The World's Most Dangerous Place (37 page)

‘Some mosques accepted the money, others did not,’ recalled Sharmarke. ‘It caused many divisions, and a whole community was stereotyped as freeloaders and fraudsters as well as potential terrorists.’

Now that the Prevent programme had been refocused, and with funding cuts and a change of government, the Home Office spending bonanza had dried up, leaving the Somali community almost back where they had started in 2005. Sharmarke was still bitter about a speech by David Cameron in Munich in February 2011 in which he declared that multiculturalism wasn’t working.

‘He said we Muslims need to take responsibility for our own problems – that “if you don’t integrate, then this is no country for you”. But what we need is greater engagement from the government, not threats.’

It would take time, he thought, to deal with the root causes of radicalization. The key, he said, was ‘early intervention’, by which he meant getting to young people before the radicalizing ‘bad influences’ – ideally, when they were still schoolchildren – with the goal of teaching them to be ‘proper’ Muslims.

‘No suicide bomber has ever had a proper grounding in Islam, which prohibits the killing of innocents,’ he insisted.

It was in Britain’s madrassahs and primary schools, he was convinced, that the war on terror would eventually be won.

But that was mostly a prescription for the future. The reality of the present was that a great many young London Somalis had turned not to Allah for their salvation, but to the gangs.

The violence and tenacity with which the Somalis fought to defend ‘their’ postcode had long been notorious. Like red squirrels chased by grey ones, existing gangs of other ethnicities were frequently driven off their traditional territories. According to a
Special Branch officer I later interviewed, two Punjabi gangs in Southall, the Holy Smokes and the Tooti Nungs, had been ‘wiped out’ by the Somalis, a new generation of gangs whose aggression was often explicit even in their names, such as MDP (which stood for Murder Dem Pussies) and GFL (Gunz Fully Loaded). In Bristol, according to a study published in 2008, the Somali newcomers were so feared that two long-established rival gangs, one white and one Afro-Caribbean, formed an unprecedented alliance in order to oppose them.
⁴

The reason for the Somali gangs’ extreme viciousness, according to ‘a number of senior police officers’ spoken to during the same study, was ‘the level of violence experienced in Somalia, coupled with the level of alienation Somali communities experience in Britain’. Were they right to infer that Somali gang violence was partly learned behaviour, copied from the mayhem witnessed in the homeland? If so, then here is another reason for Britain to involve itself in the search for a political settlement in Somalia – because the effect of the gangs is arguably even more pernicious than the threat of exported terrorism.

There is no question that religious extremism, and the implicit threat of terrorism that goes with it, undermines the Western way of life. Britain has been forced to live with the possibility of a spectacular terrorist attack for over a decade. And yet the tally of people actually killed by Muslim extremists on British soil since 9/11 stands at just fifty-six, all of them in the 7/7 bombings of 2005. The danger of terrorism is mostly in the mind, unlike the threat to personal safety posed by street gangs. Between 2009 and 2011, there were ninety-two gang-related murders in London alone.
⁵

The petty crime and violence they trade in are banal compared to 9/11 or the prospect of a nuclear dirty bomb. Yet these things eat
away at the urban social fabric on a daily basis, spreading fear and misery (and drugs) in the inner cities, blighting lives, and trashing the country’s reputation internationally. Britain locks up more of its young people than any country in the Western world apart from the US, and its prisons are bursting, yet the gangs are still not under control. The mindless violence and lawlessness they espouse was well expressed by a four-day riot that broke out in several English cities in August 2011. The catalyst for the riots, which cost the taxpayer at least £133m in policing and compensation bills, was the police shooting in Tottenham of ‘Starrish Mark’ Duggan, a founder member of the Star Gang. Analysis of the nearly 2,000 people later brought before the courts revealed that 13 per cent were involved in gangs, a figure that rose to 19 per cent in the capital.
⁶

Gang violence seemed almost glorified by some sectors of the Somali community.
Shank
, a knife crime drama released in 2010, was the debut film of the London-Somali music video director, Mo Ali. It followed characters with names like Tugz, Kickz, Craze and Rager through a futuristic urban dystopia (but actually filmed in the south London borough of Walworth) when ‘the gangs have taken over’. The film was not well received by the critics. It received a rating of 0 per cent on the cinema review aggregator website,
rottentomatoes.com
.
Empire
magazine said it ‘looks like it was informed by a generation raised on
Grand Theft Auto
for any sort of cinematic aesthetic . . . If this is the future of film then we’re all doomed.’

Less laughable was the experience of Jane, a tough, no-nonsense teacher I knew, who spoke to me on condition that I neither gave her real name nor identified the secondary state school in south-east London that employed her. As many as a third of her school’s
1,500 pupils were Somali-born, easily the largest ethnic group in a school where only 28 per cent of the pupils were born in the UK. The behaviour of a small minority of these Somalis, Jane said, could be ‘feral’. A fierce rivalry between two local gangs, the Woolwich Boys and the Thamesmead ‘T-Block’, was played out constantly in the school. The former gang ran a cadet organization called the Younger Woolwich Boys, some of whom were as young as seven. Beyond the school gates they were all in the drug-selling business; the seven- and eight-year-olds, according to Jane, were often employed as runners because the police would never think to stop and search someone so young.

‘I’m not racist, but the behaviour of some of the Somalis is so impossible that the system just can’t cope,’ Jane said. ‘I’d have fewer of them in the school if I had a choice.’

One night in October 2009, three former pupils of Jane’s, all Somalis between the ages of seventeen and eighteen, were among a group of five Woolwich Boys who travelled by taxi to Thamesmead, intent on avenging an earlier incident in which one of their number had been chased by a pack of T-Blockers. As they later explained to police, they had ‘gone hunting’. On a footbridge, the gang fell upon 22-year-old Moses Nteyoho, a random pedestrian who had nothing to do with the T-Block, and stabbed and bludgeoned him to death using knives and a hammer. Pathologists later calculated that Nteyoho had taken less than ninety seconds to die. Far from turning them in, the killers’ female relatives then helped the boys to flee to Nairobi, a truly depressing indication of how poorly integrated into British society certain segments of the Somali community still were. Happily for the cause of justice, the killers made the mistake of returning to Britain after two months, when they were caught and jailed, as were
the relatives when their role in the Kenyan flit was discovered.

Many of Jane’s older Somali pupils were appalled by the senseless savagery of Nteyoho’s death.

‘Some of my older Somali kids say privately that the situation is worsening for a whole generation of Somalis in the 16-year-old-plus bracket,’ she said. ‘They are worried that the Somali community is increasingly being perceived as a danger to society as a whole.’

It wasn’t fair, because most of Jane’s Somali pupils had nothing to do with the gangs, and many of them were excellent students. She had noticed, however, that the success stories were almost exclusively from what she called ‘the middle-class families’.

‘I’ve got one Somali at the top of Year 11 . . . his dad’s a doctor,’ she said. ‘Education is obviously the key.’

At Jane’s school, clever or studious pupils were known as ‘bods’, who did not mix with the ‘losers’ who were more likely to be gang members or to be in trouble with the law. This division reflected a polarization in the British Somali community generally. Successful, ‘middle-class’ British Somalis tended to be descended from an earlier generation of refugees, often northerners from Somaliland, who had had time to establish themselves in Britain. Assimilated Somalis were sometimes disparaged by their more traditionally oriented countrymen as ‘fish ‘n’ chips Somalis’. They made a stark contrast to the more recent arrivals who had flooded in during the early 1990s following the Siad Barre collapse. The newer refugees tended to be from the south where the civil war had raged most fiercely. Thus it was that the bitter north–south clan divide that had wracked Somali society for so long at home was perpetuated in another form in exile on the streets of London.

For Jane, the number-one problem was that so many of her
Somali pupils were chronic underachievers. Some seemed genuinely unable to stop themselves from performing and behaving badly, as though there was something deep in the nomad psyche that responded negatively to the constraints and rules of school. The problem was replicated across London. Sharmarke Yusuf said that between 2009 and 2010 in Ealing, as many as 280 Somali pupils, some of them as young as five, were ‘permanently excluded’ from the state education system: one of the highest expulsion rates in the entire country.

The causes were complex, the explanations varied. The traditional authority figure in a Somali boy’s upbringing, Sharmarke explained, was the father. But this source of discipline was often absent from families living in Britain, either because the father had been killed previously in Somalia, or else because he was ‘out working in factories, or doing a 12-hour shift as a taxi driver’. For whatever reason, the job of disciplining teenage boys tended to be left to the mothers, who were spectacularly failing to fill the gap. Somali families were often large. Broods of five, six or more children were common, and as recent refugees they were often very poor. Depression, anxiety, and other debilitating mental disorders associated with displacement and the trauma of war were also alarmingly widespread, further affecting many families’ ability to cope.

Language, according to Jane, was another ‘huge issue’. The mothers were often unable to speak, let alone read, English, so they depended on their sons to communicate not just with the school but with all representatives of officialdom. The results were predictable – for what wayward teenager would choose to read out a headmaster’s letter of reprimand addressed to their mum? Jane thought that Somali mothers were in any case unusually deaf to
criticism of their sons, whom they appeared culturally predisposed to spoil.

‘In our culture, if a boy does something wrong, we discipline him. But if a Somali boy does something wrong, the mother frequently buys him a present – trainers, the latest gadget – as though to control him through bribery. Whatever he has done wrong is forgotten about, and no shame attached . . . It is the opposite for girls, for whom the shame is apparently permanent. This is very weird parenting.’

I asked Jane if Islamic extremism was an issue, either within the school or beyond its gates. As an occasional teacher of Religious Education, with a mandate to instruct her pupils in the basics of all the world’s religions including Islam, she was perhaps in a position to know.

‘Somalis are always being marginalized as potential extremists,’ she replied, ‘yet I’m constantly struck by how little they know about their own religion. Then again, they know amazingly little about anything . . . But the younger ones don’t even know what the main parts of a mosque are called. My impression is that a lot of them go to mosque once or twice a year at most.’

Her answer tended to support Sharmarke Yusuf’s conviction that it was ignorance of Islam rather than a surfeit of it that put young Muslims on the path to violent radicalism. I asked her, rather tactlessly, if she had heard of Gary Smith, the head of Religious Education at the Central Foundation Girls’ School in Bow in east London, and she stopped me, horrified, before I could go any further. Smith had been walking to work one morning in July 2010 when he was attacked and severely injured by four heavily bearded Muslim men armed with a brick, a Stanley knife and a metal bar. One of them, Azad Hussein, 26, had a niece
at the school, and disapproved of her being taught by Smith.

‘He’s mocking us and he’s putting thoughts in people’s minds,’ Hussein was heard to say. ‘How can somebody take a job to teach Islam when he’s not even a Muslim himself?’
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Hussein showed how short the distance could be between gang crime and religious extremism. The journey from one to the other was explored in detail in a Channel 4 documentary first aired in 2008,
From Jail to Jihad
, in which the ex-Reuters Middle East correspondent Amil Khan interviewed a member of a gang called the Soldiers of Allah. This gangman – evidently a recent convert to Islam – saw himself as a kind of Muslim vigilante.

‘We are all soldiers of Islam, all slaves of Allah,’ he mumbled through the mask he wore to preserve his anonymity. ‘We no criminals, you get me? We just people dat fix da environment.’

It was a highly distorted, street version of the faith that could be used to justify violence against other, non-Muslim criminals, or as Khan’s interviewee put it: ‘Kuffars, you can take what they have, cos they don’t worship in the ways of Allah.’ Part of the proceeds of crime could even be paid to charity as
zakat
, the third pillar of Islam. A track by a long-disbanded gang-cum-rap group called SMS – the South Muslim Soldiers – confirmed that London gangland had effectively come up with its own version of jihad:

For the cause