When Aden Ismail flies home to Somaliland, a breakaway republic in northern Somalia, the low whine of the plane's engines triggers flashbacks to the dark months before he fled to Toronto 18 years ago. As the plane descends into the capital, Hargeisa, he feels himself back in the carnage of the Somali civil war.
“There is nothing so terrifying as the sound of a warplane chasing you,” Dr. Ismail says, recalling his time as a refugee, in 1988, camped out in the hilly scrubland north of Hargeisa.
He pauses to examine a tunic hanging in a shop doorway near Rexdale Avenue and Martin Grove Road, fingering the curlicues of gold thread. “The planes bombed us during the day, so we would work on patients from dusk until dawn. Then we all hid in the forest.”
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