Somalia held a state funeral Friday for former president Ali Mahdi Mohamed, who died of COVID-19 earlier this week in Kenya.
Although President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed and his opponents appeared united in grief, there was notably no close interaction between the opposing groups.
Not even handshakes, amid a continuing stalemate over how and when to hold the Horn of Africa country’s overdue elections.
Mohamed was appointed interim president of Somalia in neighboring Djibouti in 1991 immediately after the fall of the dictator Siad Barre.
But his presidency was immediately disputed by a rival, the warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, against whose fighters Mohamed’s loyalists fought a clannish, violent war in the streets of Mogadishu.
