The World's Most Dangerous Place (50 page)

Eventually I realized that they were deliberately stonewalling, and that I was the victim of a classic East African feud. Kenya had just formally joined AMISOM. But the KDF were reluctant to cooperate with that organization’s press office – through which I was obliged to communicate – because AMISOM was dominated by Uganda, whose President Museveni had recently insulted the KDF by referring to it publicly as a ‘barracks army’. This spat did not augur well for the newly expanded AMISOM, at a moment when close cooperation between the allies was likely to be essential. There was no escape from the colonels’ Mobius loop of red tape, however, and with Gandhi still incommunicado, I eventually gave up and decided to appeal instead to Sheikh Madobe’s Raskamboni Movement, Gandhi’s main rival for control of southern Somalia.

Named after Ras Kamboni, the southernmost Somali border town where it originated, Sheikh Madobe’s militia was said to have replaced Gandhi’s Azanians as the KDF’s favourite local partners. His fighters ran regular convoys from the eastern Kenyan city of Garissa, 90 miles over the border, to Dhobley, bumping along the dusty roads in 4×4s with technicals front and back for protection; perhaps I would be able to hitch a ride with them.

I went to meet Sheikh Moalim Mohamed, Sheikh Madobe’s number two, at an address I had been given in Eastleigh, the main Somali suburb in Nairobi. Eastleigh was a place that I had heard much about but never visited before. As the diaspora’s principal international gateway to the homeland, it shone very brightly in the constellation of communities abroad. It was much more than a mere travellers’ staging post. Eastleigh was where the weightiest decisions about the future of Somalia tended to be taken. All the country’s political, religious and financial elites had offices in Eastleigh, which since the 1990s had also evolved into a major
commercial centre in its own right. It was often described as Mogadishu’s Bakara Market in exile, an immense entrepôt where reputedly anything and everything could be bought or sold, including, it was often said, guns.

After a taxi ride that took almost two hours, thanks to Nairobi’s legendarily awful traffic, I found Eastleigh’s main roads to be even more flooded and potholed than was normal in the rest of the city. Jostling herds of
matatu
minibuses filled the air with their aggressive tootling. The rough and dirty pavements seethed with shoppers threading their way between stalls, hawking everything from shoes and shaving foam to qat and jerry cans of camel milk. This much I expected. But I was taken aback by the size and number of tall new buildings housing luxury hotels, all-night shopping malls, even a Barclays Bank, whose hoardings offered Sharia-compliant,
la riba
interest-free loans. Eastleigh was known, predictably, as Little Mogadishu, but for once the nickname was not an exaggeration, because it really did feel like a city within a city, with an economy and atmosphere entirely distinct from the rest of Nairobi. I later read that Somali businessmen had invested some $1.5bn in the suburb in recent years,
³
and it showed, because business was evidently booming here.

Native Kenyans viewed this enclave with a mixture of suspicion and affection. It was accused of many things: it was a hotbed of extremism, a centre for the laundering of the profits of piracy. Yet to my eye, Eastleigh’s spirit seemed neither criminal nor ideological, but hard-working and entrepreneurial. Above all, it was avowedly commercial. In 2011, high-end property prices in Nairobi rose by 25 per cent, the fastest growth rate in any city in the world, a boom largely attributable to the phenomenon of Somalis in exile.
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Sheikh Moalim and his entourage were staying at one of the enclave’s brash new glass and marble hotels called the Nomad Palace. Security was remarkably light – just one armed policeman on the front door, and none of the usual sinister men with tell-tale bulges beneath their jackets hanging about the busy lobby – which seemed a good indication of how little feared the insurgents were here.

The Somali flair for trade and commerce, it occurred to me with sudden clarity, was the most powerful antidote imaginable to the reductive and impoverishing ideology of al-Shabaab. Their Islamist project could not succeed without both the moral and financial support of Eastleigh’s big business interests. And yet, looking at this place, it was inconceivable that those interests would ever allow al-Shabaab to continue their tenure of a port as profitable as Kismayo. The Sheikh, by contrast, was unquestionably Eastleigh’s man. I very much doubted that he paid his own bills in this hotel. He ushered me towards a group of purple, cuboid armchairs in the middle of the lobby as though we were in the living room of his home.

He was a big, broad-chested man, a former judge in the Islamic Courts Union who still exuded the confidence and authority of a respected religious scholar. He wore tinted rectangular glasses and a large, fuzzy beard, as well as loafers and Argyle socks and a grey-green cotton suit. Although the buttons of his jacket carried the words MEN’S FASHION, its breast pocket was done up with a zip, which lent him a faint but distinct paramilitary air. He later joked that he had spent so long fighting and sleeping in the bush that whenever he saw a tree in Eastleigh, he felt an impulse to lie down in its shade.

He told me almost immediately that I was welcome to come and
inspect his war. He even thanked me for taking an interest, and said that I could join one of Raskamboni’s eastbound convoys whenever I liked.

‘To us, Sharia has never been about slaughtering people, as it seems to be for al-Shabaab,’ he said when I asked him what he was fighting for. ‘We want to replace them with a system that is fair to everybody. War has caused enough suffering already.’

His movement was militarily effective, he explained, because its members knew their enemy so well.

‘I know many al-Shabaab fighters personally,’ he continued, with an eloquent twist of his hand. ‘I even taught some of them when they were young. And now they say I am an infidel! They are crazy. We were Muslims for a thousand years before they came along . . . Their ideology is imposed from outside. It is not Wahhabism – it goes far beyond that. Everyone is upset with them, and so now they must be . . . disciplined.’

This last remark was accompanied by a barely concealed smirk. It was as though he regarded al-Shabaab almost as naughty children rather than al-Qaida-linked terrorists, and that all that was needed to bring them back into line was the smack of schoolmasterly authority.

It was, I supposed, hardly surprising that the difference between him and the extremists was so blurred. In 2010, after all, a Raskamboni splinter group had merged with al-Shabaab. The CIA, furthermore, had long ago identified Ras Kamboni town as an al-Qaida training base. The attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, and the bombing of the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa in 2002, were all thought to have been organized from Ras Kamboni.

As late as 2007, an American AC-130 gunship launched an
attack near Ras Kamboni against ‘al-Qaida suspects’ thought to include the Mombasa-born Saleh Ali Nabhan, one of the alleged masterminds of the embassy bombings.
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For all the Sheikh’s outward scorn for al-Shabaab’s ideology, therefore, I suspected that he was not necessarily as resistant to foreign influence as he said he was. In answer to another question about how he thought southern Somalia should be governed in future, he replied, sensibly enough, that there would have to be a grand conference of all the relevant regional stakeholders, who could thrash out a mutually satisfactory political settlement. What struck me most about his answer was the phrase he used to describe this grand conference of the future: he called it a
loya jirga
, the Afghan Pashtun for a ‘grand council’. The last loya jirga, at which the possibility of peace talks with the Taliban was discussed, was held in Kabul in 2010.

Sheikh Moalim and his fighters were likely to be the first Somali militia into Kismayo, and would therefore have a decisive say in how the port was administered in the future. Although they were allies of the KDF for now, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen once Kismayo fell and the Kenyans were of less use. Would Nairobi really be able to maintain influence over these most mercurial of local partners? More to the point, what would al-Shabaab do once they were ousted from their stronghold – and how would Kenya deal with the response?

There were already many signs that an al-Shabaab terror campaign was spreading southwards – and signs, too, of how
ill-prepared the Kenyans were to cope. The home front’s counter-terrorism strategy, in so far as it existed at all, was criticized by the Kenyan
Daily Nation
as ‘reactive, sluggish and uninspiring’.
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Compared to American or British government efforts to mobilize community leaders to persuade young Muslims to shun extremism, Kenya was years behind.

Low-level shootings and grenade attacks at nightclubs and bus stops, all of them linked to al-Shabaab, became ever more frequent as 2012 wore on. No city was safe, but as predicted it was Mombasa, the capital of the Swahili coast, that soon emerged as the focal point of the attacks. Many Kenyans feared that the city was filled with al-Shabaab sympathizers and sleeper cells; it had already proved a rich source of recruits for the insurgency over the border.

‘We’ve lost many young men who have been recruited [into al-Shabaab] and taken to Somalia,’ said Sheikh Athman Mponda, chairman of the Association of Muslim Organizations in Kenya, perhaps appropriately known as AMOK. ‘I know of nine young men who have been killed in Somalia.’
⁶

On 24 June 2012, the US embassy issued a warning that another terrorist attack in Mombasa was imminent. The warning was immediately denounced by the chairman of the National Security Advisory Council, Francis Kimemia, as an act of ‘economic sabotage’ and a ‘betrayal of trust’. The Tourism Minister, Dan Mwazo, similarly described it as ‘in bad taste and malicious’. Like Larry Vaughan, the mayor of the Amity Island beach resort in the movie
Jaws
, they were worried that the warning would scare off the tourists. Hours later, however, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired into Mombasa’s Jericho Beer Garden where customers had gathered to watch England play Italy in the European Football Championship. Three people were killed and scores injured in the
attack, which was uncomfortably reminiscent of the al-Shabaab strike on football fans in Kampala during the 2010 World Cup.

‘You are fighting al-Shabaab in Somalia where the head is, but the tail is here,’ a Mombasa local identified as Yusuf told a reporter from the Kenyan
Standard
. ‘These people live among us. You will regret.’
⁷

Earlier in the week, Kenyan police had already arrested two Iranians suspected of planning bombings in Mombasa and Nairobi. Kimemia and Mwazo fell silent as the American travel warning was repeated by the embassies of several other nations, and the British Foreign Office formally advised its citizens not to travel even to Nairobi. The economic implications were serious, for Kenya could not afford to lose its tourists, particularly its British ones. In 2011, there were more British holiday-makers than from any other country in the world: 200,000 of them, comfortably more even than from America.
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Britain, thanks to a relationship rooted in the days of Empire, was also Kenya’s biggest foreign investor, and its second biggest trading partner after Uganda. British imports of Kenyan tea, coffee, vegetables and flowers rose 9 per cent in 2011, and Anglo-Kenyan trade was worth over £1bn a year.
⁸
All of this was now under threat. As the British High Commission was at pains to point out, Operation Linda Nchi wasn’t just about combating terrorism: its success or failure would have a considerable impact on important British business interests too.

The bad news did not let up for the Kenyan government. The
Jericho Beer Garden attack in Mombasa was followed a week later by another atrocity, this time in Garissa, where the congregations of two churches were attacked during their Sunday sermon by what local police called ‘balaclava-clad goons’ armed with grenades and automatics.
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Fifteen worshippers were killed, and forty wounded. For old soldiers, it must have felt like the Shifta War all over again, while for the younger generation, the fragility of the stasis between the country’s Muslims and Christians was for the first time laid frighteningly bare.

Kenya was already well acquainted with extreme inter-tribal violence, particularly between the largest tribe, the Kikuyu, and their chief rivals for political power, the minority Luo. The presidential election of 2007 left 1,300 dead and half a million people displaced. The next election was scheduled for March 2013, and was expected by many to spark just as much trouble as the last one. Kenya’s tribal rivalries were dangerous enough on their own. The addition to the mix of newly stoked ethno-religious strife could be socially disastrous.

At the end of August in Mombasa, Aboud ‘Rogo’ Mohammed, a radical cleric and an al-Shabaab supporter so well known that his name featured on both US and UN sanctions lists, was assassinated by unknown gunmen as he drove through the city with his wife and children. The ensuing riots lasted for two days. Tyre-burning mobs closed the road to the tourist town of Malindi, 70 miles to the north. Shops were burned, churches were looted, and five people, including three policemen, were killed. Muslim opinion in Mombasa was that the Kenyan government was behind Rogo’s death, a view that was only strengthened a week later when a second al-Shabaab-supporting imam, Abubakr Ahmed, was charged with inciting the Rogo riots.