“We’re safe in here. Surely.”
—MOHAMUD “TARZAN” NUR
Mogadishu, 1960s. OFFICIAL MOGADISHU GUIDEBOOK, 1971
IMAGINE, FOR A MOMENT, THAT you’re floating in the cold silence of space, somewhere over the equator, perhaps five thousand miles above the earth. From this height you can see the whole of Africa spread out below you. Pale yellow at the top and bottom. A stripe of avocado green across the middle.
At first glance, the continent resembles nothing in particular.
But if you tilt your head to the right, the shapeless lump below is suddenly transformed into an elegant horse’s head, leaning in from the left, and bowing down in a docile manner to sip the waters of the Antarctic Ocean.
The dark blotch of Lake Victoria is the horse’s right eye. Cape Town sits placidly on the bottom lip, and the place we’re interested in—the place we’re now racing toward—is the horse’s perky right ear as it juts out and up into the Indian Ocean. From this height the ear, better known as the Horn of Africa, looks almost pink.
As we slip down, a thousand miles above the earth now, we glide toward the northeast, over Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro—from this height, just white pimples in the savannah. A straight, white coastline appears on the right.
We’re over Somalia. Green patches in the south, then a vast, smudged expanse of grays and curdled yellows, with pink and red dabs, and the tiniest veins of dark green.
Now Mogadishu is directly beneath us. Somalia’s capital is just a dull smear on the coastline from this height. But we’re sinking faster, and swinging out over the bright blue water to approach the city like the commercial airlines still do—keeping away from the shore until the very last minute to avoid rockets and gunfire.
And then suddenly the city takes shape before us in three dimensions.
The name itself seems forbidding. Like Stalingrad, Kabul, Grozny, and, these days, Syria’s Homs, Mogadishu conjures up lurid images of destruction.
But Mogadishu covers even more territory. It has become a bloated cliché, not just of war but of famine and piracy, terrorism, warlords, anarchy, exodus … All the worst headlines of our time invoked by one lilting, gently poetic, four-syllable word.
And yet today, as we swoop down toward the city center, Mogadishu looks unexpectedly, impossibly, undeniably pretty. A sandy, sunny seaside picture postcard of a city perched on a hill beside a turquoise sea.
Two curving harbor walls reach out into the Indian Ocean like crab claws. The airport runway emerges from the gruff, white waves to the south, to point like a guidebook’s arrow toward the city’s heart. There’s the beautiful old stone lighthouse, the outline of the cathedral, the fish market and a cluster of handsome old buildings around it, then a handful of taller buildings halfway up a gentle, dune-like hill, and the parliament at the top. And there’s Lido beach further north, almost at low tide now, and starting to fill up with young bathers, some just visible either in groups on the sand or leaping into the surf in bright orange lifejackets, rented from tiny stalls on the rocky shoreline.
At first, it’s hard to see the ruins. The cathedral, for example, seems determined to hide the fact that it’s just a roofless shell, one of its twin towers missing. But as we glide inland and up toward the parliament, the rest of the city, tucked behind the first ridge like a guilty secret, comes into view.
The land dips behind the parliament, and we can see a makeshift camp of ragged tents, and beyond it, the slump of a shallow valley where the buildings seem to huddle before rising again toward the Bakara market. An experienced eye might notice the absence of greenery. Where are the trees that once shaded so many streets in this neighborhood? And here, in the middle of the slump, the fierce sunlight ripples sharply along a jagged line of rooftops. It’s another clue. Like a bandage on a healing wound, the shiny corrugated iron roofs are evidence of the repair work now underway, as families try to move back into the ruins of what was, until recently, Mogadishu’s frontline—a scar that split the city in two.
This aerial view is appropriately perplexing. These are edgy, beguiling, bewildering times for Mogadishu, and indeed for the entire country. There is smug talk of corners being turned, signs of a “failed” nation clawing its way back toward viability, of the diaspora returning after decades in exile, businesses thriving, and stereotypes being shattered. Perhaps the worst is finally over. And if Somalia can breed optimism, what lessons might it hold for those now trying to fix Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other broken states?
And yet below us, on the dusty streets of Mogadishu, the same beasts still prowl. Terror, corruption, clan conflict, extremism, and, chasing at their tails, the lingering fear that Somalia is merely flirting with stability. That it will soon slide back into old habits. That the only lesson it can teach us is what not to do.
It’s almost exactly noon on a hot, cloudless Friday. And suddenly our attention is jerked away from that sunlit line of corrugated roofs. On what now looks like the highest point in the whole city, a large cloud of black smoke is rising like a balloon into the humid air.
It is Friday, February 21, 2014, and in a country where the percussion of violence—gunshots, rockets, mortars, grenades, bombs—has, over the decades, become embedded in people’s minds as the background music of an ordinary day, a particularly loud and brazen attack is beginning.
* * *
A DEEP, SHARP, BOOM rolls across the contours of the city.
A car bomb has just been detonated by a suicide attacker outside the half-renovated northern gate of Villa Somalia, the hilltop seat of the country’s government. Seconds later, a second car explodes nearby. The echoes of the two blasts mingle and separate, like thunder, across Mogadishu.
The explosions have entirely shredded two cars and torn a hole in the compound’s wall below a new, half-built watchtower. Seven gunmen, dressed to look more or less like the official security guards patrolling the area, are rushing inside.
Villa Somalia is a fortress. But the attackers surely have inside knowledge. They’ve picked a weak point. At first they meet no resistance as they run up a wide, empty avenue along the outer wall of a house now occupied by Somalia’s new president.
Ahead of them, other large buildings are half-hidden behind trees. There’s the prime minister’s residence, and the speaker of parliament’s. Villa Somalia is an oddity—a swaggering Italian colonial palace, now caught somewhere between a luxury gated compound and a dilapidated college campus. It is home to the latest in a succession of fragile new Somali governments, some of whose authority has extended no further than the walls of Villa Somalia itself.
Mohamud “Tarzan” Nur is halfway through the doors of Villa Somalia’s mosque, just opposite the president’s quarters, when he hears the first explosion, perhaps a hundred yards away.
“Stay calm,” he says to the men nearby, trying to sound nonchalant.
There’s a big crowd at the mosque today. Perhaps three hundred shoes and flip-flops sit on the tiled steps outside what seems like a surprisingly modest little white-walled building.
There are nods at the door, and a low murmur of conversation. No one here is a stranger to adrenaline. Indeed, to be a politician or a government official or any public figure in Mogadishu these days is to live, if not in fear, then in an almost constant state of antennae-twitching awareness, masked by a half-competitive, macho struggle to remain composed no matter what.
The daily routine of trying to avoid routine is exhausting. Was that a motorbike in the rearview mirror? A bearded stranger? How to vary your journey to work? Where to sit in a restaurant? And for how long? Which colleagues to trust? Which functions to avoid? In the past few months the high court, parliament, and several hotels have come under attack. Individual assassinations—usually on the street with a bullet to the back of the head—happen almost daily, ratcheting up the tension like the relentless beat of a metronome.
Right now, inside the mosque, two thought sequences are rattling more or less simultaneously through Tarzan’s head.
“Sounds like a car exploded outside. The military can take care of it. We’re safe in here. Surely. There must be enough soldiers to keep us safe.”
The second thought is a reaction to the increasingly nervous, questioning faces around him; to the scrum starting to form at the bluetinted glass door; and to Tarzan’s own sense of himself—as the mayor of Mogadishu—a powerful position, even if he’s only clinging to it by his fingertips these days.
He’s been in the job for almost four years. That’s far longer than anyone expected, not least because of his reckless habit of speaking his mind, bluntly. Caution is considered a survival instinct here, above all for politicians, but Tarzan seems unable to bite his tongue.
“I don’t afraid anyone,” is the way he’s put it to me, in his fluent, self-taught English. “I’m not a person—what do you call it?—an arse-licker.”
And the result is that no one in Mogadishu is merely indifferent to the mayor. In a city of grudges, score-settling, and fiercely whispered judgments, everyone has an opinion about Tarzan.
He’s a thug, a shallow charmer, the only honest politician in town, a useful whirlwind, a slave to his own clan’s interests, a corrupt hypocrite, a cheap populist, Somalia’s future president, a media sideshow, the diaspora’s darling, the city’s savior.
The only thing no one seems inclined to dispute is his courage. Although his critics call it a showy disdain for self-preservation, and his enemies see it as a recklessness he will surely be made to regret.
And so that second thought takes shape in Tarzan’s mind, and turns almost instantly into action.
“Let me go over and start to pray. We should all pray. It will help prevent panic. Believe me.”
Beckoning briefly to the others, Tarzan walks in his black socks across the faded green and gold carpet toward the front right corner of the mosque—his usual spot—and kneels down, toes peeping out from below black trousers, flecks of gray in his close-cropped black hair.
Outside, the shooting is getting closer.
Tarzan bows his head toward the carpet, and somehow manages to let his mind drift away—or at least half away—into the routine of prayer. He’s a man inclined toward brusque certainties, and right now he has decided that the shooting is all “outgoing.” The situation is under control.
In his early sixties, Tarzan still looks like he’s in good shape. He’s stockier than many Somalis. A bulldog, you might say, in a nation of whippets. He has a round, pleasant face, but his bright white teeth seem perpetually exposed in a snarling sort of grin. His oval brown eyes leap and flash in tune to his every thought. High on his forehead, there’s a lump left behind from an old fight, and the lobe of his left ear is gone, bitten off years ago. The trimmed beard below his mouth has turned a suave white. It looks like the chin of an aristocrat framing the face of a brawler.
Down the slope perhaps two blocks east of Villa Somalia, Tarzan’s wife, Shamis, has heard the explosion and the gunfire and has quickly worked out where the noise must be coming from. It’s less than ten minutes since Tarzan left their house; driving past the guards at the end of their short road, then up through the labyrinth of concrete barriers and gates leading into the main entrance of the Villa. Surely he must be the target.
“Oh my God! They’ve killed him.”
Shamis is a confident, talkative woman. She thinks of herself as a worrier, but she’s not prone to overreacting. She never wanted Tarzan to come back to Mogadishu after so many years in London, but for years she’s tried to bury her fears about his job, and the threats and assassination attempts against him. It’s a game they both play.
But now she’s standing in the cluttered sitting room of their bungalow, screaming to the walls as the bullets zip overhead. In her heart, she knows her husband has died.
The couple’s eldest son, Ahmed—the first of six—comes rushing in. He looks a lot like his father, and he has a reputation—far less admired than Tarzan’s—for taking unnecessary risks. He often drives around Mogadishu after dark without security, and his friends have come up with a new nickname for him—“Kill Me.” But Friday prayers are not a priority for Ahmed. Rather than accompanying his father to the mosque, he was half-asleep in the neighboring house on their small cul-de-sac, until he was woken by the gunfire and by his mother.
Now the seven gunmen have reached the back of the mosque. This is their target. The president should have strolled over from his villa for prayers by now. Killing him will be straightforward. Except that the president, for no particular reason, is unexpectedly late today. It means he’s safe behind high walls.
There’s a mixture of security teams guarding Villa Somalia—foreign peacekeepers on the perimeter, Somali government troops inside, along with a chaotic assortment of close protection and national intelligence agents. In the past that’s been a recipe for confusion and infighting, but they’re edging forward as a group now, firing constantly, some crawling in the dirt, others sheltering behind a small office building just a few yards from the mosque. Beside them, a big satellite dish on a concrete stand has been turned into a bullet-riddled colander.
Inside the mosque, the imam has taken refuge in an alcove just in front of Tarzan. He’s a light-hearted, bespectacled man. Suddenly, he sees a figure in army fatigues at the nearest window, to Tarzan’s right. A soldier, perhaps? Another man joins him. The imam can see their faces clearly now. One of the men shouts “Allahu Akbar” and starts shooting through the clear glass into the mosque.
Everything is happening at furious speed.
There’s an elderly man—once a senior figure in the intelligence service—kneeling beside Tarzan in the front row. Bullets from the gunman at the window rip into him. He is killed on the spot.
It seems hard to believe that Tarzan is still praying beside the dead man. When gunfire is close by—particularly in and around buildings—it can be almost impossible to work out which direction it’s coming from. Still, surely he must have noticed what’s happening around him.
But the imam is in no doubt. Tarzan has not moved an inch. Months later, it’s the one detail in the whole story that makes him chuckle.
“He stayed praying! No one else did. Not even me. He believed in Allah!”
By this point, Abukar Dahir’s instincts have finally kicked in. He’s been crouching just outside the mosque’s entrance, caught in a blur of panic. Now he catches a glimpse of two gunmen, perhaps twenty yards away, and his legs make the decision for him, sprinting south, across the courtyard, and out of danger.
Abukar is a skinny, self-assured twenty-six-year-old; a banker from a well-to-do family who grew up in Mogadishu, then Damascus, Moscow, Stockholm, and finally west London. He’s back in Mogadishu trying to do his bit, which in his case means stints at the central bank and the foreign ministry.
Within a couple of minutes, Abukar has talked his way through the security cordon at one of the hotels at the far edge of the compound—a place where any MPs and officials who can afford the rates often camp out for weeks at a time. And here are two of his colleagues, who escaped just ahead of him. They’re sitting in a corner, inside, hunched over a mobile phone, trying to get through to a fourth friend.
The missing man is Mohamud Hersi Abdulle. Like the others, he’s a member of the spirited, fast-changing pool of diaspora Somalis who’ve come back to the country to work up at the Villa. He’s a rising star—already the chief of staff in the prime minister’s office. But when he finally answers his phone, it is to tell his friends that he’s pinned down by gunfire, trapped in another building just beside the mosque.
“They came in they came in they came in!” he’s shouting down the phone. Abukar is listening with the other two on speakerphone. “They’reshootingthey’reshooting…”
The voice stops abruptly, and Abukar feels the air pulled out of his own chest as he hears the gunshots. He can hear them all too clearly through the phone, and a split second earlier—or maybe later—from outside the hotel. And he can hear, or at least he thinks he can hear, the sound of bullets hitting flesh. It’s hard to explain, but they sound different, as if he can tell there’s no ricochet.
Outside the mosque windows, the attackers don’t have much time left. Perhaps a minute or less. They’re outnumbered and pinned down. One of the attackers throws a grenade into the mosque, but it fails to explode. One of the officials inside has a gun and finally begins shooting back, hitting an attacker as he approaches the main entrance.
And now a solitary figure makes his way across the carpet, past the tiled pillars, toward Tarzan.
Mohamed Fanah is a gruff, muscular man in a leather jacket. He is Tarzan’s cousin, and has remained in Mogadishu through all its wars. Now he’s in charge of the mayor’s security and somehow he has managed to bring a car up close to the mosque door. In the process, some of the car’s tires have been shredded by gunfire.
“They’re inside. They’re inside. We leave now,” says Fanah, grabbing Tarzan’s shoulder and pulling him sharply up from the carpet.
Tarzan is jolted out of whatever thoughts or prayers were keeping him on his knees; and only now, as he sees the dead body to his left, does he begin to understand what’s been happening. Bullets are still coming into the room as Tarzan and Fanah join the back of the scrum now pushing its way out of the door, trampling barefoot over the shoes still lying on the steps. Out into the harsh sunshine.
* * *
LATER IN THE AFTERNOON, when it’s all over, the bodies of seven attackers—all those who entered Villa Somalia—are dragged down the path and out onto the street, near to the wreckage of their car bombs and to an incongruously bright patch of pink bougainvillea blossom.
The rest is predictable: the phone call from a spokesman for the Islamist militant group Al Shabab, claiming responsibility for an attack against “infidels”; and the defiant presidential speech, asserting that Al Shabab remains “on the brink of extinction.”
And then a practiced collective shrug.
After all, Mogadishu has been through all this before, so many times.
The seven bodies lie for hours in the dirt. They’ve been dumped haphazardly, contemptuously. Some have lost their shoes. One is shirtless. Their blood has sunk into the earth around them and been dried by the sun.
Who were these men? The truth is that nobody even tries to find out. It has been years since Somalia’s bureaucracy was destroyed, along with all records of births and of identity. Besides, the police have no forensic capability. So the usual rumors begin instead, scratching at the official version of events. Maybe it was an inside job; maybe Al Shabab is everywhere; maybe the attack was more about clans, or business, than religion; maybe the truth doesn’t even matter anymore.
And what of Tarzan? The mayor has already sidestepped death many times in Mogadishu. Can luck reset, like a stopwatch, or does it drain away like a puddle in the sand?
What follows in these pages is Tarzan’s life story, or something close to it—the truth can be a hard thing to pin down in Somalia. It’s a story of reinvention, defiance, and ambition—of an abandoned child, turned restless teenager, who fled from war and then dared to return home from exile, to a city of ruins, to fight his own battles.
Some Somalis would say Tarzan’s life mirrors their country’s tumultuous journey, from the optimism of independence through a generation of conflict and despair and now back to a faltering sort of hope. Some would go even further, arguing that Tarzan’s story is an eloquent riposte to those foreign politicians outside Somalia who want to build walls and block immigration—that two decades of safety and study in Britain acted like an incubator, providing him, and countless others, with the skills needed to start, eventually, rebuilding Mogadishu.
Others will tell you that Tarzan deserves no such praise. That he’s a callow, corrupt survivor. Nothing more. He is, as I mentioned, a divisive figure. But one thing seems clear to me: His story is a thread that weaves its way through decades of upheaval—a glint worth following in a dark maze.