The World's Most Dangerous Place (16 page)

‘So what is stopping you from leaving?’ I asked, nodding towards the camp’s unguarded entrance. ‘Could you not go back for your wife and baby?’

Jabril and Abshir looked at each other.

‘Two guys did leave here two days ago,’ said Jabril. ‘They wanted to find a better life for themselves. They got as far as Afgoye, but then someone recognized them.’
*

‘And what happened to them?’

There was the tiniest pause.

‘They were beheaded by al-Shabaab this morning,’ said Abshir.

‘But how do you know?’

‘We are still in touch with people,’ Jabril said. ‘We hear things.’

‘The hills have ears round here,’ Abshir added.

Just then, as if on cue, a third man sauntered up: a fresh-faced 17-year-old who wanted to tell me how he had arrived in the camp just two days before. He had come all the way from Kismayo, he said, travelling at night to avoid the militants who would certainly have killed him had they realized where he was headed. There was a puppyish quality to him that reminded me of ‘Young Thing’, the naive, wannabe suicide bomber in Nuruddin Farah’s novel
Crossbones
. Young Thing was the type of beta-male who would do anything to impress his peers, a willingness to please that also made him highly dangerous. It was clear from their sudden silence that Jabril and Abshir, the camp’s old lags, did not trust this newcomer one bit. I could almost see them wondering if he was an al-Shabaab infiltrator. Their camp had no walls but it was a prison to them
nevertheless, with all the vicious internal politics associated with such places, and similar behavioural conventions.

‘No one in here will tell you if they’ve killed people, but there’s more that have than haven’t,’ Jabril observed at one point.

I suspected that belonging to the right clique or gang in here could easily be a matter of life or death.

Later that summer, in Puntland, I met a French criminologist called Daniel LaDouceur, an expert in youth gang culture who knew this deserters’ camp well. Gang membership, he explained, was a primitive survival tactic based on strength in numbers. With the collapse of central authority in 1991 and the breakdown of the clan system, Somali society had disintegrated further into a constellation of gangs, the continuing survival of which, he thought, presented the single greatest obstruction to Somalia’s civil reconstruction.

‘Everything here is about gangs: gangs of kids,’ he said. ‘Pirates operate in gangs. People smugglers in the Gulf of Aden are gangs. The militias in Mogadishu say they are clan organizations but really they are gangs too . . . Al-Shabaab is a super-gang, a collection of small clans ganging up on the big clans. And they are all just kids.’

LaDouceur was piloting a UN-funded scheme called ‘Youth at Risk’ which aimed to take potential gangsters off the street by paying them to take lessons in citizenship, governance and the rule of law.

‘At the moment the international community’s strategy is to try to control the violence through the clan elders. But the elders are the wrong interlocutors because, as they themselves acknowledge, they have lost control of their young men.’

In the jargon of sociologists, talking to elders was a ‘top-down’
approach, when what was needed was a ‘bottom-up’ one: job-creation schemes, paid community work, and education-based initiatives such as his Youth at Risk programme. Until the UN started viewing Somalia through this prism of gang psychology, he thought, the country would never be demilitarized and nothing would change.

In the deserters’ camp I was introduced to a friend of Jabril and Abshir, Abdi-Osman, whose story suggested that the gangs could be literally interchangeable. Abdi-Osman was not just an ex-al-Shabaab fighter: he was also an ex-pirate. He recalled the night when two friends had persuaded him to put to sea in a small fishing skiff, with no plan other than to head out and see what happened. His friends told him they would be gone for a night or two, although the voyage ended up lasting for eighteen. They drifted about, waiting for a ship to pirate, and eventually attempted to board a French-flagged freighter.

‘I don’t remember its name, but it was pretty big,’ he said.

Unfortunately for them, their skiff wasn’t fast enough to come alongside their quarry, and the attack was a dismal failure. In fact, the whole adventure was madness. Abdi-Osman and his friends were from Hiraan, an inland state, and had no experience whatsoever of the sea. As he sheepishly acknowledged, they were hopeless amateurs compared to the professional pirates they sought to emulate. He was eventually put ashore at Mogadishu, hungry, sun-burned and destitute. He was picked up in the port by two al-Shabaab recruiters, and immediately agreed to join the insurgency. He shrugged when I asked him what was going through his mind at the time.

‘Every man who has nothing will try something to get money,’ he replied.

At twenty-three, Abdi-Osman had experienced enough desperate adventure to last most people a lifetime. Al-Shabaab or piracy? Morality simply didn’t come into the equation for him.

The two great Somali scourges of the West were simply alternative livelihoods to him. This roguish attitude had a certain charm to it. It was hard not to admire his survivor’s instinct and the way he had made his own luck. He reminded me somewhat of the Artful Dodger, the plucky chief pickpocket in
Oliver Twist
. On the margins of another of the groups I spoke to, meanwhile, I thought I spotted innocent Oliver himself, a small child in an embroidered green shirt that was much too long for him. I waved at him, and he was propelled forward until he stood looking up at a circle of his elders, wide-eyed and mute, the reluctant camp mascot. His name was Liban, and he was nine years old.

In a telephone interview in 2011, Sheikh Aweys asserted that ‘in Islam, the age of responsibility is defined as fifteen years old’, and denied that anyone under that age took any part in the fighting on behalf of al-Shabaab – as well he might, since employing child soldiers under the age of fifteen is defined by the International Criminal Court as a war crime.
¹²
Liban’s story, delivered in barely audible monosyllables that had to be coaxed from him by the older boys, proved how untrue the Sheikh’s claim was. The boy was an orphan – he just looked at me blankly when I asked about his parents – who had been with al-Shabaab since he was seven. To begin with he was used as a runner. Like a Royal Navy powder-monkey in the nineteenth century, he carried supplies and ammunition up to the fighters in the front line; as he grew older he was sent further forward in order to scope out enemy positions because, as an older boy explained, ‘children make good spies’.

I asked if he had ever carried a gun, and he replied that he had;
and yes, he had used it once or twice, in order to kill people. I wondered what had prompted him to leave his unit, which after so long must have felt like a surrogate family. An older boy again answered for him: Liban had been starving because his unit, low on food themselves, were no longer able to feed him properly. And so one night he had wandered out to a road and flagged down the first passing car, asking the driver to take him somewhere, anywhere, to find something to eat. It was pure chance that he had ended up in this camp.

‘And what will you do next, Liban?’

He looked me in the eye for the first time: here, at last, was a question he understood and recognized.

‘I’m ready to fight again!’ he trilled. ‘I want to fight for the TFG! I’m not scared!’

He said this with such fervour that one or two of the crowd looked away, sucking through their teeth. Liban was no Oliver Twist, I realized, but a deeply damaged little boy, a dangerous, feral creature who knew only how to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of the warzone. His reasoning seemed binary, as simple as a mollusc’s: hungry, not hungry, alive, not alive. Did he know that killing people was wrong? I was sure not. His moral compass was terrifyingly absent, and there was no soft-hearted Nancy figure at hand to redeem him.

There was, though, a contender for the role of Bill Sykes. I had been speaking to the boys for over an hour, and was beginning to think I had learned all I could from the deserters, when I fell into conversation with an older man with a skull cap and a long, Islamist’s beard – the only beard among the deserters, in fact.

‘I can’t afford a razor,’ he deadpanned when I asked him, jokingly, why he had not shaved it off.

But Abdikadir, 33, was no joke. The other deserters were visibly wary of him. He was not an ex-foot soldier but a former mid-level commander, who had quit the insurgency suffering from what sounded like old-fashioned battle fatigue.

‘I still hear the sound of fighting in my head,’ he said, with a faraway look in his eye. ‘All we ever did in al-Shabaab was fight. The battle against the Ethiopians was the worst. I tell you how long I’ve been fighting. You see that guy over there? He’s twenty-three. I remember when he was turned down by al-Shabaab because he was too young.’

It was another dark joke. Abdikadir had been in the camp for less than two months but was already regretting it. He had expected to be debriefed by the TFG when he deserted, and indeed was willing to share all he knew. Yet no one had so far asked him anything, and now he felt slighted.

‘I had a good life in al-Shabaab,’ he said bitterly. ‘I had a house, and three cars. My family had enough to eat. Look. This was me.’

He produced a mobile phone and prodded at the buttons. Across the tiny, cracked screen flickered some shaky footage of a man in combat gear with his head wrapped in a keffiyeh, posing by a Toyota. In the background was a newly built concrete bungalow.

‘I gave all that up for this,’ he said, waving dismissively at the dusty parade ground, ‘and now, even my wife has been taken from me. Why does the government not want to talk to me? I have a book full of names of people who could help them . . . After Ramadan, if nothing has changed, that might be the time for me to start walking from here.’

He said there had been between three hundred and four hundred fighters in his group, including several foreigners, most of
them from Kenya and Sudan but also people from America and Europe.

‘The foreigners were mostly being trained as suicide bombers,’ he said then. ‘They were kept apart from us, in a different camp. Outside, we would walk on one side of the road, they on the other. They had hero status. Even the Somalis from abroad were treated as heroes.’

He recalled a Somali from Britain among this latter group who had been encouraged to take part in a recruitment video, although he couldn’t name him. Did he know of any British-Somali suicide bombers; had he heard of Abu Ayyub al-Muhajir, ‘the Migrant’, the 21-year-old student from Ealing, west London, who blew himself up in Baidoa in 2007?

‘You know of one,’ he replied. ‘I know of many.’

‘And what do you think about suicide bombing?’

Abdikadir stroked his beard and looked at me as though the question was strange.

‘It was what they had registered in themselves to do,’ he shrugged eventually. ‘It was part of their path to Heaven.’

The Ugandan medical officer reappeared, his rounds of the dormitories complete. At the sound of our Casspir’s engine starting up, a group of 15-year-olds materialized and asked to pose for a team photograph. Abdikadir melted away, and suddenly we were back in the world of schoolboy buffoonery as they crowded in for the shot, laughing, swearing, their white teeth flashing as they jostled for the best positions. They looked like the cream of Somalia youth, in far better condition than the Mogadishu average. The MO confirmed that they were mostly in rude health. The only new medical problem he had found was an infestation of fleas in the dormitory bedding. There seemed to be hope for the future.
And yet the horror remained just a step away for all these young men. As we queued to climb back into the vehicle, one of the 20-year-olds pulled me aside again.

‘The bearded man – Abdikadir,’ he said. ‘What did he say to you?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You shouldn’t trust what he says. He’s a bad one.’

‘In what way is he bad?’

‘He was one of the executioners. He used to chop off people’s heads with a sword.’

*
The so-called Afgoye Corridor just south-west of Mogadishu, home to over half a million refugees displaced by years of fighting in the capital, is a well-known al-Shabaab stronghold.

7

The famine

Badbaado refugee camp, Dharkenley district, June–July 2011

In the first week of June 2011, in the al-Shabaab-controlled southern regions of Gedo and Lower Juba, six nomads were attacked and eaten by hungry lions. Local media pounced on this horror story, noting that lions generally only attacked humans
in extremis
. For six people to be eaten within a week was almost unheard of. What could it portend?

A month later, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, Mark Bowden,
*
announced that two al-Shabaab-controlled districts were in the grip of an official famine: an apocalyptic term seldom used by aid officials, and which had not been heard in Somalia since 1992. Yet Bowden made clear that, this time, it was potentially just the beginning. Like some Old Testament prophet
of doom, he warned that without immediate foreign intervention the famine would spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months.

I had seen the effects of famine before, in northern Haiti in the early 1990s, when I witnessed an entire village scrabbling in the dust for the remnants of the contents of an upturned porridge pot. But the scale of this disaster was of a different order. The underlying drought in the region was said to be the worst for sixty years. By late July, 3.7 million Somalis were in need of food aid, almost half of the country’s total population. Across the Horn of Africa, over 12 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance. The very young suffered worst of all. Between May and July, according to American officials, the famine claimed the lives of an estimated 29,000 Somali children under the age of five.