The World's Most Dangerous Place (14 page)

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Fazul’s death was an allegation published in
SomaliaReport
, a news website set up and funded by the Canadian correspondent Robert Young Pelton, that it had been orchestrated by Godane. According to
SomaliaReport
, Fazul and his driver had been given instructions to meet some insurgent commanders at a certain al-Shabaab checkpoint outside Dayniile. Godane secretly ordered this checkpoint to be taken down, causing Fazul’s companion to drive straight on towards the enemy lines. If true, it was a piece of skulduggery worthy of the Borgias.

SomaliaReport
speculated that Godane hoped to curry favour with the new al-Qaida chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had taken over the organization following bin Laden’s assassination in May 2011, and whose relationship with the influential Fazul, a bin Laden loyalist, had always been tense. The relationship between Godane and Fazul had not exactly been easy, either. In 2009, Fazul posted a lengthy autobiography online in which he expressed concern at al-Shabaab’s political immaturity, and revealed that he had even criticized the formation of the organization in 2006, on the grounds that it was likely to undermine the Islamic Courts Union, which he described as ‘an official body . . . whose authority ought to be respected’. Bin Laden, no doubt on Fazul’s advice, consistently rejected Godane’s courtship of his organization. It was not until after his and Fazul’s death that Zawahiri accepted Godane’s overtures, and al-Shabaab and al-Qaida merged.

The irony of all this was that Fazul, one of the main reasons that the US covertly manoeuvred to bring down the ICU in 2007–8, probably represented America’s best chance at the time of stopping al-Shabaab in its tracks. If Washington had found a way to work with the ICU’s moderates instead of opting to destroy the whole regime, how might history have been different?

I had hoped to find a way to get close enough to al-Shabaab’s leadership to interview them, but after months of trying I concluded I was probably wasting my time. Godane was a recluse who was said sometimes to issue his orders, Wizard of Oz-style, from behind a curtain. It was a mystique-enhancing trick worthy of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban whom no Western journalist had seen for over a decade, and I was discouraged by the
noli me tangere
message behind it. Even the relative moderates such as
Sheikh Aweys or Mukhtar Robow rarely granted interviews to foreigners, and then only by email or, very occasionally, by phone. Face-to-face encounters were almost unheard of.

Mogadishu wasn’t like Kabul, where with the right contacts, money and patience, a foreign journalist could always find an insurgent willing to talk. The Taliban put great importance on getting their message across to an international audience, and were prepared to take considerable risks to do so. They understood that the continuation of Nato’s war depended on Western public approval ratings, and that the foreign media offered them their best opportunity to undermine these.

Al-Shabaab, by contrast, usually just wanted to shoot the messenger. Their common assumption, almost a default position, was that all journalists – even local ones – were traitors and spies. Al-Shabaab knew, or thought they knew, that AMISOM had access to CIA surveillance technology, and were paranoid about being traced. This meant that there was no phone number a journalist could call to request an interview, no email address to write to, and of course no physical office to visit.

The movement had a spokesman, the entertainingly named Sheikh Rage, who regularly issued press releases, but it was difficult if not impossible to speak to him, because his number, like all al-Shabaab numbers, was constantly changing. Then even if you were lucky enough to have the right number, there was no guarantee that he would answer your call, because like everyone else in Mogadishu he tended not to pick up if he didn’t recognize
your
number. He must have been one of the least accessible press spokesmen in the world.

Even local journalists struggled in this environment. When I went for help to a friendly producer at Radio Bar-Kulan, an AU-funded
station with a well-established news operation, every one of the many phone numbers he produced for Sheikh Rage turned out to be defunct. He rang colleagues on two other radio stations, but neither of them could produce an extant number either. I put this problem to one side, and went to ask the Burundians what they thought about al-Shabaab.

In late February 2011 the Burundians, the junior partners in AMISOM, had attempted to oust al-Shabaab from their main military base in the city, the former Ministry of Defence headquarters. The government in Bujumbura, facing tough questions about Burundi’s apparently open-ended commitment to the Somali mission, was tight-lipped about their casualties. A fortnight later, however, Burundian military sources revealed that they had suffered 43 dead and 110 wounded: one of the costliest operations of the entire campaign.

‘They started coming in with bullet wounds the moment the offensive began,’ recalled Ed Parsons, the Canadian medic assisting at the field hospital. ‘Then they started coming in with knife wounds: deep panga slashes. Then they started coming with blows from rocks. It was basically your worst Oliver Stone nightmare . . . You can criticize the Burundians for their lack of tactics, but there is no doubting their courage as fighters. Boy, they fight.’

The failure to provide the assault force with enough ammunition did not slow it down one bit. One soldier, unable to extract his bayonet from the al-Shabaab fighter he had just impaled, simply disconnected his rifle and charged on using its shoulder butt as a weapon, leaving the dying al-Shabaab fighter skewered to a wall.

It was hard to square such stories with the Burundian soldiers I had met around the AMISOM camp, who smiled shyly whenever
I greeted them before answering in courtly, archaic French. They were far less experienced than the Ugandans. Apart from a small policing contingent in earthquake-struck Haiti, the Somalia mission was the Burundi army’s first ever international venture. I found their lack of worldliness rather charming. They had a gentle, curiously artistic side to them, evident in the homely way they marked out the territory around their bivouacs with neat lines of half-buried orange juice cartons and yoghurt pots. Most of them were deeply Catholic, a hangover from Belgian colonial times. They held mass in their section of the base every Sunday, when African harmonies would soar ethereally above the tangled thornscrub where they were encamped. An AMISOM propaganda film showing a new rotation of Burundians on parade had to be scrapped when it was realized that the soldiers were marching beneath a giant illuminated cross, an obvious gift to the crusader-obsessed propagandists on the other side.

But for all their naivety, the Burundians were no strangers to violence. As Hutus and Tutsis, they had been killing each other at home for half a century. Many of the older soldiers had first picked up a gun as children. One of their colonels had started fighting at the age of seven. It was only in 2005 that Burundi, a nation of less than nine million, emerged from a twelve-year civil war that killed 300,000. An end to that bloodbath was negotiated through the African Union, which was why the grateful Bujumbura government had voted to contribute troops to AMISOM, the only African country apart from Uganda to do so.

The Ministry of Defence complex, a collection of identical concrete blocks built in the communist brutalist style by Siad Barre at the height of his power in the 1970s, sat on a hill dominating the district of Hodan, the north-west corner of the city. Mogadishans
nicknamed this imposing place Gashaandhigga (‘Drop Your Weapons’) – a reminder, if any were needed, of the iron fist with which the old dictator ruled his people for so long. The authority of Afweyne (‘Big Mouth’), as he was known, rested primarily on the army and the National Security Service, both of which were dominated by his own Darod Marehan clan. Hundreds of his political opponents disappeared into Gashaandhigga during the 1980s, where they were murdered or tortured to death, or imprisoned indefinitely without trial.

The ministry building at the centre of the complex, a famous symbol of Afweyne’s regime, had been shot to pieces long before al-Shabaab’s time. Gunfire and the elements had continued to round off the corners of its facade, turning windows and monumental doorways into rough-edged holes. Its sweating interior resembled a series of gloomy interlocking caves rather than former offices, with walls so pockmarked by bullets they looked like formations of grey coral.

My guide was the sector commander, Major Gerard Hamenyimana, an officer with a joke-shop scar down his cheek and chin, who grimaced at the memory of the battle he had fought a few weeks previously. Al-Shabaab counter-attacked almost immediately after his battalion’s capture of the complex, and went on counter-attacking for ten consecutive days. Three months later, the defenders were still on high alert. Ramadan was due to begin soon, and planeloads of ammunition had been arriving all week from Kampala in anticipation of a repeat of the previous year’s al-Shabaab offensive. Yet despite the ferocity of the recent fight for Gashaandhigga, it was the major’s confident opinion that the insurgency was now militarily spent. They were losing ground with every AMISOM attack, while the fighters opposing his men
seemed to grow younger and more desperate with every passing day.

From a heavy machinegun-emplacement on the roof of the ministry building, we peeked out at the northern suburb of Dayniile, al-Shabaab’s new field headquarters. In between was a no-man’s land of cactus and thornscrub pushing up through roofless ruins, a landscape with which I was by now becoming depressingly familiar. To the east were the tower blocks and radio masts of the Bakara Market, with the top of Mogadishu stadium visible just beyond. In the 1990s the stadium had served as the headquarters of the UN’s Pakistani peace-keeping contingent, to whom exhausted US soldiers pelted for safety at the end of
Black Hawk Down
: the finish line of what American military trainers still call a ‘Mogadishu Mile’.

The major led us back downstairs and out to the perimeter, which had been massively reinforced with sandbags. The troops were thickly spread along the fire step: four hundred of them, the major said, around the ministry building alone. The wall was so high that we were able to stroll along the gunline in its shade, safe from everything but a chance mortar strike. Hamenyimana called this a quiet day, and his troops did seem relaxed. Several radios were tuned to Radio Africa, so that jolly pop songs wafted up from their dugouts as we passed. Yet al-Shabaab’s fighters were always probing. Twice in five minutes, an enemy bullet snapped overhead, prompting bursts of return fire from the sentries stationed above us.

At one point, surreally, I thought I heard men singing. Hamenyimana grinned: I was not mistaken. It was coming from a couple of hundred yards away, along and back from the gunline, where the battalion choir was at practice for next day’s Sunday mass.

‘You know, I would like to have been
un prêtre
– a priest,’ the major suddenly confided. ‘I would like to have studied theology in London.’

We made our way over to the source of the hymn. The choir, all off-duty soldiers in T-shirts and shorts, were sitting in rows of plastic chairs arranged like the pews of a church, facing an altar built of ammunition cases, in a ruined chicken coop of a building that had once housed officer cadets in Siad Barre’s army. The major, clearly an aficionado, cocked his head to listen, before nodding with approval and leading us on.

‘It is a tragedy, but Somalia was once the
first
military power in Africa,’ Hamenyimana observed. ‘Officers came from every country to study at the academy here. Even Burundians. We admired the Somalis in those days. We wanted to be like them.’

We picked our way out of the ministry complex on to the Terebunka Road, once a major artery of the city but now blocked with truck containers filled with sand: al-Shabaab had expected AMISOM to attack their position with tanks, not infantry. It was the start of a long morning’s hike along the Burundian front. I took photographs of sleeping Burundian soldiers, a pair of emaciated cows grazing on rubbish, and the bullet-pocked front of a grocery decorated with bright little paintings of the goods it had once sold, standard advertising practice in a country with an illiteracy rate of over 60 per cent.
⁷
We had to sprint across one sniper-exposed section of the line helpfully signposted
DANGER DE MORT
. Beyond was a pharmacy with its side blown off, the shelves within still stocked with tempting-looking packets and boxes, a sign that the shop was almost certainly booby-trapped.

In another wasteland of shattered concrete and tangled thorn, a
district known as the Milk Factory although no milk had been processed there for many years, we were high-fived by a TFG soldier, one of the many interspersed with AMISOM’s troops all along the line of control. Hamenyimana looked apprehensively at this one, who was wearing combat trousers and a dirty yellow vest that read
FBI: Female Body Inspector
. His nearby bivouac didn’t look any more military than his vest. He and his friends had fenced off a large, tumbledown villa, and had brought their families to live with them there, front line or no. A group of women and children were visible in the villa’s trash-strewn courtyard, squatting around a fire from which a thin plume of smoke rose. A ‘technical’, a rusting pick-up truck with a four-barrelled anti-aircraft gun bolted to its load bay, was parked nearby. This weapon of choice for the warlords of the 1990s was a Somali innovation – perhaps the only thing to be created during those years of terrible destruction – that was subsequently copied by everyone from the Taliban to Libya’s anti-Gaddafi rebels in 2011.

The sight of these men, all members of the SNA, the fledgling Somali national army on which the TFG’s authority supposedly depended, did not bode well for the future. Western advisers had repeatedly pointed out that, to preserve discipline and foster esprit de corps, the SNA’s troops really needed to be housed in proper military barracks. As an ex-military dictatorship, Somalia was hardly short of bases. But the ranks of the SNA were filled with exclan militiamen like these, who were used to living on the streets ‘with their brothers’ – and the SNA’s officers could not afford to alienate them by ordering them to do otherwise. It was another sign of the fragility of the TFG’s hold on power. Could clan loyalty ever be supplanted by patriotism in circumstances such as these?