch us a drink, giving him five dollars. When he returned, I asked again, “And now? What do you mean, did something else happen?”

“Of course. Do I ever escape misfortune? One morning, just like today, the government came to the neighbourhood by the airport where I lived. I had taken my eldest to register for school. When I returned, our home — and every house around it — had been flattened by bulldozers. You’ve heard of Galmudug neighbourhood? That’s where it was. They gave the land to politicians and businessmen for their relatives to build on. An elder — Bulshaale, may Allah have mercy on him — who was a close friend of Mursal, took pity on us. He gave us a small plot. We built a three-room tin house — two rooms for me and my children, the third for my brother Qooreey. Later, my brother married and moved in with his wife. Those three orphans are his children. He left them with me.”

Hearing this and looking at the children she was pointing at, I felt a lump in my throat. “And he — did he die naturally?” I asked, my voice muffled.

“No. He was a government soldier. He died in a battle with al-Shabaab in a place called Masjid Ali-gudud. If their mother had been alive, maybe my heart would not carry so much bitterness.”

Tears stung my eyes. I hesitated, then asked, “How did their mother die?”

“I don’t think anyone in my family is destined to die of illness. Their mother, my sister-in-law, washed clothes for a living. And one day, six months ago, while walking home from work, a police officer in a speeding tuk-tuk ran over her. She was rushed to Medina Hospital, but to no avail. She bled heavily and died on the way.”

My voice trembled. And as my mouth failed me, I felt powerless. I offered her all I could afford — a prayer. I asked Allah to lift the burden from her and grant her relief from places she cannot imagine.

She nodded, then added something to send more shivers down my spine.

“I forgot to tell you; they even dug up the graves of my parents and siblings,” she said, her face crowded with exclamation marks. 

“It was the Somali government who did it. Now, if I wanted to visit their graves and recite a Fatiha, I wouldn’t even know where to go. It’s possible they were never reburied, that their bones were dumped in a garbage pit. Yes, it’s possible. Because those who would desecrate the dead are capable of anything. These are not people with hearts. Allah decreed this for us.”

The last sentence sounded as if it wasn’t meant for me to hear. But I did.