empty street was packed. I got back in the Jeep as Pete went to get Duguf, who was arguing with the woman.
Dozens of men pressed up against the window and started yelling “American,” laughing and banging the glass, trying to rock the Jeep. I smiled weakly, mouthing “Nooo . . . Cann-ehhh-di-ann,” which made their jeers louder. Hmm. What had those British sas guys taught me to do in a situation like this?
The crowd didn’t believe me, or understand, or care if I was Canadian or American or Bhutanese, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. So I just sat there smiling and pressing my blue passport against the window like a shield while Pete yelled at Duguf outside the Jeep. His lips looked like they were saying: “Time to go!” Once they made their way through the crowd back to our car, the convoy finally inched forward and then took off at high speed when in the clear. Duguf seemed calm but was shaking his head in disbelief.
“She wanted us to pay!” he finally said. The woman, who lived nearby and we later learned was called the “Black Hawk Lady,” had wanted us to pay a fee to see the piece of helicopter. She wanted about $5, something we would have gladly paid for a “museum” fee, considering we had already paid $250 for a “visa.” But Duguf was indignant. He considered us guests and was furious we were being taken advantage of. But it appeared few were on Duguf’s side.
AS THE SUN SANK below the roof of the Peace Hotel that night, the clanking of plates and mewing of scrawny cats heralded the end of that day’s Ramadan fast. Ali Sharmarke swirled his decaffeinated coffee slowly, cradling one cellphone to his ear while another jumped closer to the table’s edge with each vibration. Hotel owner Bashir Yusuf Osman was famous for treating his foreign guests to lobster dinner on the roof, but on this night we sat under a tree in front of the hotel with a simple but delicious dinner of fish and rice. Business was booming at the Peace Hotel, where the generator rarely failed, with humanitarian workers, foreign journalists and businessmen tentatively coming back into the country. There were no vacancies when we arrived, but Bashir’s younger brother kindly gave me his room and Pete found space with a couple of generous Japanese photographers.
“They just closed our station in Kismayo,” Ali said, hanging up the phone. Earlier in the day, his HornAfrik reporters had covered an all-female protest against the ICU in the southern town. The ICU retaliated by shutting down the station. When I had asked Professor Addou about a free press earlier in the day, he had agreed wholeheartedly about its importance. But he added that journalists must work “with restrictions.” In fact, there were thirteen. Rule 13: “The media must not employ the terms which infidels use to refer to Muslims, such as ‘terrorist,’ ‘extremists,’ etc.” Journalists were not allowed to create “conflict” with their stories. “It’s so arbitrary,” Ali said, shaking his head.
As we discussed these problems, the heavy tin door to the hotel compound was in constant motion, opening to let in visitors like a curtain sliding back between acts of a play. We were afforded glimpses of the darkened street, where men strolled arm in arm or children ran alongside the odd goat. The evening’s soundtrack that night was a murmur of voices and laughs, not the gunshots that Somalis had grown accustomed to.
Farah Muke could barely contain his excitement as he ran through the doors and up to our table, pumping my hand furiously. Farah was Canadian and like many of Toronto’s Somali diaspora lived in the Rexdale neighbourhood north of the city. Also like many Somalia-born Canadians, Farah was a diehard patriot. “If I see any Canadians here, I have to meet them,” he said, explaining that word had reached him that journalists from the Star were in town. “I love the Toronto Star!” Farah had returned to Mogadishu four months ago but missed his Canadian home and planned to return soon. “I fly a Canadian flag from my home and people are always asking why I do that, and I say, ‘Because I like Canada so much!’” He asked if we could come see his flag, maybe take a picture the following day?
Throughout the night, visitors came to the hotel to see us: a Somali poet, other Canadians, curious neighbours of the hotel. And while this easy flow of people may not have seemed remarkable to us, Ali assured us that it was. Most people stayed home after dark in Mogadishu.
But Ali was still worried about the ICU’s radical element. Young, bloodthirsty fighters like Sheikh Indha’adde and Sheikh Mukhtar Robbow, also known as Abu Mansour, were jockeying for power. There were frightening stories about how ICU members dispensed their own perverted sense of justice. Would these factions overwhelm Sheikh Sharif? What about Aweys, whom no one trusted?
But even Ali, indignant with the restrictions on his reporters, could not denounce the entire organization. It was simple. The ICU had delivered a break in the war, and for that, at least for now, Somalis were thankful.
SOMETIMES IT IS hard not to picture terrorists holed up in caves, with ak-47s resting against the muddy walls and generators powering broadcasts of Fox News, around which they all huddle. Giggling. Rubbing their hands. “This is making our job too easy,” one would exclaim. Gifts for al Qaeda recruiters: the Iraq war, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the burning of Qur’ans, the tortured death of an Afghan taxi driver in Bagram, waterboarding, misguided predator drones, faulty intelligence. In this theme of disastrous reactions to disastrous events comes the next chapter in Somalia’s history.
U.K.-born, Canadian-raised analyst Matt Bryden, who has lived much of his adult life in Somalia and neighbouring countries and speaks Somali fluently without a trace of an English accent, was among those who tried to warn what would happen if fears about the ICU led to their removal by force. “After more than a decade of political disengagement from Somalia, the United States has plunged back in with an approach that threatens to produce precisely the scenario it seeks to avoid: a militant Islamist movement that serves as a magnet for foreign jihadists and provides a platform for terrorist groups,” Bryden wrote in an essay for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in December 2006.
Arguing that since 9/11 Washington has viewed Somalia through a narrow counterterrorism lens, with almost no political engagement and little humanitarian aid, Bryden stated that Washington’s new policy of pledging its unconditional support for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government and for longtime rival Ethiopia is “not just self-defeating: it is inflammatory.” He wrote: “Washington appears to have designated the Courts as a strategic adversary, elevating Somalia from a simmering regional problem to a global issue. The Courts are now likely to attract support from a far broader range of anti-American and anti-Western interests than they have so far, and the flow of foreign funds and fighters to the [icu] seems bound to increase dramatically.”
Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s transitional government had lost credibility among Somalis partly due to the corruption among the government’s ranks. But as so often is the case with dizzyingly complicated Somalia, the struggle for power between the Transitional Federal Government and the ICU was oversimplified in the West. The ICU and all its members: terrorists. The TFG: good guys.
Behind the scenes, the Bush administration was focused on three men hiding in Somalia who were wanted in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. According to New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson, Michael Ranneberger, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, had attempted to negotiate with ICU leader Sharif, telling him that if he would eschew terrorism and take action against the three high-value targets, they could work together. “He listened and nodded and seemed to understand. But then he went back to Mogadishu and I never heard from him again. I guess he had no traction there,” Ranneberger told Anderson.
Further attempts for diplomatic solutions were abandoned. Ethiopia, Somalia’s neighbour, had long been wary of Islamic uprisings, fearing that any movement in Somalia would radicalize Ethiopia’s sizable Muslim population. Ethiopian tanks rolled across the border into Somalia on Christmas Eve 2006, with Washington’s blessing. No one believed the ICU could withstand Ethiopia’s army, but the speed and ease with which it captured Mogadishu was surprising. Within
