emails I received from Ali Sharmarke during the war sounded more desperate by the week. “You don’t know who’s attacking you,” he would write, since the ICU, al Shabab and the Ethiopian-backed TFG were critical of any negative press. Few foreign journalists covered Somalia that year, but local reporters were dogged and for their efforts they were being targeted and assassinated in record numbers.
ON AUGUST 11, 2007, a large group of Somali journalists, including Sahal and Ali, gathered at the funeral of one of their own. They were burying Mahad Ahmed Elmi, a popular talk-show host on HornAfrik. Mahad didn’t mince words, and, despite death threats, he was relentless in holding the warlords, the Islamists and government officials accountable. Mahad was shot three times in the head on the way to work that morning and was buried the same day, as is customary in the Islamic faith. Before going to the funeral, Ali had called Ahmed Abdisalam Adan, one of his HornAfrik co-founders, who was visiting Canada. “I’m just worried about the young reporters,” he told his friend in a weary voice. “The risk is getting so great.”
Hours later Ali spoke passionately at the gravesite. He lamented the loss of Mahad, and another blow to journalism in Somalia, and the dwindling hope for peace in the country. “We are in the crossfire—all of us journalists,” he said. “The killing was meant to prevent a real voice that described the suffering in Mogadishu to other Somalis and to the world. He was a symbol of neutrality. . . The perpetrators want to silence our voices in order to commit their crimes.” This was uncharacteristic of the usually cautious Ali. But he was mad and feeling guilty. He had inspired a generation of journalists who were now being slaughtered at the rate of one a month.
Ali left the funeral exhausted, and slumped in the front seat of a black Toyota Land Cruiser. Duguf, who had been our fixer, was driving. Sahal sat in the back with Falastine, Ahmed’s wife. They were only eight kilometres from Sahal’s home near the Shamo Hotel, where they could mourn their colleague behind guarded walls, where the garden and cigars, John Coltrane and Tortoise waited.
Bang. Darkness. Dust.
It was never determined if Shabab had detonated the remote-controlled improvised explosive device or if the Ethiopians or TFG were behind the killing. As Ali had said, everyone wanted journalists dead. The Land Cruiser passengers stumbled out bleeding and deaf. Ali had to be pulled out. He lay motionless on the road. He was fifty.
At first I didn’t believe the news when I heard it a day later. I remember the call; I remember that it was my birthday. But I can’t remember who called me. There were always rumours from Somalia, and besides, Ali was just one of those guys who didn’t die. A picture of his body on the Internet confirmed it and I sat at our kitchen table crying and hating Somalia. Thinking back to the corridors of Horn-Afrik’s newsroom, where Ali had proudly hung the international awards his radio station had received, I remembered the dozens of sayings and words of inspiration taped on walls or sitting framed on desks. One hanging near Ali’s office read: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Sahal was not sure if he would ever return to Mogadishu after Ali’s death. Reuters offered to put him up in a Nairobi hotel after the bombing. He chose a modest one in the town centre and rarely ventured out. When he did, he would see Ali walking the streets. “I knew it was a matter of time before something happened; statistically the chances were there,” he told me years later, still tearing up at the thought. “But my sons, Liban and Abdul Aziz, what would they think if anything happened to me? Would they think, ‘That son of a gun abandoned us because he was there, selfish, looking after his career and Somalia instead of us?’ But I wanted them to have a part of their heritage—the gift of what I had of my father. But now I feel like that gift was taken away,” he paused, then repeated, “Now I feel like that gift was taken away.”
Liban, Sahal’s eleven-year-old son, helped him heal and find the courage to return to Toronto, and then eventually back to Somalia. Liban later conveyed his pride in his father’s work to a room packed with Canada’s top journalists who had gathered at a gala dinner in Toronto to honour Ali posthumously. Standing on a box to reach the microphone, his voice unwavering, Liban read a speech that reduced the cynical, grizzled crowd to tears. “Reporters have a lot of courage and determination. All they want is to make a difference, to educate people on what’s going on in the world. That’s exactly what my uncle Ali Imam was trying to do,” Liban told the crowd. “Can you believe someone could be killed because they wanted a better world, a more educated society?” After his speech, Liban ran around the ballroom collecting business cards from the journalists, later beaming as he showed me the stack like they were precious and rare hockey cards.
While recovering from his wounds in Toronto, Sahal had left his Mogadishu home, his garden and Tortoise in the care of a trusted cousin, who carefully tended to the plants and animals. But one day in the summer of 2008, cleaners scrubbed the concrete patio outside Sahal’s home with a mixture of chlorine and chemicals. The toxic brew pooled in one of Tortoise’s favourite cool afternoon resting places. Tortoise died later that afternoon, and the death of that stubborn reptile felt like Ali’s death all over again for Sahal.
Tortoise had somehow survived traffic, the power-hungry warlords, insurgents, clan warfare, disease, misguided foreign policies, neglect and starvation, only to die a senseless death. Somehow, Tortoise’s death seems like an apt metaphor for Somalia itself.
THE YEAR AFTER Ali died, a young Somali girl named Asho Duhu-low went missing from a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. No one remembers the exact date in August 2008 that Asho disappeared. Her disappearance was barely noticed outside her immediate family, which is not surprising since Dadaab is one of the world’s oldest and largest refugee camps, where stories of loss are more plentiful than bread. Alive, young Asho was just one of 230,000 refugees, about 90 per cent Somali, who lived in the United Nations camp in the desert-like northern Kenya region near the border of Somalia. Dead, she would become an international story about Shabab’s brutality.
While the details of her disappearance remained murky, the details of her death were not. She died in the Somali port town of Kismayo on October 27, around 4 PM, after she had one last tearful conversation with her father and after her captors buried her legs so she could not escape. A small group of men stoned her to death with large rocks.
Al Shabab had killed Asho as punishment for the crime of “adultery.” It was a public execution before hundreds, and local reports said some onlookers tried to intervene, running forward in protest until Shabab’s militia fired into the crowd. A young boy was reportedly killed. Rock after rock struck Asho’s head and chest. A break only came when someone, reportedly a nurse, stepped forward to see if she was dead. Asho had a pulse; the stoning resumed. Pictures surreptitiously taken with a cellphone recorded the gruesome aftermath. One blurry shot shows the bloodied face of a girl wearing a soiled pink sweater. On Somalia’s Radio Shabelle, a Shabab spokesperson later said that Asho had pleaded guilty and “was happy with the punishment under Islamic law.”
I read about Asho in an Amnesty International report and was eager to go to Dadaab to see how other Somali refugees were faring. I had been there before, with Pete Power. The camp was reportedly growing by the day, resources were thin, tension was mounting and Shabab was recruiting amid the disorder.
Around the time I heard about Asho, I also became aware of an Ottawa-based program called World University Service of Canada. Each year, the organization selected refugees living in camps around the world to study in Canadian universities. WUSC had awarded its thousandth scholarship that fall. Of the eighteen students who had been hand-picked from Dadaab, some had come to Toronto, and Muno Osman was one of them. I went to meet Muno in her apartment at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus, still only thinking of telling Asho’s story, wondering if she had known her in Dadaab. When I met Muno, I knew she was a story herself.
With our luggage full of gifts Muno wanted us to give
