“What I see, I speak. I don’t hide it.”
—MOHAMUD “TARZAN” NUR
Armed escort, Mogadishu, 2011. COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
IT MUST HAVE BEEN A mortar. I woke with a start to the sound of windows rattling. A few seconds later I heard a heavy thud from the northern edges of Mogadishu. Now I was wide awake, lying on an old mattress beneath my mosquito net and contemplating the three disconcertingly fresh-looking bullet holes in the wall above my bed.
It was eleven at night, and less than a month since the minister had been blown up by his niece.
A few days earlier, a famine had been declared in two regions in southern Somalia. The experts had been warning for months that this might happen. The annual Gu rains had failed again, and much of the country had now been bone-dry for more than two years.
Already, tens of thousands of desperate families were on the move, trudging either west toward the long, straight Kenyan border or east toward the coast, and Mogadishu.
Outside my window, the generators had finally been switched off and the city seemed to lie, sprawled and expectant, in the darkness. There was a rattle of automatic fire just a few streets away, and my mind stretched out for a reassuring explanation. A teenager showing off to friends, perhaps. Or a sleepy guard, startled by shadows.
For the first time in several years, I was staying outside the giant UN and African Union compound on the beach beside Mogadishu’s airport, with its high fences, watchtowers, reinforced bunkers, sirens, and endless green sandbagged walls. Being “embedded” within a huge, highly bureaucratic fortress offered—or appeared to offer—better protection for visiting journalists but far less access to the city. And so, in order to get a closer look at the famine, I’d made hurried arrangements with a well-connected local charity known as Saacid, which means “to help” in Somali.
“Don’t worry,” said the wiry, confident young man who’d greeted me in the cavernous old arrivals hall at the airport that morning. “We will keep you safe.”
Bashir Mahmoud ran Saacid’s food program in Mogadishu, which, he told me, involved distributing eighty thousand meals a day to all sixteen districts in the city, including those still controlled by Al Shabab.
The job required a steady nerve and impeccable contacts.
“It’s difficult, but possible,” Bashir said with a grin, climbing into the front passenger seat. He pulled out his phone and called ahead to alert the eight guards waiting for us in another pickup outside the airport entrance. We drove together up the hill toward the K4 roundabout, and as we swung right toward the narrow gates of a small hotel, I looked through the tinted glass and saw a crowd of perhaps thirty people squatting forlornly in the dust outside.
“New arrivals,” said Bashir.
The gates squealed shut behind us and shouting immediately erupted in the hotel courtyard. Some sort of argument between security guards—ours and the hotel’s. Within seconds, two men were pointing guns at each other’s heads. More shouting. Then they both seemed to reconsider, turning nonchalantly away as if nothing had happened. Just another squall. As we finished unloading the car and walked inside, Tarzan’s phrase jangled in my head—“city of sharks.”
The famine itself was on its way to Mogadishu. The new arrivals on the roadside in front of the hotel were part of a far larger influx—thousands heading to the city in search of food and water. But the city was in no shape to help everyone. Within days, it would be official. Mogadishu and two nearby regions would also be declared famine zones.
The weather was part of the problem. But droughts alone do not cause famine. It requires human intervention of the most stubborn and callous sort to push a population over the brink. And it was no coincidence that by far the worst-affected regions were firmly under the control of Al Shabab.
Later that day, Bashir took me to a makeshift camp on the southern edge of the city. A place called Badbaado, or Camp Salvation. Thirty thousand people were already crowded inside the flimsiest homemade tents—scraps of cloth and cardboard crudely stitched together. Outside the emergency feeding station, a queue of women waited in the sun, their thin shadows swaying on the side of an old shipping container. One woman was holding silent, fly-covered twins in her arms and was eventually nudged to the front of the line, where the infants—paper-thin skin stretched tight over jutting bones—were carefully lowered into a sling to be weighed.
A few days earlier, I’d seen similar scenes in Dadaab—the cluster of vast refugee camps over the border inside Kenya. More than a thousand new arrivals were turning up there each day. They were ushered into long lines, marked out by sticks and strips of tape, in the blazing sun, and told to wait to be processed. It felt industrial. Like some giant sheep dip. And what struck me there was the same silence I noticed in Mogadishu. The silence of tough, resilient people with no sense of entitlement and no expectation of help. Some of them had arrived by truck, clutching a few possessions. Others had walked for weeks.
When I think of Dadaab now, the first image that comes to mind is not of dying children, or a tearful Kenyan nurse struggling to find a baby’s vein into which she might connect a saline drip, but rather of the drive we made one morning, up toward the Somali border. We’d been traveling for nearly an hour on a rutted track that meandered through a sandy, desolate wilderness when I glanced into the wing mirror and saw the dogs.
There were twelve of them. African wild dogs—a distinct, rare, endangered species of carnivorous pack hunters, with mottled brown, white, and red coats, sharp teeth, and big, rounded ears.
They jogged confidently behind our car, ears alert, long front legs biting into the sand in a steady gait that seemed to require no effort. Like hyenas.
It was mesmerizing.
And for the five minutes or so that it lasted, I couldn’t shake the sense that this was more than simple curiosity—that we were the prey, that the dogs had done this sort of thing before, patiently stalking other groups that had dared to cross through their barren territory, waiting for the weakest to fall behind.
* * *
I THOUGHT OF THE African wild dogs a few days later, in Mogadishu’s Camp Salvation, as I tried to speak to some of the new arrivals.
There seemed to be gunmen everywhere—a bristling, bewildering assortment of militias, our own security, police, and soldiers. Five men squatted in the shade of an acacia tree, weapons balanced on their knees. Another group started shouting at the women in the queue—the line wasn’t straight enough for them. A truck arrived and the soldiers onboard stared with raw, undisguised interest at a new tent beside the feeding station, where donations of food and other supplies had been stacked.
Before long, Bashir’s antennae began to twitch with alarm. “Too many guns. Time to go,” he said, and we got back in our car to leave.
It was clear from those families I’d managed to speak with that almost everyone in the camp had come from territory controlled by Al Shabab. It had been the same in Dadaab. I remembered my trip to Buale and the Al Shabab commander I’d met with his pet dik-dik.
The declaration of famine seemed to have caught the militants off guard. They tried to play it down. They called it a test from God. They harassed and killed aid workers and continued to ban or obstruct most foreign aid organizations. They asked for help from fellow Muslims. They tried, aggressively, to prevent civilians from fleeing. They insisted that, God willing, the rains would soon come and all would be well.
But before long, an exodus was under way.
I thought of the dogs again when I spoke to a couple of government officials in Mogadishu that week. They couldn’t say it on the record, but in truth, they couldn’t believe their luck. The famine, they whispered cheerfully, was “an opportunity,” even “a blessing.” Not only was it discrediting Al Shabab, but it was luring away their civilian populations—the militants’ source of new recruits and income—and bringing them over to government territory. And that, in turn, would force the outside world to pump more aid into places like Mogadishu, into the government’s hands.
I felt a jolt of outrage at the cynicism of it all. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was, in a sense, just business as usual—a struggle for power and resources in a land without rules. The starving civilians flooding into Mogadishu were simply a new set of props to be herded into place by the men with guns.
* * *
TARZAN WAS ABROAD WHEN the famine was declared, and he rushed back to Mogadishu a few days later.
It was the windy season, the Hagaa, when the monsoon winds stir the Indian Ocean clockwise, bringing cooler waters up the coast of Somalia from the south, whipping sand across the parched countryside, and, sometimes, nudging a few rain clouds toward Mogadishu.
One morning soon after his return, Tarzan went to visit some of the new arrivals camped out in the skeleton-like ruins of the old cathedral. Human turds floated in the middle of the giant puddles. A woman sat in the entrance of her homemade tent, cradling a sickly child on her lap and trying, with her free hand, to relight a tiny clay cooking stove.
It had been raining heavily in the city for the past hour. Already, the low-lying areas near the coast were starting to flood. Imagine it. The irony of a flood in the middle of a famine was lost on no one.
Tarzan looked up at the cathedral. The corner of its one remaining tower—now just a few blocks balanced on top of one another—still jutted, improbably, into the sky. The roof was gone, and large chunks of white stone littered the ground. But the nave was more or less intact—a procession of elegant columns and arches leading into the gloom, and the air was cooler inside. The scuffing footsteps of Tarzan’s armed guards echoed quietly across the stone floor.
“This is a disaster,” Tarzan thought. “I won’t allow it.”
Over the past fortnight, hundreds of families had set up camp in the neighborhood. The only available space was in the ruins and in the cathedral’s grounds. The familiar makeshift tents were packed tightly together here. There were no toilets, no clean water, and precious little food. A group of young boys chased each other through the mud. A cholera outbreak seemed almost inevitable.
Tarzan describes all this to me in a fierce torrent of indignation. When he remembers the children “playing in an open space with floating human feces,” his eyes glisten with tears.
In the fight against the famine in Mogadishu, the mayor describes himself as being at the center of the whirlwind, a frenzy of activity, an organizer—demanding land on the edge of the city, setting up camps for the displaced, begging the public for donations, bullying local truck drivers into transporting thousands of families out of the city and into the camps. And all the time, fighting against the petty clan interests of his critics, against the rumors that he was only helping his own clan, and against an incompetent central government that promised help but contributed almost nothing.
“The government appointed five ministers to deal with the famine. Five ministers! They promised half a million dollars for the camp, but never paid. Their dignitaries all came there to take credit, to have their photos taken. The military were nearby but they’re always thugs. They rape at night.”
Tarzan doles the blame out like a generous orderly at a soup kitchen confronted with a long queue. It is the politician in him, and it fits a pattern. He often struggles to volunteer praise for anyone but himself.
“What I see, I speak. I don’t hide it.”
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON, TARZAN DECIDED to make an unannounced visit to one of Saacid’s food distribution points—a makeshift kitchen perhaps a mile north of the K4 roundabout and close to the frontlines. Stew and rice were being cooked in large, dark, steaming pots. Three dogs sat in the dirt nearby, as if considering their strategy.
Saacid’s operation seemed remarkable. I’d already visited some of the kitchens with Bashir. Here was a Somali charity that was doing something concrete, taking some of the vast stockpiles of UN food, milling the grain, cooking meals, and delivering them across the city.
But Tarzan was less impressed. The food being served was, he declared, “not fit for dogs.” More to the point, he claimed, it was all a scam—that in reality the food was being quietly sold off as animal feed, and the grain was ending up openly on sale in the city’s markets, still in its original World Food Programme bags.
Tarzan had clashed with Saacid before, accusing them of corruption over a contract to clear rubbish from the city’s streets. Then, as now, the organization vigorously protested its innocence. I found myself siding with Bashir. Could it really be possible, as another well-placed source later told me, that 80 percent of the food aid they were supposed to be distributing in Mogadishu was actually being stolen?
I was ready to believe that corners were being cut, commanders and warlords paid off, in order to get the food to the needy. But surely that was just the price of getting things done, of cutting through the red tape and ending the famine?
Then again, I was in a difficult position to judge. I liked Bashir, and perhaps more to the point, I was depending on him and his guards to keep me alive.
This was Mogadishu, after all. And as the drought continued, it became increasingly clear that it wasn’t just the politicians who were viewing the famine as an “opportunity.”
There were the militias, of course, who prowled around Camp Salvation, looking for unguarded, or poorly guarded, food convoys. There were riots, gunfights, and deaths. But there were also far more sophisticated scams by businessmen who took advantage, as they’d always done, of a weak government and an international community still trying to organize things at arm’s length, from Kenya.
“Bogus camps! Everywhere!” Tarzan fumes again. He’d inspected half a dozen around Mogadishu. “No fires in the huts, nobody used the latrines. No trace of life. Bogus!” And to maintain the illusion of credibility—at least when the camps were being evaluated—genuine famine victims were shunted around at gunpoint to sit, and queue, and be counted. Like hostages.
The United Nations Security Council commissioned its own investigations, which concluded much the same, and worse. Some serious allegations were leveled against Saacid. Again, it defended its actions vigorously. But it was not alone in facing criticism. From the moment foreign aid arrived at Mogadishu’s port, it was, the UN experts concluded, being siphoned off, illegally taxed, and distributed to local groups that went to enormous—you could almost say impressive—lengths to manipulate the entire process and hide their deceit.
“A pretty sick society, basically,” one of Tarzan’s deputies summed it up with a sad shrug.
* * *
THERE IS NO DOUBT that the famine exposed Somalia’s faults and failures more starkly than perhaps anything else since the country’s collapse two decades earlier. By some estimates, it killed more than a quarter of a million people, most of them children.
But the Somalis were not the only ones to blame. The outside world was too slow, and too political, in its response. The UN, understandably concerned about safety, kept its staff in Nairobi, Kenya, and let smaller local organizations like Saacid to do much of the hard work.
Then there were the Americans, with what many felt was a fastidious, squeamish, legalistic, immoral obsession with ensuring not a single drop of outside help—no bags of grain, no tents, no emergency rations—fell into the hands of Al Shabab.
But imposing such strict rules on the aid operation seemed, at best, impractically naive. Many considered it an act of monstrous cynicism. Surely, the best thing to do was to relax the rules, focus on the needs, and flood the whole place with cash and grain in order to bring the prices down and save lives. But the Americans were the biggest donors, and many foreign aid organizations privately, and sometimes publicly, fumed that Washington was proving to be an even bigger obstacle to fighting the famine than the Islamists.
* * *
AND THEN, IN THE middle of the famine, the entire equation in Mogadishu changed.
Sometime after midnight, on August 6, 2011, Tarzan’s mobile phone rang by his bedside at the Nasa Hablod 2 hotel, rousing him from a deep sleep. He listened, grunted, turned over, and thought nothing more of it. Another rumor. Wishful thinking.
The rumor had been brought to life a few hours earlier by some soldiers on the frontlines. Sentry after sentry began reporting the same thing. No one was returning fire anymore or even answering them when they shouted out in the dark. No insults, no entreaties. It took a while to piece together all the information across the city, and longer still for a few soldiers to edge forward and make sure. But before the sun had even appeared above the rim of the Indian Ocean the following morning, all doubt had vanished.
Quickly, and without warning or fanfare, Al Shabab had pulled out of Mogadishu, its fighters slipping away from the frontlines overnight, quietly abandoning the ruins and trenches and tunnels that they’d held onto with such furious determination. The group’s administrators, commanders, and tax collectors had likewise disappeared—either leaving the city or melting into it.
Several people in the nearby market town of Afgoye, further inland, had peered out of their windows during the night to see the convoys race past—trucks packed with fighters and smaller pickups with blacked-out windows—heading into the vast countryside of southern Somalia where Al Shabab still held sway.
Tarzan rose early the next morning, called Fanah to get him to bring his guards and convoy around to the hotel, and was soon driving north through the city, crossing the old frontlines and heading into districts and suburbs that were suddenly his to administer. He needed to see this for himself. But he also felt the politician’s instinct to introduce himself to the rest of the city’s population, to reassure them, to give them a taste of his own confidence.
His mind was racing. He’d been mayor of Mogadishu for more than a year now, but until that morning, peering through the tinted glass in the backseat of his own armored convoy as he sped from one district to the next, it hadn’t felt real. He’d been trying to survive, not to govern.
Not that the population was exactly celebrating yet.
In the claustrophobic, dusty streets of the giant Bakara market—for years the financial stronghold of Al Shabab—the small stallholders and the wealthier businessmen with their mobile phone shops, money exchanges, and electrical goods stores quietly sipped their tea and wondered who would fill this strange power vacuum. A warlord, perhaps? Or the feeble government? How soon would Al Shabab be back with its suicide attacks and roadside bombs? How many spies had they left behind? And more to the point, would business prosper or suffer even more now that the stern Islamists had gone and the old ways—of clan and corruption—seemed poised to return?
Twenty years of disappointment had bred a wariness that could not simply be shrugged off.
Still, in some neighborhoods, crowds did gather behind high walls, in courtyards and in local government offices, to welcome the militants’ departure, and to listen to an increasingly hoarse but energized Tarzan.
“This is your victory,” he shouted. It wasn’t just the African troops, the Ugandans and Burundians with their guns and mortars. It was the public who had rejected Al Shabab’s evil ideology. “You made this possible.”
It was good to hear it said. Maybe there was even a hint of truth to it—in recent months more businesses had been lured across the frontlines to Tarzan’s side of the city, reducing Al Shabab’s opportunity for raising funds through taxation.
But the simpler fact was that, in Mogadishu, Al Shabab had bitten off more than it could chew. Militarily, it was, at heart, a guerrilla organization. But somehow it had allowed itself to get lured into fighting—and funding—a conventional war, holding and administering half of Somalia’s biggest city. And it was struggling. Its enemy had international backing and far more troops and ammunition. Al Shabab could always buy more weaponry from corrupt government sources, but it had been losing too many men on the battlefield. More importantly, internal rifts were threatening to tear the militant group apart. Besides, there were other frontlines to protect against new factions, warlords, and self-declared administrations, which were starting to chip away at the edges of Al Shabab’s territory in other parts of southern Somalia. And although the organization had recently sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda, there was evidence that some of the group’s foreign fighters were now drifting away to new, more tempting conflicts in places like Libya and Syria.
And, of course, there was the famine, which imposed new financial burdens and constraints on Al Shabab and its revenues. Something had to give. And Mogadishu was the obvious choice.
* * *
THE CHALLENGE NOW, FOR Tarzan and for Somalia’s government, was to prove that they were a better alternative, that Al Shabab’s departure was a blessing that would not be squandered.
Leaving Mogadishu, I remember driving to the airport and swinging, counterclockwise, around the K4 roundabout. Something began fluttering beneath my rib cage, and I found myself shrinking back into my seat, as if that would make me safer. The roundabout always had that effect. It was a choke point. Everything slowed down at K4, as trucks and cows and carts and armed convoys and motorbikes tried to push their way through the traffic, jostling for access to one of the dusty, beyond-potholed roads leading either east into the city center, south to the airport, north toward the old frontlines, or west toward Afgoye.
Inevitably, it had become a favorite target for Al Shabab, and for all the other political assassinations and revenge attacks and score-settling that were invariably blamed on the Islamists, too. Black stains on the roundabout’s hard-worn tarmac still marked out a couple of the more spectacular explosions. There would be many more in the years ahead. But the wreckage would always be dragged away within an hour or so—there was no sense in making K4’s traffic wait even longer.
As our guards leapt off the pickup in front of us, waving furiously at a man sitting on a homemade cart, with two car wheels beneath him and an indifferent donkey in front, I leaned forward for a moment and looked through the darkly tinted window.
Coming up the airport road was a small convoy of white trucks. I could just make out a bright red flag with a white star and crescent on the front vehicle. It was the Turks.
Turkey—ambitious, business-minded, and Muslim—was poised to shake up, and to shame, the international aid effort for Somalia by abruptly striding into the country as if no threat existed, as if other foreign aid agencies had been cowering beneath the emperor’s new clothes. It was the start of a dramatic humanitarian intervention, and slowly, it would help to change the way the outside world perceived Mogadishu. With hundreds of Turks working and living in the city, it would become a lot harder for diplomats and aid workers to justify living in Nairobi and flying in for a few hours.
Suddenly there was a piercing, unfamiliar noise outside the car window.
Fffwoooeeeeeeeef.
It wasn’t a car horn. As we nudged forward, past the donkey and around the big concrete block in the center of the roundabout, I saw where it was coming from. Wading into the traffic, in a clean white shirt and beret, was a traffic policeman.
It seemed absurd. Unthinkable. Ordinarily I’d have jumped out to talk to him, but we had a plane to catch and security was an issue. So we drove on. But I can picture him now, through the rear window.
The famine wasn’t over. Al Shabab remained an existential threat. But here was a middle-aged man—someone who must have been able to remember how smoothly this roundabout had functioned two decades ago—charging out into the chaos, waving his arms at the traffic, convinced that in this city of brandished guns and quick tempers, the time had come for someone to try their luck with a whistle.