The World's Most Dangerous Place (2 page)

There are other reasons for cautious optimism. So many of Mogadishu’s long-abandoned seafront villas are being rebuilt, in many cases by owners returning from twenty years of refugee exile, that the city is experiencing a minor property boom. Piracy in the Indian Ocean, although far from eradicated, appears to have peaked thanks to land-based efforts by the regional Puntland government and cleverer counter-piracy measures at sea. Even the threat of further famine has receded thanks to unusually kind winter rains. By the end of 2012, in short, Somalia no longer looked quite as dangerous as it had done just a year previously – and I still worry that the title of my book will be seen by some (such as the taxi driver who took me to task over it in Minneapolis, home to America’s largest Somali community) as unfairly negative.

I decided to let the title stand, however, for two reasons. First,
the gains of 2011–12 are all perilously fragile, and could easily be reversed. The process of political reform was flawed from the start, with even the UN admitting that the clan elders had rigged the selection of the new parliament through bribery, intimidation and violence: a dispiriting case of
plus ça change
, in other words. Some two-thirds of MPs in the new parliament served in the previous one. Rivalry between the clans may be in abeyance but is hardly eliminated. The challenges facing the untried new president are huge, and the possibility of another cycle of communal bloodletting remains. Will Somalia’s new dawn turn out to be yet another false one?

After all, al-Shabaab are far from defeated, despite their recent territorial losses, and seem unlikely to disappear as an insurgency. Indeed, they had already begun the tactical switch from conventional war-fighting towards a deadly, Taliban-style guerrilla campaign in the summer of 2011. In September 2012, a spokesman for al-Shabaab immediately dubbed the newly elected president a ‘traitor’. Their determination to carry on their jihad was made abundantly clear less than thirty-six hours after Professor Mohamud had taken office, when two suicide bombers attacked the Mogadishu hotel where he was giving a press conference. The president survived, but at least five people, including an AMISOM soldier, died.

The second reason is that Somalia’s underlying problems have still not been dealt with, and chief among these, I would argue, is the question of what to do with the country’s millions of young men.

‘The US does not have a robust and comprehensive strategy for targeting the connection between youth and conflict,’ Professor Jennifer Sciubba, a demographer and adviser to the US Department of Defence, said recently. ‘Victory, in whatever form,
will remain elusive as long as this segment of the population is marginalized.’
²

She was speaking about Afghanistan, but her observation was just as applicable to Somalia, a country with almost the same low median age of eighteen, well under half the median in America or Europe.

The challenge posed by exploding populations in the Muslim world is a global one, as the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011 perhaps proved. But the problem is particularly acute in the case of Somalia, where the state has conspicuously failed to provide any of the essentials for a decent life for over twenty years. For all the fanfare surrounding the election of the new president, it was far from clear what concrete steps he proposed to improve the lot of the young. While recognizing the challenge, the new speaker of parliament, Mohamed Osman Jawari, could do no more than put his faith in the divine.

‘May God help us to elect a good leader in an atmosphere of tranquillity,’ he told the new parliament. ‘We must give the youth of Somalia a bright future.’

The children of the civil war want what everyone wants: education, jobs, security, a home. Without these things, young people anywhere, and particularly young men, may turn in desperation to violent rebellion; young Muslim men may also turn to extreme forms of Islam. In the course of my research I was constantly struck by the similarity of al-Shabaab foot soldiers, pirates and the members of Somali street gangs I interviewed in Britain and the US. They were all young men, and in some cases – such as Abdi-Osman, a 23-year-old ex-pirate, ex-al-Shabaab fighter whom I met in Mogadishu – literally interchangeable.

‘Every man who has nothing will try something to get money,’ Abdi-Osman explained.

The clue, perhaps, was in what the insurgents first called themselves: al-Shabaab in Arabic means ‘the Youth’.

The regional dangers are obvious enough. Somalia’s location, barely 150 miles from the Arabian Peninsula, has long made it Africa’s natural gateway for Wahhabist ideas. With the recent rise of Boko Haram and other extremist Islamic groups in West Africa, it is no longer fanciful to worry that such groups could link up with al-Shabaab, spreading their violent brand of Islam across the entire continent. The threat posed by al-Shabaab, however, already extends far beyond Africa, for one, very twenty-first-century reason: the immense size and distribution of the Somali diaspora. In the view of the British ambassador Matt Baugh, the ease with which people can travel in our globalized era has introduced ‘a kind of threat we haven’t seen before . . . [Somalia] is no longer a traditional, geographical country, but a diffuse, global entity – and that is not physically containable.’

An estimated two million Somalis have fled abroad during and since the civil war of the 1990s, putting down roots in almost every country in the world. But many young Somalis, most of whom left when they were small children and are now typically in their early twenties, have failed to adapt as they should to life in the West, leading to all kinds of troubling social problems. Young Somalis everywhere, in Canada, America, Europe and Australia, are noted for their atrocious performance at school and high levels of unemployment. Somali street gangs have also become a by-word for lawlessness and violence. One London community leader spoke to me of a Somali crime ‘time-bomb’ in Britain. On a visit to the Youth Offenders’ Institution at Feltham in west London, he was
shocked to find it contained more inmates from Somalia than from any other foreign country – ‘more, even, than the Jamaicans’, as he put it. It seems that the cycle of social deprivation and alienation that so often leads to frustration and hostility is spinning almost as fast for the diaspora as it is in Somalia itself.

As I found in both London and Minneapolis, the West has proved fruitful territory for the radical recruiting sergeants of al-Shabaab. Dozens of young Somalis have abandoned their lives in the West in recent years in order to go and fight for the Islamists in the homeland, with direct consequences for the security of us all. Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, warned in a speech in 2010 that it was ‘only a matter of time before we see terrorism on our streets inspired by those who are today fighting alongside al-Shabaab’. The threat of Somali-linked, home-grown terrorism is in any case not new, as Ramzi Mohamed and Yassin Omar – both born in Somalia – amply demonstrated when their suicide bombs failed to detonate on the London Underground on 21 July 2005. In 2011, when Prime Minister David Cameron described Somalia as ‘a failed state that directly threatens British interests’, the first threat he cited was that posed by the radicalization of young Somali Britons.

There is, happily, another side to the diaspora. The vast majority of young Somalis are of course not disgruntled future terrorists. In fact, the more I saw of them, the more convinced I became that it is the diaspora young, more than any other group, who have the power to steer Somalia and Somalis towards a better future. Not only do Somalis abroad bankroll the home country with millions of dollars of remittances to friends and family each year. The best of the young exile generation has also taken full advantage of the opportunity to better themselves through hard work and
education, absorbing Western values and ideas along the way. This class of young Somali is out of patience with the traditions of their elders, most of all the old system of
qabyalad
, tribalism, which played such a central role in the destruction of their country. Some of them, such as Adam Matan, 25, and his impressive London-based organization, the Anti-Tribalism Movement, are actively campaigning for a real break with the past. And his kind are, very encouragingly, determined to export their ideas back to their troubled homeland.

Will they succeed? If so, they will need all the support they can get from the West, for the obstacles are certainly immense. There are some signs that Western leaders have understood the importance of engaging with Somalia’s youth. For instance, the London conference on Somalia in early 2012, a major international event attended by senior representatives of forty governments and organizations, was notable for the inclusion of the young. International conferences come and go, however – Somalia has been the subject of twenty-one of them since 1991 – and the new spirit of engagement must be sustained if Somalia is ever to be turned around. This applies to the war against al-Shabaab, too. The time may fast be approaching when it will make more sense to talk to the movement’s moderate elements rather than to go on trying to destroy or contain them militarily. Or as the Somali imam Sheikh Hassan Jaamici put it to me in Minnesota – on the day he learned of the death by missile of the celebrated American al-Qaida ideologue, Anwar Al-Awlaki – ‘What is needed is fewer drones, more debate.’

In the summer of 2012 there was no better or more obvious illustration of the benefits of properly engaging with Somali youth than the inspiring story of Mo Farah, the British-Somali
long-distance runner from Hounslow in west London who won two Olympic gold medals. When he first arrived in London in 1991, he was just another troublesome, traumatized refugee. He spoke poor English and struggled academically at his school, Feltham Community College, where he was constantly in trouble with the authorities.

Farah could easily have ‘gone off the rails’, as his agent Ricky Simms later said, and ended up like so many other displaced Somali boys in the Young Offenders’ Institution down the road. Instead, his athletic talent was spotted by a PE teacher, Alan Watkinson, who took him under his wing and forced him to train and focus. The ‘FlyMo’ is now a Union Jack-draped national hero. He did a favour to immigrants in general with his achievement: in a poll following the Games, 32 per cent said they felt more positive – or less worried – about immigration.
³

‘Everyone is happy,’ said Mahmoud Adan, a Somali shopkeeper in Whitechapel. ‘It’s something that makes us very proud. The stories you hear about Somalia are always bad.’
⁴

In Western cities, as in the Horn of Africa, sustained engagement with Somalia’s young men is the key to a better future for us all. Without it, as one London exile said to me in a slightly different context, Somalis will become ‘the worst people in the world’; and Somalia itself could again unequivocally become
The World’s Most Dangerous Place
.

Part I

L
IVING ON THE
L
INE

1

An African Stalingrad: The war against al-Shabaab

Hawl Wadaag district, Mogadishu, March 2011

Of the West’s many fronts against Islamic extremism around the world, I am thinking, this one has to be the most literal. I have the oddest feeling that I have stumbled on to a film set: a Hollywood producer’s recreation of a front line, not the real thing.

I am sitting on a faux antique armchair, with sagging springs and the stuffing spilling out, in the living room of a wrecked townhouse in downtown Mogadishu. A colonel of the UPDF, the Ugandan People’s Defence Force, who has requisitioned the house as his field headquarters, is waving a stick at a large wall map. His name, helpfully spelled out on his breast pocket, is John Mugarura. Both he and the map are interestingly spot-lit by sunshine from a jagged hole in the corrugated-iron roof where, I have just been told, a mortar shell exploded the previous night.

‘In the last two weeks, my battalion has advanced here, here and here,’ the colonel booms, ‘and we are . . .
here
.’

He taps on the bottom edge of a red-inked ‘U’ that cuts across the heart of the city: the al-Qaida-linked militants of al-Shabaab on one side, us on the other. A cluster of yellow arrows surrounds our position, which is marked with the Uganda Battle Group acronym UGABAG.

Mugarura’s diction is the same as all the other Ugandan officers I have met: clipped, confident and elision-free, almost more English-sounding than the English. It is fifty years since Ugandans fought for the British Empire’s East African regiment, the long-disbanded King’s African Rifles, yet the colonial legacy lives on. The colonel’s rank is still denoted as it is in the British Army, by red flashes on the lapels of his jacket. Even the name of the man who sent him here, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, means ‘Son of a man of the Seventh’, a reference to the KAR’s Seventh Battalion. Mugarura’s blue-black cranium, shaved bald in the regulation way, shines with perspiration as though polished. He reminds me, as many of his colleagues do, of Idi Amin, as played by Forest Whitaker in the film
The Last King of Scotland
.

‘We have now paused to allow our TFG allies to come up and protect our flanks,’ he continues. ‘There is no question that we are winning. The problem is the speed of our progress, which is too slow . . . we give the enemy an opportunity to regroup every time we stop.’

The TFG is Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, whose forces are supposed to be leading this war. Mugarura and the 9,000 other mostly Ugandan ‘peace enforcers’ who make up AMISOM, the UN-mandated African Union Mission in Somalia, are officially only here in a supporting role. The truth, of course, is that the
foreigners are running the offensive – AMISOM versus Islamisom, as the local joke goes – because the TFG’s ‘army’ is actually an uncertain alliance of clan militias incapable of leading anything much. There have been stories of TFG troops deserting their posts, and of shooting at each other instead of at al-Shabaab. They are even suspected of selling the enemy their weapons and ammunition.