The World's Most Dangerous Place (15 page)

We came eventually to a district called African Village, built in
1974 to house the VIP delegates to a summit of the Organization of African Unity – the forerunner, ironically enough, of the African Union, the sponsors of the AMISOM troops now in occupation here. The district had been a showcase of modernity in its day, with large, airy accommodation blocks neatly arranged along leafy avenues that must once have been very pleasant.

In the 1980s it was so favoured by senior civil servants and their families that less fortunate Mogadishans nicknamed it Booli Qaran (‘Stolen Public Money’). That affluent era was long gone now, commemorated by the burned-out carcass of a yellow, American-style school bus.

Back at the ministry complex the major stopped by the eastern gate. This had been filled in with Hesco barriers on which ‘8 BN AMISOM’ had been picked out in empty strawberry yoghurt pots. It was a memorial to his battalion’s fallen, spontaneously constructed at the scene of the fiercest fighting of all. Just inside the gateway was a deep conical crater in which lay a blackened engine block and a twist of axle: all that remained of an al-Shabaab suicide truck. Hamenyimana described how, after a week of trying to force the gate, the insurgents had massed for one final attempt. The truck had tried to ram its way through, but the weight of Burundian gunfire pouring through the windscreen was too much, and the driver was killed before he was able to detonate the explosives in the back. The gate was partially blocked by the riddled vehicle, which finally blew up just as al-Shabaab’s main force of infantry was trying to negotiate its way around it.

‘We picked up sixty of their dead,’ said the major, shaking his head. ‘Sixty! Can you imagine?’

Al-Shabaab’s supply of fighters prepared to martyr themselves did seem inexhaustible, like an industrial conveyor belt of young
suicide. I wondered, not for the first time, how their leaders had managed to create this demonic meat-grinder. As Somalis never tired of telling you, suicide bombing was a foreign import, almost unheard of until a decade ago and unfavoured as a tactic even at the height of the civil war. Yet I suspected that many of the traits required in a successful suicide bomber were deeply rooted in the national character. Nomadic warrior tradition, for instance, placed great importance on the obviously useful quality of fearlessness.

‘I never saw a Somali who showed any fear of death, which, impressive though it sounds, carries with it the chill of pitilessness and ferocity as well,’ wrote Gerald Hanley. ‘The Somalis died as they liked to die, contemptuously, throwing off the cloak-blanket and staring at the firing squad, sneering at the trembling rifles. They had had their fragment of living, their brief satisfaction, and they had prayed. Now die.
Hrun sheg! Wallahi!
’
⁸

Fearlessness, however, is not quite the same thing as actively seeking to die as you kill your enemy, as these young suicide bombers appeared to do. It is not natural to want to destroy oneself. The mindset it takes to do so therefore has to be nurtured, if not taught from scratch. Al-Shabaab’s suicide bomber mentors were skilled theologians, expert at twisting the tenets of Islam to promote and justify martyrdom. Just as importantly, perhaps, they knew exactly which psychological buttons to press in their young charges.

Martyrs for Islam, famously, are rewarded with the attentions of seventy-two virgins when they reach heaven. In Somalia, al-Shabaab’s mentors were said to have shown their pupils Bollywood DVDs, and told their young charges that they were watching footage shot by militants who had already blown themselves up and gone to Paradise.
⁹
It obviously helped that the trainee bombers
were uneducated and highly impressionable boys, for the most part, who were easily misled and lied to. Their gullibility was sometimes breathtaking. But so, too, was the religious hypocrisy of their mentors. Bollywood movies are a byword for licentiousness in Muslim Asia. Their troupes of gyrating
houris
are seen as agents of moral corruption, to be resisted at all costs. Indeed, the popularity of the genre in Afghanistan was one of the main reasons that the Taliban banned television when they came to power in 1996.

There was no doubt that al-Shabaab’s foot soldiers were sexually frustrated. In this, perhaps, they were no different from teenagers in all those other parts of the Islamic world where pre-marital intercourse of all kinds is
haram
. In one recently overrun al-Shabaab position, AMISOM troops were astonished to find the walls covered with doodles of the most obscene type.

‘There was a lot of rape imagery – a lot of bestiality, and half-man, half-beast stuff,’ said an AMISOM public relations officer who saw it. ‘It was certainly not the sort of thing you would associate with pious Islamists.’

The discovery led one UN official in Nairobi to joke that to neutralize al-Shabaab as a fighting force, all AMISOM needed to do was to fly in two planeloads of prostitutes from Bangkok and ferry them up to the front.

The connection between pornography and Islamic terrorism had been made before. One of the more intriguing discoveries made by the US Navy SEALs who stormed Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in May 2011 was a ‘fairly extensive’ collection of porn films.
¹⁰
Did the puritanical scourge of the ‘decadent’ West have a porn habit? It seemed so unlikely at the time that many Westerners dismissed the report as black propaganda put out by the CIA. Yet US officials who had seen
evidence gathered during investigations of other Islamic militants said it was ‘not unusual’ to discover porn in such cases.

I was later amazed to discover a large body of psychiatric literature dedicated to the role of sex in suicide bombing.
¹¹
I could just about grasp that to enable them to kill innocent people, suicide bombers commonly ‘dehumanized’ their target before pulling the pin – and that this process, according to one analyst, was very similar to the ‘desensitizing’ effect on the male brain of too much pornography. In both cases, I could see, human beings were reduced to the status of objects. But I did not realize that some Islamist suicide bombers literally wrapped up their genitals before their mission in order to preserve them for the promised seventy-two virgins; nor did I know that the act of suicide is commonly described as their ‘wedding’. Some psychiatrists interpret the moment of detonation as a kind of consummation, the ultimate physical release of the frustrations of a virgin’s life on earth, a grotesque orgasm of body parts.

The US military psychoanalyst Nancy Kobrin delved even deeper into the suicide-bomber’s psyche. She thought suicide bombing was a symptom of early ‘problematic bonding’ between sons and their mothers, which she regarded as inevitable in Muslim societies where ‘the female, instead of being valued and cherished, is denigrated, abused and pathologically controlled from day one. There is no regard for the mother’s stress hormone level or her devotion to her newborn. Ultimately, this not only jeopardizes the infant’s health but can lead to severe ego dysfunction as well as cognitive impairments, such as flying planes into buildings rather than just fantasizing about it.’

The West had long assumed that Islamic terrorism was primarily about politics. How much of it was actually driven by
dysfunction in the terrorist’s maternal relationship? It was certainly suggestive that in the 1990s, the Saudis repeatedly sent bin Laden’s mother, Umm Usama, to Sudan and Afghanistan in order to get her son to ‘behave’. Kobrin noted that
Ummi
– ‘Mummy’ in Arabic – comes from the same root as
Ummah
, or ‘community’, the Koranic term for the global Muslim diaspora that bin Laden hoped to unite. ‘The Arab Muslim communal self-perception is [thus] linked to the maternal,’ Kobrin wrote.

There was no doubt something in this thesis, although again it did not quite explain what was happening in Somalia. From a Freudian point of view the mother–son relationship was ‘problematic’ for all Muslims, according to Kobrin. Yet the epidemic of suicide bombing was not universally spread, any more than the extremist ideology that underpinned it was. It seemed to me that neither would have flourished in Somalia without the civil war, which had silenced the voices of moderation that might have countered the extremists. There were no schools or teachers, the clan elders had been scattered, and the fathers, very often, were dead.

‘One asks – where is the father?’ wrote Kobrin. ‘The father’s absence seems to reflect the frequently heard complaint in the interview literature of terrorists that their fathers were absent. We might conclude that the reason terrorists remain forever tied into their mothers is precisely because of the absence of a father in Islamic regimes.’

Like the first generation of Taliban in the 1990s, many al-Shabaab recruits were indeed orphans of parents killed by famine or war. The careers of thousands of other al-Shabaab fighters had begun, as Mohamed Omaar observed, with the trauma of sudden abduction from the family home, a separation that all too often became permanent. In either case it meant that youths were left
vulnerable, hungry, and ripe for exploitation by ambitious ideologues operating
in loco parentis
.

At the AMISOM base, just beyond the north perimeter, was a camp set aside by the TFG for deserters from al-Shabaab. The existence of this place was little advertised, and I was told early on that there was no chance of gaining permission to visit it. The inmates’ first-hand knowledge of how the insurgency worked made them a source of intelligence which neither the TFG nor AMISOM much wanted to share. Eventually, however, I and three other foreign journalists badgered the Ugandan civil-military affairs officer, an avuncular lieutenant colonel called Katwekyeire, to let us accompany an army medical officer there on one of his weekly health visits.

There were 168 ex-al-Shabaab fighters living in the camp, almost double the number three months previously, which was another indicator that the war was going AMISOM’s way. The numbers were not huge, yet al-Shabaab fighters were already deserting faster than the TFG could handle them. It was not even their intelligence officers but AMISOM’s who screened and interrogated the inmates before releasing them into the camp for rehabilitation. There were also dark rumours that TFG officials close to President Sharif had sold some al-Shabaab deserters back to the enemy, with senior fighters commanding the highest prices.

I had come prepared for anti-Western hostility from a gang of hardened jihadist militants. Instead I found a crowd of school-age teenagers, spirited, unruly, and for the most part instantly likeable. Their average age was fifteen. They lived in large, closely packed dormitories that looked out over a sandy parade ground to a
huddle of half-built blockhouses on the other side. Dozens of them clustered around the back of the Casspir from the moment we arrived, clearly bored and apparently glad of the novelty of strangers to talk to. It was disorienting, but in their Lakers T-shirts and Nile Sports tracksuits, they resembled schoolboys anywhere in the world. They behaved like them too, particularly in the way they made faces behind the back of Najib, an officious type who ‘coordinated’ the camp on behalf of the TFG. No one had warned Najib of our visit, and for a moment it seemed we would be ejected from his kingdom, although he was soon calmed by a phone call back to Katwekyeire.

I asked the crowd for their names.

‘Saifullah,’ said one, after a moment’s hesitation.

‘Musa,’ said another.

‘Hizbullah,’ said a third, to titters all around.

‘Mohamed al-Shabaab,’ said a fourth, to guffaws.

It was a good joke – absurd pseudonyms to please the silly gaalo – and they clapped me on the back when I smiled to show that I got it and didn’t mind being teased.

‘Our real names are all left at the door here,’ one of them added apologetically. ‘I’m sure you understand.’

The atmosphere felt part army boot camp, part school sports day. There was no perimeter fence to speak of, and no guards, for the inmates here had all volunteered for ‘deprogramming’, as Najib called the rehabilitation process. There were plans to run vocational training courses in mechanics and electronics when the sheds across the square were finally completed. In the meantime, the boys underwent three mandatory hours a day of ‘correct’ Islamic instruction, designed to undo the ‘lies’ they had been taught by al-Shabaab.

At first they answered our questions with platitudes. Al-Shabaab was bad and the TFG was good, they said, because there was ‘no life, no prospects’ in the insurgency.

‘We are taught how to load and unload – that’s it,’ said one. ‘We don’t matter to them. I want to fight for the TFG.’

But as the novelty of our presence wore off and the crowd began to thin and break up into smaller groups, the conversations became more interesting. Among the older ex-al-Shabaab, the young men who were no longer in their teens, I detected a troubling level of discontent, and they were keen to explain why.

‘Don’t let this place fool you,’ said one long-faced young man, glancing over his shoulder. His name, he said, was Jabril, he was twenty-one, and he had been living in the camp for six months. ‘Some of the younger ones here are believers, but in truth we are just TFG showpieces. I was promised a better life when I came here – a job, a visa, a passport – but that doesn’t happen. So far they have given us nothing.’

‘It’s true,’ said his friend Abshir, a Kenyan Somali who had come to the camp at the same time. ‘The TFG have been very welcoming. At least we are alive and well. Yet most of us are thinking every day: how do I get out of here?’

‘You ask about our future,’ Jabril went on, ‘but we cannot think beyond surviving in the present. And meanwhile, we are losing our families.’

Defection, he explained, came at a high cost to the older, married fighters. Jabril had left behind a wife and baby somewhere in al-Shabaab territory, since when the wife had been ‘taken’ by another fighter. It seemed that battlefield marriages had been forced on the wives of several of the deserters here, no doubt in order to deter others from running to the gaalo.