prison warden, Lucas was as tough as he was hard-working. In New Orleans, in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, police ripped Lucas’s camera off his neck and threw him to the ground after he photographed them beating a handcuffed suspect. He handed over a second camera and then walked the block to cool off before confronting them and demanding back his equipment. They returned the cameras, minus the memory cards. He would continue to find himself in police crosshairs throughout the years, dodging bullets in Bahrain, or following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where he captured a wrenching photo of fifteen-year-old Fabienne Cherisma as she lay dead, clutching three ornamental mirrors. The teenager in the pink skirt, T-shirt and sandals had been running with other looters when police shot at random, striking her in the head.
At Dadaab we tracked down Asho’s family, and over the course of a week discovered the sad life of a little girl who had suffered from epilepsy and struggled in school. Her father still carried her prescription for epilepsy medication, folded hard into a little block of paper about the size of a matchbook. He pushed it at us like it was a clue to her disappearance. The story of how she left that camp was impossible to verify, even after interviewing many who saw her on that last day. She may have left willingly for Kismayo, trying to find the Somali town that existed only in her imagination and her grandmother’s stories. Or she may have been kidnapped as a bride. One report said she had been gang raped when she got to Somalia and reported the crime, only to be charged with a crime herself.
Jihadi websites justified her killing, purporting that Asho was in fact “over twenty years old, married and practising adultery” and thereby rightfully killed under Sharia law. But we talked to Asho’s teacher at the camp’s primary school and spent more than an hour in a sweltering, fly-ridden classroom poring over school records to find proof of her age and see her report card. We tracked down someone who was at the Dadaab hospital the day Asho was born. Asho was only thirteen, not that her killing would have been justified had she been any age, but I took delight in debunking the jihadi websites.
A short walk (but what seemed like a world away) from Asho’s distraught parents lived Muno’s proud mother and father. The whole family had sacrificed to get Muno that coveted scholarship, her sisters taking up chores, her father having to defend his daughter’s pursuit of education among some of the traditional Somali elders at the camp who wondered how, at twenty, she could not yet be married. We had brought photos Lucas had taken of Muno on campus, which I’m sure looked to her family like they were taken on Mars. Her sisters handled the photos carefully with expressions that oscillated between pride and fear as we squatted on the ground over plates of cookies and xalwo, a sugary homemade jelly. Mohamed Osman, Muno’s father, said he always fought for education for his three girls. “Seeing is believing,” he said. “I was always supporting her. Girls are equal beings.” Muno’s beautiful mother, Safiyo Abdikadir, added quietly, “I just wanted her to be something. I’m illiterate and I know how horrible it is.”
They laughed tenderly when describing the day their middle child left. Muno was sobbing. It may have been the happiest day of her life, but that didn’t mean leaving was easy. Her parents had to carry their daughter onto the bus, helping her leave the camp the same way they had brought her here as a two-year-old refugee, eighteen years earlier.
Muno took planes—which she had only seen before in the sky—to London and then Toronto. Under the folds of cloth that covered her, she wore new winter boots, jeans and a leather jacket. She almost passed out when she finally arrived at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Everyone had told her Canada was cold. No one told her, though, that it didn’t snow in August. Muno hoped to sponsor her family in Canada one day. Her parents longed for her to return to Somalia and prayed for peace.
In 2006, Dadaab’s population was at its limit, staff said. By 2008, it had grown by 30,000 and definitely could take no more. By 2011, more than 300,000 displaced Somalis lived in Dadaab.
Dadaab continues to grow.
ONLY THREE YEARS had passed since Sheikh Sharif met me in Mogadishu and talked about that light at the end of the tunnel; about how he would bring peace so that refugees like those in Dadaab could finally come home. Only three years ago, he was the leader of an Islamic insurgency that some in Washington cited as the next great threat to the West. Only three years ago, he was one of President Bush’s evildoers.
I replayed that last meeting as I rode the elevator to his suite at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. I made it past the cordon of dozens of NYPD agents standing guard outside, only to be met by a muscular and unsmiling U.S. Secret Service agent. “I have an appointment with President Sharif.” President Sharif. It was October 2009, and Sharif had just addressed the United Nations. A month earlier, in Nairobi, he made headlines around the world after shaking hands with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She called him the “best hope” in a long time for Somalia. Some feted Sharif as a visionary. New York was his coming-out party.
President Sharif entered the room wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, a delicately embroidered prayer cap and a pin of Somalia’s flag on his lapel. His hand was outstretched. Three years ago, we had not shaken hands, and had I tried the gesture would have likely been met with disapproving clucks from his advisors.
The hotel room smelled of roses; large unopened glass bottles of Evian sat nearby. The fruit tray and exotic flower arrangement, with a spiky protea at the centre, probably cost more than most Somalis make in a year. “You’re first, Al Jazeera is next,” said a jubilant Abdulkareem Jama, Sharif’s chief of staff, an American citizen who also acted as our translator. “We have thirty minutes.”
Was Sharif the same man I had met three years earlier? Or had he adapted to the times? Some analysts believed he was a chameleon, a politician ready to say what both the United States and the hard-line Islamists wanted to hear. Others just thought he was well meaning, but weak. He laughed when I asked how he had changed, how Somalia was different today.
“The challenges people were facing before were kidnappings, rape, violence, all kinds of problems. No one at the time believed change could come but I had a lot of hope,” he said of his 2006 tenure with the ICU. “I find myself in the same spot now where we have a lot of serious challenges and people saying this is not going to work. But I am full of hope.”
Same man, different times?
Sharif was among the ICU leadership that fled for safety during Ethiopia’s 2007 incursion. According to New Yorker
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