Barre’s ousting. What the U.S. administration did not appreciate in its attempt to capture Mohammed Farah Aideed, the ruthless warlord of the day, was Somalia’s fierce clan structure and nationalistic pride. Nothing unites Somalis more than fending off a foreign force, which is why a militia in flip flops and armed with rocket-propelled grenades managed to shoot America’s sturdy steel birds out of the sky and send its elite forces running for cover.
Black Hawk Down had always been my image of Somalia. Every time I walked down the newsroom corridor to my desk I saw the dusty, battered torso of U.S. Staff Sergeant William Cleveland. The Toronto Star’s Paul Watson risked his life to take that Pulitzer Prize– winning photo of Cleveland’s corpse as it was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by a cheering, dancing, frenzied mob on October 3, 1993. Paul would later write in his memoir, Where War Lives, that before he took the photo he “winced with each blow.”
Paul’s image of Cleveland, one of the eighteen American soldiers killed the day two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were shot out of the sky (and hundreds of Somalis were killed in the fighting), changed the course of history, prompting U.S. President Bill Clinton to pull American forces out of the region. When it was announced the following year that Paul had become the first Canadian journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize, colleagues paraded him around the newsroom on their shoulders. The Star later created commemorative pewter coins about the diameter of hockey pucks depicting Paul with a disproportionately enormous forehead. “A pall of stunned silence fell over the room,” Paul later told me, describing the moment when managers handed out the coins. “Then suddenly there was a single thunk of a coin hitting a plastic garbage bin, followed by another and then more, in a rippling wave of thunks as my oversized, memorialized forehead hit bottom across the Star.” When I joined the newspaper as a summer student a year later, reporters who still had the coins had stashed them in their desk drawers and the consensus seemed to be that money spent on a big party would have been a better idea.
After 1993, Somalia largely fell off the world’s radar as the fighting continued and thousands died of starvation and disease. The West became reluctant to get involved again, which brought disastrous consequences not just for Somalia but for the region. The Western world ignored the 1994 genocide in Rwanda until it was too late partly because of Black Hawk Down aftershocks and fears of becoming involved in African affairs. The little foreign help Somalia did receive throughout the 1990s came from Arab states, Saudi Arabia in particular, which helped fund schools and mosques and deliver humanitarian aid.
With 9/11 came fears that the Horn of Africa would harbour fleeing al Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan as it had in the past. U.S. forces set up a military base in nearby Djibouti, and Somalia’s instability took on global significance. Conferences, summits, dialogues and reconciliation meetings were held in five-star hotels in neighbouring Kenya as un officials and diplomats met with Somali warlords, politicians, businessmen and clan power brokers to discuss a way out of the mess. The meetings would end with much hand-shaking and ten- or fifteen- or twenty-point plans of action, and there would be brief periods of optimism before greed, corruption, ineptitude or bureaucratic bungling would scuttle any chances of peace.
Somalia had fascinated me as an important terrorism footnote, and with the majority of foreign reporting after 9/11 focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Somalia was interesting for the simple reason that almost no one else was covering it. Somalia also held special significance for Canada, home to the world’s largest Somali diaspora outside of Africa. It was one of the few countries in the world where the Toronto Star carried as much clout as the New York Times—and in some cases more. Many Somalia-born Canadians held positions of great influence in their birth country and had homes about a thirty-minute drive northwest of my newsroom.
For the first few years after 9/11, I concentrated on making contacts within Canada’s diasporas, prominent Muslim organizations, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, trying to build the Star’s first national security beat. The timing for this new direction was good. In 2002, I was part of a team of Star reporters headed by my husband that wrote a series about racial profiling and Toronto’s police force. Jimmie had spent two years fighting for access to a police database that would reveal patterns suggesting police in certain circumstances treated blacks more harshly than whites. The stories caused a major uproar. The police union sued our paper for $2.7 billion in a class action defamation suit. (We won the legal battle, with costs.) The series eventually resulted in important changes and was awarded the Governor General’s Michener Award for public service journalism. But needless to say, covering city cops got a little more challenging after that, and I welcomed the change in beat.
One of the biggest Canadian national security stories when I started concerned Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen and Ottawa engineer who was detained in New York’s jfk Airport during a stopover in 2002 and was covertly flown to Damascus for interrogation as part of the CIA’s rendition program. In early 2004, after his release, I went to Syria to retrace his steps and learned more about another Canadian who had been held and tortured as a terrorism suspect. Later that summer, I spent almost every week in Ottawa covering a federal inquiry into Arar’s case, which concluded that the RCMP had passed erroneous information to the United States, which influenced the decision to render him. Arar was vindicated and awarded a $10.5 million settlement.
By 2006, I was eager to do more foreign reporting and in particular to learn more about Somalia. I pitched a trip to Mogadishu. Somalis living all over the world were returning to the country’s capital. For some, it was the first time in fifteen years they had felt safe enough to visit, weeping as they saw the African coastline where they grew up, or felt the heat, or introduced their Western-raised children to their homeland.
What had transformed the country’s previously anarchic capital was a group called the Islamic Courts Union, a union of small Sharia courts throughout the south. The ICU was doing what no one else had managed: they took weapons off the streets, shut down the gun markets and chased away the warlords and dismantled their checkpoints, which had once dotted every block. Soon couples ventured out after dark. The airport opened. Kids played soccer on the streets. The ICU brought civility to a city that had seen none in fifteen years. The Transitional Federal Government had the backing of the un but was led by unpopular warlord Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, and by 2006 most Somalis had given up hope that they could stabilize the country. When the ICU took over control of Mogadishu and much of the south, the TFG was pushed 250 kilometres west, to the town of Baidoa.
The secret to the ICU’s success was that they had overcome sub-clan rivalry in Mogadishu. The majority of the ICU’s senior members belonged to the powerful Hawiye clan, and the unifying forces were religion and a hatred of warlord Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed (of rival Darod clan). Somalia had always been beholden to a complicated and fierce clan structure that was part of the reason past attempts at reconciliation had failed. But the ICU purported to have only Islam as the backbone of their organization, and in bringing all the sub-clans of Hawiye together, the ICU had done something no UN-backed, CIA-funded agreements (of which by this point there had been fourteen) could.
Then there was the other side of the story: the worrying fact that the ICU adhered to a strict interpretation of Islamic law. There were reports that thieves had their hands amputated and adulterers were stoned to death, music and theatre were banned, the media faced “regulations,” and women were forced to cover their faces with the niqab or be penalized. There were also foreign ICU members with pedigrees earned in Afghanistan who appeared on the U.S. and un terrorism watch lists. Some Western analysts compared the ICU to Afghanistan’s Taliban. The conditions certainly looked similar. The Taliban had come to power in 1996 amid chaos as the world paid little attention.
Many Somalis, the majority of whom were Sunni Muslims following the Sufi traditions infused with dancing, art and the honouring of saints, were just as concerned about the ICU’s Saudi-influenced doctrine that banned music and imposed harsh rules on women. The shooting death of two fans watching a World
