The World's Most Dangerous Place (19 page)

I spent a day following another visiting official around the city, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, a veteran American diplomat called Lynn Pascoe, who went to visit the president at the Villa Somalia. This in itself was a moment of some
significance. AMISOM’s latest offensive had pushed al-Shabaab out of effective mortar range of the presidential complex. It was the first time in years that it was judged safe enough for someone as senior as Pascoe.

Sheikh Sharif’s state office had mirrored doors and marble floors and smelled strongly of patchouli. The press were herded in for the photo opp. Sharif was wearing the same blue suit and embroidered kufi cap he wore in a framed photograph of himself that hung above the presidential desk. He and Pascoe sat stiff-backed in leather armchairs, grinning furiously at each other across a glass coffee table bearing a small flagpole with the Somali national colours waving from it. The tabletop itself appeared to be supported by a large jar of gobstoppers, which seemed an odd choice for an office that depended as much as Sharif’s did on the ability to make small talk. The conversation that ensued was, in fact, desperately stilted.

‘So . . . how are you?’ Pascoe began. ‘It’s so lovely to see you again . . .’

Sheikh Sharif nodded and clasped his hands and hoped the Under-Secretary-General had had a pleasant flight to Mogadishu.

‘Yeesss!’ Pascoe nodded back. ‘It’s good to see the airport looking so busy!’

There was something about the way they bobbed their heads at each other that reminded me of the courtship ritual of iguanas. They were still nodding in this way as the press pack was chivvied from the room.

Pascoe’s formal statement for the cameras afterwards was just as bland. Flanked by the president and the prime minister as well as the speaker, three dark Somalis in three dark blue suits, he spoke of international solidarity and a shared clear vision and of helping
Somalia to move forward in the family of nations. It was not until later, as he prepared to board his plane back to Nairobi at the end of a long day, and the mask of smiles was starting to slip in the debilitating heat, that I learned what Pascoe really thought of Sheikh Sharif and the TFG.

‘It would be good if there was some evidence of them doing their jobs,’ he growled, irritably running a finger beneath his shirt collar. Quite remarkably, this had remained buttoned to the top all day long, and his tie was still pulled up tight. What, I asked, would the UN do if the government failed to meet the latest deadline for drawing up a constitution and holding elections?

‘I suppose we’ll have to see where we are,’ he shrugged. ‘If there’s no change, we’ll just have to start again.’

It was no doubt fortunate for the TFG that, however inadequate their response to the famine, al-Shabaab’s was incomparably worse. Godane and his faction simply refused to take the crisis seriously. I met one experienced Somali official, an employee of the UN children’s agency UNICEF, who had spent many months trying to persuade al-Shabaab’s so-called ‘humanitarian committee’ to allow at least some emergency food aid through. His job was dangerous as well as difficult: he would only speak to me on condition that I withheld his name.

‘I used to have a contact in Shabaab-controlled Mogadishu whom I would go to meet in secret,’ he recalled. ‘He would take written messages from UNICEF to their humanitarian committee. But one day he just wasn’t there any more. I eventually found a new phone number for him. It was a number in Kismayo. I had to beg him to let me email my latest message from UNICEF, but he was so paranoid. He created a new email account especially for my message. One hour after I’d sent it, the account was defunct again.’

Godane’s faction in the end simply wasn’t interested in co-operating with the foreigners, not even by back channels. On one occasion, while trying to negotiate a delivery to Lower Shabelle, a region in the heart of the famine zone with a population of almost a million, the UNICEF official was told by the militants that he should negotiate exclusively with their ‘regional humanitarian coordinator’. This important-sounding officer turned out to be a foot soldier of just sixteen years old.

‘The leadership were faceless – pathetic,’ he said. ‘There was a famine, yet no senior people had been put in charge of relief operations. They only had messengers.’

The hardliners may have been a lost cause, but UNICEF had better success when they approached Mukhtar Robow. On 13 July, two planes carrying five tons of emergency food and medicine were permitted to land at Baidoa. It was the first international airlift to the region for two years. Robow, who was born in nearby Berdaale, was not prepared to see his fellow Rahanweyn clansmen starve to death for reasons of half-baked ideology – and half-baked it undoubtedly still was. Just south of Mogadishu in Afgoye, on the cusp of the fasting month of Ramadan, al-Shabaab was reported to have banned the consumption of samosas, on the grounds that their triangular shape was too similar to the symbol for the Christian Holy Trinity.
¹⁰

Catalysed by the famine, the rift within al-Shabaab’s leadership was becoming significant. Aden’s aunt, who was in Baidoa at the time of the UNICEF airlift, described to her nephew how Robow had dispatched fifty technicals to secure the airport ahead of the arrival of the planes. No one would normally try to challenge such an impressive array of firepower, yet on this occasion a rival al-Shabaab leader, a known Godane loyalist, also sent fifty
technicals to the airport. The day ended in a tense Mexican standoff, and with UNICEF unlikely to want to repeat their bold experiment.

The argument between Robow and Godane over famine policy rumbled on, but the row was soon eclipsed by developments on the Mogadishu front line. Throughout July, the city had been bracing itself for another offensive over Ramadan, which this year began on 1 August. For this reason, in the last week of July, the Ugandans launched their own pre-emptive strike in Bondhere district in the right-centre of the line. It was another resounding success.

‘We heard they’d brought seven hundred reinforcements – all new recruits,’ one Ugandan infantry captain told me. ‘That was good news for us. It was a walk in the park.’

AMISOM’s advance had become relentless. The captain described how his men had laughed as they killed a fighter who had popped up next to one of their T55s and opened fire with a Kalashnikov, the bullets bouncing off the tank’s hull in all directions. The Ugandans had every reason to be confident. Their opposition were children. One day, waiting at the base convoy point for another ride up to the front, I came across three recently captured al-Shabaab fighters, the oldest of whom was seventeen, the youngest fifteen. They were slumped along the wall of an administrative Portakabin awaiting transport to who knew where, their hands cuffed behind their backs, dirty and dejected, a look of shock in their eyes. They were volunteers, they said, who had put their hands up when an al-Shabaab recruiter came to their school. This had happened just fifteen days ago. They had decided to surrender when they became separated from their unit and ran out of bullets. Why, I asked, had they put their hands up in the first place? The boys all looked at each other.

‘We were given a piece of fruit every day,’ said one of them.

For al-Shabaab, the famine was the most convincing recruiting sergeant of all.

Reinforcements of this calibre were almost useless, and turned out to be al-Shabaab’s final throw of the dice in their bid to hold on to the capital. On 6 August, the city woke up to discover that, overnight, the militants had withdrawn from eleven of the city’s districts, including the Bakara Market. For the first time in four years, the TFG and their AMISOM allies were in charge of the capital. Only the northern suburb of Dayniile remained in al-Shabaab hands. The militants were also reported to have pulled back from a number of other key positions, notably in the Galgadud region in central Somalia. Their military spokesman, Sheikh Abdi-aziz Abu Mus’ab, told the al-Shabaab-run radio station Radio Andalus that the retreat was a tactical one, and that it was only a matter of time before the ‘mujahideen’ returned to Mogadishu to ‘drag their [enemies’] bodies along the streets’. Sheikh Rage echoed him, explaining that the leadership had merely chosen to switch strategy to ‘hit and run’ guerrilla tactics that would ‘break the back’ of AMISOM.

Was Rage bluffing? Mogadishu’s residents were not dancing in the street quite yet.

‘I saw three al-Shabaab fighters throw down their guns and change into civilian dress,’ a Dayniile resident known as Casho told
SomaliaReport
.

Aden seemed ominously downbeat when I called him. Al-Shabaab might have retreated from their trench line, he said, but the Amniyat’s spies were still everywhere in the city. It was still highly dangerous to speak out openly against the militants.

Two months later, as if in confirmation of Sheikh Rage’s promise
of a ‘back-breaking’ guerrilla campaign, an al-Shabaab suicide bomber drove an enormous truck bomb into a complex of government buildings near the junction at K4, killing 139 people and injuring ninety-three. Body parts were flung for hundreds of metres. Among those murdered were several students who had been queuing for exam results at the education ministry, hoping to gain a scholarship to study in Turkey.
¹¹
The famine, combined with their disastrous handling of it, had forced a major tactical reverse for the hardliners. But, as Aden gloomily foretold, they were not yet defeated. The poverty and ignorance of the young which fuelled the insurgency were genuine grievances, and had yet to be addressed. The wider war for control of Somalia was far from over yet.

*
Not to be confused with Mark Robert Bowden, US journalist and author of
Black Hawk Down
.

*
The three-letter root
(
Sh Ra I’en
) means to go, to enter or to start; leading to the noun
Shaaira
, a street; which then has the implication of the ‘Right Path’ and hence
Al Shar
, the Revelation. Sharia law (or more properly, in Arabic,
Shari’ah
) metaphorically offers a path through the dusty wilderness to the cool oasis of salvation: Islam. It is only one of many modern Arabic words that have their roots in the pre-Islamic desert.

Part II

N
OMADS
’ L
AND

8

In the court of King Farole

Garowe, Puntland, August 2011

August the first was a big public holiday in Garowe. Not only was it the anniversary of Puntland’s declaration of autonomy in 1998, but in 2011, 1 August was also the first day of Ramadan. Garowe is Puntland’s capital, and the state’s president, Mohamed Farole, together with his son – also called Mohamed – had been planning the celebrations for weeks. The centrepiece was to be a parade. At 4 a.m., long before dawn, hundreds of townspeople had begun forming up in their marching squads in the main road out beyond the UN compound, my temporary home in the town. I was woken by the noise of the swelling crowd, a low-frequency rumble of excited chatter interspersed with whistles and snatches of song. Drawn on by the unmistakable atmosphere of a carnival, I dressed quickly and hurried out with my camera.

Puntland looms large in the wider Somali story. It comprises 212,000 square kilometres of territory, a third of all Somalia, the size of England and Wales combined; and it is home to some
4 million people out of an estimated national total of 10 million.
¹
These statistics alone mean that if Puntland had decided on full independence from Mogadishu in 1998 – as did Somaliland, their neighbour and rival to the north-west, in 1991 – then Somalia as a unitary state would have been finished. Instead, however, Puntland opted for devolution: self-government from Garowe, while maintaining strong political representation in Mogadishu in a clan-based confederation with all the other states and regions. What the Puntland government said and did mattered, therefore, because this political vision alone kept the dream of a single Somali state alive.

Puntland, however, is known abroad – indeed, it is globally notorious – for something rather different: the extraordinary flourishing of piracy along its thinly policed coastline, which, at 1,600 kilometres, is as long as Portugal’s. The state incorporates the whole tip of the Horn of Africa, jutting out into the Indian Ocean to form the southern edge of the Gulf of Aden, through which 21,000 ships plod each year on their way towards the Suez Canal, carrying cargo that includes a tenth of all of the world’s petroleum. By 2011, the Gulf of Aden had become the world’s Pirate Alley, the focus of a criminal enterprise that, according to one often quoted report, cost the global economy $8.3bn in 2010.
²
The Farole family, meanwhile, had been accused by UN officials in Nairobi of personally profiting from piracy even as they claimed to be tackling it. Was this sensational allegation fair? The answer was important, because even Nato’s navies agree that the eventual solution to piracy will be found not at sea but on the land.