Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Chance to move over .500 slips away as Nats lose to reigning champs

T.J. Oshie, the heart of the Caps, wants to keep playing. He’s not sure if he can.

Nationals sweep away the Marlins to get back to .500

Biden is aiming increasingly personal and sarcastic jabs at Trump

Views of the campus protests are too broad — and too narrow

Attorney general moves to reclassify marijuana as lower-risk drug

UnitedHealth grew very big. Now, some lawmakers want to chop it down.

The new face of flooding

How celebrity tequilas are changing the very nature of tequila

I coach my son’s sports team. Why is he so disrespectful during practice?

Miss Manners: How to decline donation requests at checkout

Ask Amy: My friends took my advice, but they’re doing it wrong

Man arrested at Yellowstone for allegedly kicking bison while drunk

Southwest passengers now get a $75 voucher for big flight disruptions

The Rick Steves guide to life

A murder plot that cannot be ignored: India must come clean at last

How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

Biden’s internet-for-all program needs Musk’s help

Microsoft’s “responsible AI” chief worries about the open web

How the push to ban TikTok spurred a new Washington influence machine

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

How this new rule protects retirement savers from costly advice

Borrowers, don’t miss this important student loan forgiveness deadline

The delusions behind Biden’s plan for Middle East peace 

Middle East conflict live updates: Blinken meets Netanyahu in Jerusalem; U.S. presses Israel on Gaza aid

Is Bougainville the next battleground between China and the U.S.?

Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

Meet Emo, the AI robot that can predict your smile

Speaker Johnson: deploy National Guard to Columbia

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

 Donald Trump Speaks During A Campaign Rally In Green Bay Wisconsin

The gunmen arrived soon after sunrise, surrounding Hawa Abdi’s hospital one day in 2010. Marching through the hallways of one of southern Somalia’s few medical centers, they shot anesthesia machines, tore up records, smashed windows and destroyed the country’s only glass incubators. In panic, mothers ripped IV tubes from their babies and rushed into the bush.

The 750 militants, many of them teenagers, were members of Hizbul Islam, a radical Islamist group known for stoning offenders or chopping off hands. They had arrived with automatic rifles and a question for Dr. Abdi, a gynecologist known for turning her family’s farm on the outskirts of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, into a haven for Somalis fleeing famine, poverty and an ongoing civil war.

“Why are you running this hospital?” they demanded, according to a New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/world/africa/08somalia.html" title="www.nytimes.com">report</a>. “You are old. And you are a woman!”

Dr. Abdi, then 62, was unfazed. She had been forced to marry an older man at age 12 and went on to become one of her country’s only female physicians, opening a one-room clinic in 1983 to help women giving birth in the East African countryside.

Eight years later she began radically expanding her efforts, spurred by the onset of civil war, to treat anyone who visited her office, whether for malaria or malnutrition.

Thousands soon arrived, and the clinic grew into a 400-bed hospital. The surrounding farm transformed into a makeshift city, Hawa Abdi Village, ultimately home to an estimated 90,000 displaced Somalis living in huts made from sticks and plastic sheets. Under Mama Hawa, as Dr. Abdi was known, they received free medical care, food and education at an 800-student school.

When the militants put her under house arrest, hundreds of women living in the complex protested in a show of support. Somalis across the country condemned the attack. The insurgents retreated after a few days and, at Dr. Abdi’s insistence, wrote an apology note.

“I told the gunmen, ‘I’m not leaving my hospital,’ ” she said in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/world/africa/08somalia.html" title="www.nytimes.com">a 2011 interview</a> with the Times. “I told them, ‘If I die, I will die with my people and my dignity.’ I yelled at them, ‘You are young and you are a man, but what have you done for your society?’ ”

Dr. Abdi, who returned to work after replacing the militants’ black flag with a white sheet from her hospital, was 73 when she died Aug. 5 at home in Mogadishu. She had several strokes in recent years, said her daughter Deqo Mohamed, but the precise cause of death was not known.

“She had a really deep faith and sense of hope that things could change in Somalia,” said journalist Sarah J. Robbins, who co-wrote Dr. Abdi’s 2013 memoir, “<a href="https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B009Z2TYRO&amp;preview=newtab&amp;linkCode=kpe&amp;ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_NWBmFbEVM2FEP" title="read.amazon.com">Keeping Hope Alive</a>.” In a phone interview, Robbins recalled that while touring the United States to promote the book, Dr. Abdi urged young Somali Americans to help rebuild their ancestral home.

“This was a beautiful place,” Dr. Abdi said, telling stories of Somali life after the country became independent in 1960. “This can be a beautiful place again.”

Dr. Abdi was part physician, part human rights activist, with a law degree she earned on the side to protect herself from men who sought to take advantage of a woman running her own nonprofit organization without a husband, brother or son by her side.

“My mom would not talk much. She would just say a couple words and do the work,” Mohamed said by phone from Mogadishu, where she and her younger sister now run the Dr. Hawa Abdi Foundation with support from aid organizations. “She often repeated a Russian saying: The beauty of a city is the statues or the streets. But the beauty of a human being is his work. If you want to be beautiful, do the work.”

That work was recognized around the world as early as 1993, when President George H.W. Bush visited Mogadishu on New Year’s Day. Dr. Abdi was the first Somali he met; she guided him across her hospital grounds and through the camp of displaced families at a time when it was known as Lafoole, meaning “place of bones.”

“It’s just very, very emotional for me to see it,” Bush told reporters after visiting the compound. “And I’ll tell you,” he added, “I’ve got great respect for what they are doing.”

Dr. Abdi was later hailed as “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo” by Glamour magazine, which named her and her daughters Women of the Year <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/dr-hawa-abdi-and-her-daughters" title="www.glamour.com">in 2010</a>. Two years later, actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie delivered a testimonial on her behalf at the Women in the World summit in New York City. Dr. Abdi was unable to attend but sent a message to the audience.

“I have given my people my heart and my soul,” <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/angelina-jolie-champions-nobel-peace-prize-nominee-dr-hawa-abdi?ref=scroll" title="www.thedailybeast.com">she said</a>. “Still I did not lose my hope. One day my people’s lives will change in a better way. I hope my children and the children who grow in camp, and are born in the hospital, will change the lives of Somali people.”

Hawa Abdi Dhiblawe was born in Mogadishu in the spring of 1947. Without knowing her precise birthday, she adopted the May 28 birth date of her daughter Mohamed. Her father worked at the city port, in an era when Mogadishu was controlled by Britain and then Italy; her mother died of childbirth complications when she was 12.

The episode introduced her to the shortcomings of the country’s health-care system and set her on a path to become a doctor. “I wanted to help future generations and children to avoid the pain I felt,” she later <a href="https://in-sightjournal.com/2013/08/17/dr-hawa-abdi-m-d-physician-human-rights-activist-hawa-abdi-foundation/" title="in-sightjournal.com">told an interviewer</a>. It also led the family to give Dr. Abdi up for marriage, according to Mohamed.

The marriage ended in divorce after the death of her infant daughter, which she attributed to a female genital cutting ritual that  she had undergone as a child  and that apparently compromised the birth. After the child died, she returned to school and received a scholarship to study gynecology in Kyiv, in what is now Ukraine, as a result of Somalia’s Cold War-era alliance with the Soviet Union.

Dr. Abdi returned to Mogadishu in 1971, at a time when Somalia had about 60 doctors, according to her memoir. She worked at Digfer Hospital, where most of her colleagues were Italian and only one was female, before starting her own clinic at her family farm.

Its location, on the road between Mogadishu and the town of Afgooye, made it a destination for families in need. By 2010, the corridor was home to more than 400,000 displaced people — more than anywhere else in the world, <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/4cf8cea36.html" title="www.unhcr.org">according to</a> the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees — and the camp had grown to about 90,000 people.

Dr. Abdi initially sold a stockpile of gold to feed the women and children who flocked to her doorstep. “Then, as the famine worsened, she had to pay gravediggers in food to bury the more than ten thousand who died,” journalist Eliza Griswold wrote in her 2010 book “The Tenth Parallel.”

In interviews with visiting reporters, Dr. Abdi often said she had not intended to support thousands of displaced families. But “necessity is the mother of invention,” she explained.

To keep the peace, she instituted certain rules. Husbands who beat their wives were sent to a makeshift jail, a storeroom with barred windows. Newcomers who sought to maintain the clan identifications that had torn the country apart were not allowed to stay.

“When they come, we were informing them, if you use the clan division, or you said I am that clan, you cannot stay here,” she told NPR <a href="https://www.npr.org/transcripts/175695515" title="www.npr.org">in 2013</a>. “You will be Somali. And you will see, we will welcome you.”

Dr. Abdi married Aden Mohamed, a military technician, in 1973. They later separated, and he died in 2012. Survivors include her two daughters, Deqo and Amina Mohamed, both physicians; two sisters; and three grandchildren. A son, Ahmed, was killed in a 2005 car accident exactly 15 years before Dr. Abdi died, according to Deqo Mohamed.

About three years ago, Dr. Abdi stopped working regularly at her hospital, which has since closed — temporarily, the family hopes — because of safety concerns. “We’re hoping when things clear out, we can regain her legacy,” Deqo Mohamed said. She added that fewer than 10,000 displaced Somalis remain in the camp, where the school has continued holding classes.

Most of the camp’s residents have been women and children. “The men are dead, fighting, or have left Somalia to find work,” Dr. Abdi told Glamour, adding that the country’s women were more than capable of carrying on without them.

“<i>Women </i>can build stability,” she said. “We can make peace.”

Read more <b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/">Washington Post obituaries:</a></b>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/james-harris-who-wrestled-as-ugandan-warrior-kamala-dies-at-70/2020/08/09/2ecbe5b4-ff22-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">James Harris, who wrestled as Ugandan warrior Kamala, dies at 70</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/noel-r-rose-scientist-who-advanced-study-of-autoimmune-diseases-dies-at-92/2020/08/08/5be640fc-d992-11ea-aff6-220dd3a14741_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Noel R. Rose, scientist who advanced study of autoimmune diseases, dies at 92</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/bernard-bailyn-historian-who-reinterpreted-the-american-revolution-dies-at-97/2020/08/07/babbcb6c-d8fa-11ea-930e-d88518c57dcc_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">Bernard Bailyn, historian who reinterpreted the American Revolution, dies at 97</a>

Society of Professional Journalists D.C.'s Dateline Award for series, 2019

Society of Professional Obituary Writers' obituary writer of the year, 2019

University of Chicago, AB in English and philosophy

Harrison Smith is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk. Since joining the obituaries section in 2015, he has profiled big-game hunters, fallen dictators and Olympic champions. He sometimes covers the living as well, and previously co-founded the South Side Weekly, a community newspaper in Chicago.

Harrison Smith

The Washington Post

Contributor

Getty

Hawa Abdi IDP Camp

Search Death Notices

Place a Death Notice

Request a News Obituary

Obituaries

iptc-media/religion_and_belief

iptc-media/religion_and_belief/religious_belief

iptc-media/health/healthcare_policy

iptc-media/health

iptc-media/society

iptc-media/conflict_war_and_peace/armed_conflict/war

iptc-media/society/family

iptc-media/health/healthcare_policy/government_health_care/Medicare

iptc-media/health/healthcare_policy/government_health_care

iptc-media/religion_and_belief/religious_belief/Islam

iptc-media/politics

iptc-media/politics/fundamental_rights/human_rights

iptc-media/politics/political_process

iptc-media/politics/fundamental_rights

iptc-media/crime_law_and_justice

client-blocklists/Client List: Morgan Stanley KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Becton Dickinson KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/CLIENT LIST: Nomura KWs 2021 - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Boeing KWs 2021- INCLUDE ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Exxon Mobil  - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Microsoft KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/GEICO KWs - INCLUDES ANY_4.26.21

client-blocklists/Client List: T. Rowe Price KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/T. Rowe Price KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/B2_Automotive Interest 2.5.15_legacyaux_jqs

client-blocklists/HBO KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Ford/Lincoln KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/ExxonMobil 03312021 KWs - INCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Bank of America KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/WaPo: Combined Disaster Keyword List - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Optum KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Eli Lily KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Purina KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/Qualcomm Custom KW - 5G

advertising/B2_Family Matter 2.12.15_legacyaux_lf3

advertising/B2_Family & Parenting_legacyaux_v02

advertising/B2_Health and Beauty_legacyaux_3fv

advertising/Client Keywords: On Running

client-blocklists/BP KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/B2_Family_legacyaux_icy

advertising/B2_Positive News_legacyaux_hlt

advertising/B2_Russia & Putin_legacyaux_F55

advertising/B2_Social Issues Content_legacyaux_8C2

advertising/B2_Society_legacyaux_0cz

advertising/B2_STEM Enthusiasts_legacyaux_gx0

advertising/B2_Women's Beauty_legacyaux_9jv

advertising/B2_Sex and Gender_legacyaux_2c3

client-blocklists/Client List: GEICO KWs

client-blocklists/Client List: KPMG KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Novo Nordisk KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Siemens KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Cisco KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: AT&T ALT KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Inpixon KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Boeing KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Aetna KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Navy Federal Credit Union NFCU KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY - 12.23.20

client-blocklists/Client List: Google KWs - INCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: AT&T KWs 2021 - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Philip Morris KWs - INCLUDES ANY 

client-blocklists/Capital One KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY - 1.4.21

client-blocklists/Bank of America Merrill Lynch KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Google PG KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Chase KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Office Depot KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: ETrade KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

prism://prism.query/obits-stream&limit=20

The Washington Post Obituaries section has Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia obituaries, appreciations and death notices as well as historical obits and celebrity obituaries.

D.C., Md. & Va.

The Washington Post offers breaking local news, weather and traffic information for the DC, Maryland and Virginia metro areas, plus information about school districts, crime, government, religion, the lottery,restaurant reviews and obituaries.