The World's Most Dangerous Place (4 page)

‘That was close,’ says Richard. ‘In fact, I’d say we’ve been spotted. In fact: Move!’

We all run from the roof into better cover – all except the colonel, who walks at his usual dignified pace. We are back in Vietnam again: the scene in
Apocalypse Now
where the Stetson-wearing Lt-Col Bill Kilgore announces, while under heavy fire: ‘If I say it’s safe to surf this beach, captain, then it’s safe to surf this beach!’ For Colonel Mugarura, being mortared has become routine: an everyday event on this extraordinary, nightmarish front line.

2

At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war

By Aden Adde International Airport, March 2011

Until a few years ago, journalists visiting Mogadishu tended to stay at the Hotel Sahafi, a
pensione
near a major street junction prosaically known as Kilometre 4, or K4 for short. In February 2005, however, the BBC producer Kate Peyton, 39, was shot dead outside the Sahafi by gunmen loyal to Aden Hashi ‘Eyrow’, an al-Shabaab hardliner linked to al-Qaida. The Sahafi, and indeed every other city-centre hotel, has been shunned by sensible foreign visitors ever since.

During 2011, my home in Mogadishu was an air-conditioned Portakabin on the military base by the airport, which was protected by sandbags, barbed wire and several battalions of combat-ready African Union troops. Security had been tightened greatly since a spate of devastatingly successful suicide bomb attacks. In September 2008, the militants tricked their way past the
checkpoints in a stolen UN truck which blew up at the convoy point, a large open square where AMISOM’s armoured vehicles and their crews formed up before going out on patrol in the city. Around fifty Ugandan soldiers were killed. I passed through K4 many times in the spring and summer of 2011, but only because it lies on the road to the airport; and I only ever did so in the back of a Casspir, an 11-ton, South African-built armoured vehicle with a V-shaped hull designed to deflect mine blast. As a guest of AMISOM, there was no other means of reaching town.

The narrow rectangular windows in the sides of the Casspirs were cracked and dirty and didn’t afford much of a view of Mogadishu’s street life. My first and many subsequent impressions of the city were gained in jolting cinemascope, as the vehicles lurched and bumped along the disastrously pot-holed roads. What I did see, however, was that something approaching normal civilian life had returned to the TFG-controlled areas. Spectacular ruination was everywhere, but shops had reopened between the ruins, and hawkers sold fruit, sweets or plastic kitchenware from rickety barrows. K4 had turned into a bustling street market, a sure sign of security and progress, as the AMISOM press officers were quick to point out. In places there were quite surprising numbers of private vans and cars moving about – enough, even, to form the occasional traffic jam, which had the security-conscious drivers revving their engines with nervous impatience.

Here and there one spotted an ancient Vespa, with spinning flywheels where the engine casing should have been, still splendidly serviceable after half a century of independence from the Italians. These rickety machines are not the only legacy of Somalia’s colonial past. Older Mogadishans still routinely greet foreigners with a cheery
Buongiorno
. The taps in the city’s bathrooms, where
they have not been ripped out and looted, are still marked C and F for
Caldo
and
Freddo
. A strong flavour of Italy also remains in the city’s white-painted buildings, even in their super-dilapidated state. The public buildings and shops along the city’s main artery, the Makka al-Mukkarama, are still organized into shady colonnades, with balconies and decorative crenellations along their tops. The café culture thriving along the shattered pavements also retains a distinctly Italian feel, even if habits have evolved somewhat since colonial times. For instance, it was evident even from the back of a bouncing Casspir that many of the customers were animated by the chewing of
qat
*
rather than the drinking of espresso; while the shirts and suits that Somalis working in the colonial administration had once been obliged to wear had been replaced for the most part by the
macawiis
, a colourful, sarong-like wrap much better suited to Mogadishu’s equatorial heat. The cafés looked especially inviting from the back of a sweltering Casspir, and I longed to jump out and go into one. To report properly on the war against al-Shabaab required an understanding of the society and culture from which the insurgents sprang – and that meant talking to ordinary Somalis. I, however, was surrounded almost exclusively by Ugandans and Burundians, and it wasn’t immediately apparent to me how I was going to change that.

On the other hand, my arrangement with AMISOM had its compensations. The base was set among sand dunes and scrub-filled ravines along the western edge of the runway, with the Indian Ocean crashing up the beach to the east. It made a natural
headquarters for AMISOM, and not only because it was relatively easy to defend. As they realized when their peace-keeping troops first deployed in March 2007, control of the airport was the key to political power in Mogadishu. It was a vital source of tax revenue without which the TFG could not even pretend to govern, as well as the principal gateway to the outside world through which flowed the arms, aid and personnel that kept the administration alive.

Its strategic importance was not lost on al-Shabaab, whose suicide bombers had tried six months previously to force the heavily fortified gates leading to the terminal, killing several soldiers and civilian bystanders in the process.
¹
In those days they were still able to infiltrate the buildings visible beyond the airport perimeter, and occasionally stationed a sniper there, but they couldn’t do that now thanks to AMISOM’s advances in the city, and the airport was the safest it had been in years. There was no doubting we were still in a warzone, though. While waiting for my lift when I first arrived, I turned to watch a Katyusha rocket battery in action, just past the end of the runway. There was a jet of flame and a belch of white smoke as each missile whooshed from its tube towards the enemy’s territory beyond the city, making a distinctive moaning sound that gave the Katyusha its other nickname, ‘Stalin’s organ’.

AMISOM-accredited journalists had to stay in a compound set aside for foreign contractors. Guarded by Ugandan sentries, and surrounded by rubble-filled Hesco barriers, it was a spartan but not unpleasant place to stay. Rows of Portakabins, only some of which were sandbagged against the possibility of mortar attack, were arranged along neat sandy paths that led to an open-air recreation area equipped with an erratically stocked bar, a barbecue, a dartboard, two widescreen televisions, and wi-fi. Skeins of sacred ibis
passed overhead each evening, rushing to their roosts before the plunge of the tropical sun. The tails of manoeuvring aircraft could often be seen above the tree-line to the east, gliding back and forth like the dorsal fins of patrolling sharks. At quiet times it was easy to stroll across the unfenced runway to the beach beyond, where shore-crabs danced on the surf-swamped rocks, waving their claws in the air like castanets. The air was permanently sticky with salt, the temperature a steady 32 degrees. The camp felt so much like a cheap holiday resort that it was easy to see why its longer-term residents nicknamed it the ‘Bancroft Hotel’, after the American security firm that built and ran it, Bancroft Global Development.

There were few better places from which to contemplate the successes and failures of twenty years of international intervention in Somalia. On 3 October 1993, this patch of sky was filled not with sacred ibis but formations of American attack helicopters, as the 160 soldiers of Task Force Ranger rode into the city to capture the militia commanders of the Habr Gidr warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid. The task force was spectacularly ambushed. Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and during the 24-hour effort to rescue the marooned crews, a battle ensued in which as many as seven hundred Somalis were killed, including a great many civilians. So too were eighteen US servicemen, some of whose bodies were dragged by enraged mobs through Mogadishu’s streets, a spectacle that was also televised. A horrified President Clinton ordered a withdrawal from Somalia soon afterwards.

Although it happened almost twenty years ago, the ‘Day of the Rangers’, as Mogadishans still call the incident, goes on colouring Western perceptions of Somalia to an extraordinary degree. Made famous by Mark Bowden’s bestselling book of 1999,
Black Hawk Down
, and then a blockbuster film of the same name by Ridley Scott in 2001, it remains a classic tale of American military hubris. Osama bin Laden also held it up as proof that the mighty US war machine could be defeated by lightly armed Muslims, even though the Habr Gidr’s resistance had nothing to do with Islam. Indeed, few Somalis had even heard of al-Qaida in 1993. But it was too useful a narrative for the world’s future arch-terrorist to ignore – and it undoubtedly inspired the next generation of jihadis in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Richard, the ex-British Army officer, grew exasperated when journalists asked him about
Black Hawk Down
, which of course they always did. It was his belief that Ridley Scott had more or less single-handedly set back Somalia’s prospects for peace for an entire generation.

‘The film gave the audience no context whatsoever to the events, and stereotyped Somalis as a bunch of bloodthirsty savages,’ he said.

As a spokesman for AMISOM, he was professionally obliged to defend the doctrine of military intervention, and, as an ex-soldier, perhaps inclined to do so anyway. He was not alone in thinking that in Somalia’s case, the doctrine had been given an unnecessarily bad name.
Black Hawk Down
, he argued, was just one, short, not particularly relevant episode in a wider UN mission in Somalia which ran between 1992 and 1995, and which included some quite notable military successes. For instance, by wresting control of the docks from the warlords in early 1993, the American military’s Operation Restore Hope allowed food aid to get out from the city to the rural areas, thereby succeeding in its primary aim of alleviating Somalia’s worst famine for twenty years. Some analysts estimate that as many as a quarter of a million lives were saved.
²

Despite this, America remains almost pathologically afraid of ‘another Black Hawk Down’, a fear that has governed its thinking on the Horn of Africa ever since.

‘The United States does not plan, does not direct, and does not coordinate the military operations of the TFG, and we have not and will not be providing direct support for any potential military offensives,’ insisted Johnnie Carson, the State Department’s secretary for African affairs, in a speech in March 2010. ‘Further, we are not providing nor paying for military advisors for the TFG. There is no desire to Americanize the conflict in Somalia.’
³
Paying for military advisors to AMISOM, however, was apparently a different matter.
Black Hawk Down
was the reason the Bancroft Hotel existed in the semi-clandestine form that it did.

In its early days, Bancroft Global Development had specialized in land-mine clearance, although it quickly mutated into something much bigger. Somalis commonly suspected it of being a front for the CIA. This was an exaggeration, although I could see how they might have jumped to that conclusion, because the company, headquartered in the heart of Washington DC’s embassy district, undoubtedly was an instrument of US foreign policy. It employed about forty former soldiers from around the world, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as many smaller wars in Africa, whose job was to advise and train AMISOM in the art of urban warfare. The governments of Uganda and Burundi had reportedly paid them over $12m for this service since they began operations in 2008. It was the American taxpayer who picked up the final bill, however, because Bancroft’s fee was reimbursed by the US State Department. This opaque arrangement allowed the US to publicly distance itself from the conflict while keeping a hand in the game.
⁴

The camp had expanded greatly since it was set up in 2008, and was now a base for all sorts of itinerant foreign consultants and contractors, most of whom had nothing to do with Bancroft. But the original tenants still formed the nucleus of the community: a tough, close-knit group with brusque manners and sun-tans developed over years in desert battle zones. Scandinavians were dominant among the Europeans, and Afrikaaners among the Africans. Wherever they came from, they all thrived on the adrenalin of war. They were wary of newcomers and – of course – highly suspicious of visiting journalists. Conversations would often stop abruptly as I moved about the canteen or recreation area. It wasn’t hard to imagine that I was interrupting discussions about the teaching of darker military skills that Bancroft was sometimes accused of by suspicious Somalis or the left-wing press in the US.

Many of the Bancrofters were combat engineers who called themselves ‘mentors’ and were often to be found on the front line alongside their AMISOM protégés, working unarmed even during offensives. Some of the South Africans were involved in a curious subplot of the war involving armoured bulldozers. These vehicles weighed over 17 tons, and had emerged as a key piece of kit in the close urban warfare that AMISOM was engaged in. They were essential for clearing roadways of debris and ordnance, the only way of consolidating newly won territory. They were so feared by the enemy’s field commanders that one of the al-Shabaab-controlled radio stations had announced that the bulldozers’ newly trained drivers were to be targeted as particular enemies of Islam.