Read The World's Most Dangerous Place Online
Authors: James Fergusson
The World's Most Dangerous Place
THE WORLD’S MOST
DANGEROUS PLACE
Also by James Fergusson
Kandahar Cockney
The Vitamin Murders
A Million Bullets
Taliban
For more information on James Fergusson and his books, see his website at
www.jamesfergusson.info
THE WORLD’S
MOST DANGEROUS
PLACE
James Fergusson
DA CAPO PRESS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 2013 by James Fergusson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.
Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
First Da Capo Press edition 2013
Reprinted by arrangement with Bantam Press,
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
ISBN 978-0-306-82158-5 (e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013933566
Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810–4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail
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For Fergus
Contents
1
An African Stalingrad: The war against al-Shabaab
2
At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war
3
The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people
4
Aden’s story
5
The failure of Somali politics
6
What makes al-Shabaab tick?
7
The famine
8
In the court of King Farole
9
Galkacyo: Pirateville
10
Hargeisa Nights
11
How to start a border war
12
The Somali youth time-bomb
13
The missing of Minneapolis
14
‘Clanism is a disease like AIDS’
15
Operation Linda Nchi: The end for al-Shabaab?
Picture and Map Acknowledgements
After sixteen years, off and on, of writing about Afghanistan and the Taliban, the Horn of Africa felt a natural destination to me. In 2008 when a populist, al-Qaida-linked Islamist movement called al-Shabaab took over the southern half of Somalia, including the country’s capital, Mogadishu, the parallels with the Taliban were immediately obvious. It wasn’t just that Mullah Omar’s militants had also emerged from the poor, neglected south of their country to take over Kabul in 1996. Al-Shabaab explicitly modelled themselves on the Taliban. Indeed, many of the new movement’s leaders had fought alongside them against US-led forces in the early 2000s; and just as the Taliban had once sheltered Osama bin Laden, so al-Shabaab welcomed senior members of al-Qaida into their fold.
In early 2010, as America’s drone war in the mountainous borderlands of north-west Pakistan began to heat up, al-Qaida fighters were reported to be ‘streaming’ out of that region towards Yemen and Somalia, which were said to offer the terrorists many more hiding places than ‘Af-Pak’ was now able to. It was these
reports that finally prompted me to come to Somalia. The Horn of Africa was the battlefield in the War on Terror that mattered now – the next chapter in a story I have been following for a third of my life.
My interest in Somalia was not new. The first TV images of that country’s terrible civil war in the early 1990s were not easily forgettable. The feral violence, and the astoundingly destroyed urban landscape against which it was set, were unlike anything that has occurred in my lifetime, with the possible exception of Grozny. That may be why Somalia, so often labelled ‘the world’s most failed state’, still occupies a special, dark place in the imaginations of so many of my generation of Westerners. When I explained my new project to a journalist friend in London, who had spent many years covering the danger zones of South America, she replied: ‘Mogadishu? That’s one of those places that gives me nightmares, even though I’ve never been there.’
What has happened to Somalia since the civil war stands as a kind of cautionary tale for grown-ups, a vision of the anarchy that we too can expect should our own systems of governance ever be allowed to collapse. There has, famously, been no properly functioning central government in Mogadishu for over two decades. For the last several years, Afghanistan has come 179th in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index, an international league table that measures the level of graft in the public life of each of the world’s 180 nations; only one country has consistently ranked lower. An African Taliban, at war in a country more corrupt than Afghanistan! That was a place I was very curious to see.
Mogadishu lived up to expectations when I got there. It truly was the stuff of nightmares, particularly on my second visit in July
2011, when the southern half of the country was in the grip of a famine said to be the worst for sixty years. Refugees were pouring into the capital from the drought zones looking for help, even as trench warfare between al-Shabaab and the government’s forces backed by AMISOM, the Ugandan-led African Union Mission in Somalia, was raging across the city’s centre. A British photographer I met, an experienced Africa hand based in Kampala, observed that however often the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode out into the world, Somalia was where they always came back to, because this was where they were stabled; this was their home. War, famine, pestilence and death were indeed constants that summer, and Somalia really did seem to be the world’s most dangerous place.
By the time this book went to press in late 2012, however, things looked a little different. So much had changed since I began my dizzying journey through the Somali nation, a research project that took me to nine different countries across four continents, and still only scratched the surface. In August 2011 al-Shabaab, to the amazement of most in the international community, suddenly withdrew from Mogadishu, and have been in retreat ever since. At the end of 2011, the armies of Somalia’s southern and western neighbours, Kenya and Ethiopia, joined forces with AMISOM, forming an alliance that by September 2012 was poised to capture the economically vital port of Kismayo, al-Shabaab’s most important stronghold.
A handful of hardliners were expected to mount a heroic last stand against the infidel invaders, as remnants of al-Qaida and the Taliban had done in Kandahar against US-led forces in 2001. But few Somalia-watchers thought Kismayo would hold out for long. In Mogadishu, crucially, the military endgame in the south
coincided with the winding up of the Transitional Federal Government, the TFG, whose UN-backed mandate had expired after eight years in office. In September, a newly selected parliament voted to replace President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed with Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, a little known university professor who used to work as a consultant for the UN. The newcomer, a moderate Islamist with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, is admired for his perceived lack of corruption as well as for the fact that, unlike most educated Somalis, he did not flee Mogadishu during the civil war. His election was against all expectations. The incumbent, President Sheikh Sharif, was rumoured to have many supporters in the Gulf who had reportedly spent $7m in bribes in a bid to secure his re-election.
1
It was the first genuine presidential poll in a generation, representing what the UN Special Envoy Augustine Mahiga called ‘an unprecedented opportunity for peace’.
