The bottom line has always been the excesses of people like Aideed. Kill or be killed were the watchwords of these factional heads that neither recognized nor were circumscribed by any convention. Geneva might have been on another planet.

In a peculiar way, the Somalis seem always to have been adept in dispensing violence. Since the end of World War II, they have fought with each one of their neighbors. Indeed, they continue to do so and have since expanded their revolutionary interests abroad. It tells you a lot that several Somali nationals – all of them Muslim fundamentalists – were arrested in Europe following acts of terror. One Somali youth was taken into custody in 2007 under British anti-terrorism laws after police found in his apartment containers of a chemical used in the July 2005 London bus and Underground blasts that left scores dead.

In Somalia itself, there was never a ‘front line’. Most of the time, battles just ‘happened’, sometimes at a cross-road, or because of a woman or perhaps a dispute over Qat. But for the presence of a UN force during the initial stages, losses would have been far greater, though as soon as the last of the Blue Helmets had departed, the bloodletting escalated once more.

If the drama that we encountered was sobering, the succession of conflicts that followed the departure of the Americans and their Allies defied description. No fewer Somalis died with their throats cut while they slept or were stabbed in the back in the marketplace than in outright battles, which often took place outside a village, in any one of the dozens of towns, or on the roads linking them.

Others were killed, sometimes in their hundreds, in a single firefight on the imaginary ‘Green Line’ that ran through Mogadishu and which was originally supposed to separate the combatants. With time, the war seemed to borrow some of its jargon from the Beirut of the 1980s.

Earlier, while the warlords maintained a strangle-hold on food distribution centres – as well as access to foreign aid compounds – they milked the situation until it haemorrhaged. Not that it mattered much in the end because the monster that was created by all these shenanigans ended up feasting on itself.

Within a short time after the Americans left to fight in Iraq, there was still more violence and more bloodletting. In fact, in the past decade and a half, it has got much worse…