On the morning of February 8, a civil servant from Buffalo, New York—a Somali by birth but an American by choice—walked into a heavily guarded airplane hangar in the battle-scarred capital of his native country where an important vote was about to take place. When he emerged that night, he was president. His surprise victory, which was celebrated with gunfire and camel slaughter in Mogadishu and high-fives at the Buffalo office of the New York Department of Transportation, where he was still technically employed as an equal opportunity compliance officer, was all the more remarkable because it came at the very moment a federal court in the U.S. was deciding the fate of a travel ban that targeted refugees exactly like him.

The story of how Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed came to be the leader of a country that is synonymous with anarchy and terrorism is both a classic American immigrant’s tale and one about the age-old conflict between basic democratic principles and the forces of political corruption. It begins in 1988, when Mohamed, then a first secretary for the Somali embassy in Washington, D.C., decided it was too dangerous to return home and applied for asylum. Back then, the U.S. was inclined to say yes to such requests.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/how-an-american-bureaucrat-became-president-of-somalia-214798


Somalia's new president visited victims wounded by the Mogadishu car bomb that on Sunday killed 34.

President Mohamed Abdulahi Mohamed also offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of those who planned the blast.

The powerful explosion was the first major attack since Somalia's new president was elected on Feb.8. Although no group has yet claimed responsibility, it bears the hallmarks of Somalia's Islamic extremists rebels, al-Shabaab.

In a Twitter post, President Mohamed condemned the blast, saying that it shows the "cruelty" of al-Shabaab.

A few hours before the blast, al-Shabaab denounced the new president as an "apostate" and vowed to continue fighting against his government.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/somalia-market-bomb-1.3990273

........................................


From asylum seeker to President, not bad. Hopefully he can accomplish what he seeks to do.