The World's Most Dangerous Place (10 page)

‘Busloads of pilgrims used to come, especially on the Sheikh’s birthday,’ Aden recalled.

Al-Shabaab soon put a stop to that. As Wahhabi Salafists they disapproved of shrine worship, which smacked to them of idolatry. In 2008, therefore, they smashed up the grave and scattered the
saint’s bones in the desert.
*
The pilgrim buses were turned back at gunpoint, the hawkers and traders driven off with sticks.

‘We all hated al-Shabaab for what they did,’ said Aden. ‘In Tieglow we reject them in our hearts, 100 per cent.’

This was not just because of the affront to the local saint. In a region devastated by the vicissitudes of war and the weather, the shrine’s reliability as an income generator made it a mainstay of the local economy. Al-Shabaab could not have done more to alienate the people of Tieglow if they had tried.

Amazingly, this tactical error was repeated in many other places in Somalia. Al-Shabaab was a dogmatic organization that seldom acknowledged its mistakes. The country is peppered with Sufi shrines, and from 2008 the militants took every opportunity to desecrate them, a policy that enraged Sufis everywhere. The Red Mosque in Mogadishu, which I had peeked out at from the Ugandan lines in Hawl Wadaag, was one of the shrines that suffered in this way. Although a professedly non-violent religious order – ‘Sufi Islam is gentle Islam,’ Aden insisted – in 2008 the Sufis formed a multi-clan militia, the Ahlu Sunna Waljama’a or ASWJ, which soon scored several victories over al-Shabaab, notably in central Somalia. Aden’s childhood acquaintance Gumo was in fact killed in one of these battles. By March 2010 the ASWJ had become the TFG government’s most important local ally, and so powerful that they were granted control of five government ministries.

It was six months before Aden could scrape up the money to get
out of Tieglow again, by when he had been picked up three times by marauding al-Shabaab gangs. On one occasion a fellow detainee revealed to their bullyboy tormentors that Aden spoke English. This was easily enough to warrant a death sentence among some al-Shabaab. ‘Sometimes it can be dangerous just to talk,’ as Aden pointed out. He was already in trouble with this particular group of fighters because his hair was unshaven at the sides, the style supposedly advocated by the Prophet. Once again, he was lucky: the group’s leader told him he was in a good mood that day, and booted him back on to the street with orders to get his hair cut.

He knew his luck would not last for ever, however.

‘I had three choices,’ he said. ‘To fight for al-Shabaab, to be killed by them, or to run away again.’

Aden fled back to TFG-controlled Mogadishu in the summer of 2010, and had been here ever since. He arrived just in time to witness al-Shabaab’s latest offensive, which was timed, as in 2009, to coincide with Ramadan. This one was called
Dhameytirka Dabadhilif
, ‘the War of the Elimination of the Stooges’. An al-Shabaab spokesman, Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage, issued a statement calling on ‘all al-Shabaab troops, beginning at this hour, to invade and destroy all entrenchments of the apostates and Christians’. The offensive opened with a suicide attack on another hotel, the Muna, a favourite meeting place for TFG politicians. Six MPs were killed. It was just the beginning: in the course of 2010, the city ambulance service recorded over 2,300 violent civilian deaths, and 6,000 more who were injured.
⁹

Aden got into trouble with al-Shabaab yet again when he tried to bring a friend of his, a paraplegic gunshot victim, across the lines to the doctors on the AMISOM base.

‘He’d been at the Benadir Hospital but all they could offer him was a wheelchair,’ he said.

The patrol that stopped him said they would kill him if they ever found him in an al-Shabaab-controlled area again. For that reason, he had not been into al-Shabaab’s areas of the city for eight months.

‘Never mind having your tongue cut out,’ he snorted. ‘There was a time when they’d cut your head off with a sword if they caught you with Ugandan medical papers.’

Life was as hard as it had ever been for Aden’s few remaining family members. The house he had shared with his aunt and sister had been destroyed. Home was now a shell-scrape in the Medina district, with walls formed of sacking strung between trees and a tarpaulin for a roof. They were not alone, for the district was crowded with refugees living rough – there were, he said, three hundred people living in his ‘village’ among the ruins – although there was little sense of community because the refugees tended to keep themselves to themselves. This was for fear of the
Amniyat
, al-Shabaab’s ‘security’ wing, whose frequently murderous agents were everywhere.

‘It is not possible to tell who is Amniyat and who is not, because they are ordinary people, from soldiers to shoe-cleaners. You cannot trust anyone; you have to watch what you say all the time.’

His was a feral existence, a Hobbesian struggle for daily survival. Food prices were going up, and the only income came from the handful of Shillings his aunt earned by taking in washing. Aden never ate more often than twice a day, therefore.

‘We eat bread. Or maize is cheap. We get beans, sometimes. We used to buy powdered milk, but that has become too expensive. We can’t afford oil or sugar, either.’

It was little wonder that he felt dizzy. On this meagre diet, Aden
went out into the city each day, walking the sizzling streets for hours – because he couldn’t afford the buses – in an endless search for work. His current plan was to get a job as a guard at the Villa Somalia presidential complex. The chief of security there belonged to the Jilible sub-clan, the same as him. The problem, he explained, was getting into the chief’s office.

‘Do you think,’ he coughed, ‘that you could help me with an introduction?’

I thought at first that he must be joking. Did he really think I could have such influence? It was the mark of a desperate man, if so; and showed that the power of clan patronage had its limits in Mogadishu, at least if you were a Jilible.

It was still no simple matter to travel about the city. That very morning, he said, his route here had been blocked by a fierce gun-battle, obliging him to make a lengthy detour that caused him to miss a place near the front of the queue for the OPD. On reaching the gate, he discovered a new regulation was in force: all patients had to surrender their wallets and phones to a gang of guards who were charging a dollar to get them back again on the way out. He sucked through his teeth, and sadly shook his head. Such petty official corruption, he meant to say, was the norm here.

The OPD was closing by this time, and the AMISOM sentries, relaxed until now about our occupation of their unfinished machinegun nest, were anxious for us to be gone. Aden, I suddenly guiltily realized, had not seen a doctor, the whole purpose of his coming here. But he said it didn’t matter because, as a matter of fact, he no longer felt dizzy; and added, as we walked together back up to the gate, that he felt much better for having spoken of his troubles to me.

I wasn’t sure how to interpret this. At the time, I cynically took
it as a coded, and not inelegant, request for money. I was happy to give him some: $50, enough to keep his family group in wheat or maize for a hundred days. He looked surprised, then very pleased. He quickly folded and refolded it and then, with a glance left and right to make sure no one was looking, slipped it into his shoe. Later, though, I concluded that I was wrong to be so cynical, and that Aden had meant what he said, at least in part. Talking to an outsider really had made him feel better. I was an emissary of a different world, who had affirmed to him merely by showing interest in his stories that Mogadishu was not normal, and that life did not have to be governed by poverty and savagery.

I gave him my contact details and he still emails me occasionally, short letters in shaky English, that always begin ‘dear freind’. He even phones sometimes, always from a different borrowed mobile, his voice pursuing me all the way back to Britain. His letters contain interesting snippets of news from Mogadishu. Once, he wanted me to investigate an organ-smuggling ring he believed was operating out of one of the city hospitals; a friend of his had apparently had a kidney stolen while under anaesthetic for an operation for a gunshot wound. (A story I never pursued, beyond asking the Canadian medic Ed Parsons about it. ‘Anything is possible in Mogadishu,’ he said.)

hi jmaes dear freind

this is a picture’s of the person that I had told you who his kindey

was stolen I summitted all of his evidence like computer result

anad ather letter U will see into your box

byee adden

Most of the time, though, he just wanted help finding work, ideally with one of the foreign NGOs in Somalia, Care or Save the Children or Médecins Sans Frontières – a favour I have never been able to swing for him, although I did try.

My personality I am still jobless

The country’s job opportunities are under hand of special

individual not easy to get a job in Somalia with out help special in

Mogadishu. Without outside help or inside. Things which

encourages that some persons to hold all jobs under their hands

are tribalism and corruption which is part of the manner.

I need your support most if you have any contact with NGOS and

agencies in the home link me to them if you can.

It is good for me having your contacts

We stay in touch. As a Somali fisherman might say: If Aden insists on seeing me as a lifeline to a better future, who am I to cut him adrift? All I can do for now is to tow him through dangerous waters. It would be good, one day, if I could find a way to reel him in.

*
I later asked Aden to write down his full clan lineage, although I quickly wished that I hadn’t. He wrote:

A – Rahanweyn

B – Jilible

C – Ilkole

D – Abow enow hasan

E – Gasaro gud

F – Bagadi

G – Abasad

H – Diile (Dhiigle in Somali)

I – Yamen orgin is Yamen

*
‘Aden and Xawl’, Aden explained, is the Somali equivalent of ‘Adam and Eve’.

*
Such horror stories remain distressingly common on the well-established smugglers’ run over to Yemen. In 2009, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, some 78,000 Somalis and Ethiopians made this voyage, of whom 376 people were categorized as ‘dead or missing’.

*
An odd nickname meaning ‘Pigeon Tea’. Aden’s explanation – that he ‘used to drink tea like a pigeon’ – was unconvincing.

*
The Qadiriya is one of three Sufi brotherhoods with strong representation among Somalis; the others are the Ahmediya and the Salihiya. Aweys Al-Barawi was murdered in 1909 by the Mad Mullah, Sayyid Mohammed Hassan, who was jealous of his influence.
⁸

*
Wahhabis abhor shrine worship so fiercely that in 1913 they razed all the domed graves around the holy city of Medina, including those of the uncle, father and wives of the Prophet Mohammed himself.

5

The failure of Somali politics

Villa Somalia presidential complex, March 2011

Mohamed Omaar, Somalia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, leaned back in his office chair. He was just explaining to me why he had returned from the safety of exile to take on this most challenging of jobs, his sense of national duty and the need he felt to form a bridge to the rest of the world, when he was interrupted by an ear-crushing
BADOOOOOM
from outside. The office’s single window was protected by sandbags piled up on its sill, but the blast was so near and so powerful that the glass briefly rippled, like the surface of the water in a bath when you bang the side of the tub. One of my eyelids slowly dipped of its own accord. It was a comedy twitch, worthy of Herbert Lom, the Inspector Dreyfus actor in the
Pink Panther
films.

‘Shelling?’ said the minister with a thin smile. ‘It is like water off a duck’s back to us . . . But don’t worry, I expect that one was outgoing.’

Before I could answer, a machinegun opened up, loud and near,
and then, just as the noise stopped again, all the lights went out. From a chink in the sandbags the gloom was pierced by a hot needle of sunshine that fell across the desk between us, the beam filled with motes of crazily tumbling dust.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said again, his glasses glinting. ‘This is normal. All normal.’

When the lights came on again – the presidential complex was equipped with back-up generators, so we didn’t have to wait for long – he checked to see I was still listening before carrying on exactly where he had left off; although I was, frankly, having trouble concentrating. It was less than twenty minutes since a Casspir had dropped me off on the parade ground outside, and my shirt was still sticking to my back from the flak-jacketed, sweat-bathed drive through the centre of town. It had taken many days of difficult phone calls to secure an interview with any TFG minister, and more effort still to persuade AMISOM to give me a ride, despite the shortness of the journey here, a mere ten minutes from the airport. In any normal city, I would certainly have walked it. But now that I was here, the Villa Somalia complex, the seat of every president since independence in 1960 and the country’s most conspicuous symbol of political power, felt a lot more dangerous than I had expected. Set on high ground in the centre of the city, it commanded an excellent view of the port area and the ocean beyond. The walls facing inland, though, were disconcertingly peppered with bullet holes. It seemed an extraordinary place from which to try to govern a country. Omaar’s sangfroid was not put on: this really was his ordinary working environment.