Читать книгу Decade of Fear - Michelle Shephard - Страница 9
Оглавление“If you lose where you’re going, you look back to where you’ve been.”
TRADITIONAL SOMALI SAYING
THERE MAY BE no country more cursed than Somalia, the archetypal failed state. Which is strange when you think that unlike so many other war-torn nations, Somalis share one language, religion, ethnicity and culture.
Somalia went into free fall in 1991 when warring clans deposed the military dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre and the incendiary fighting nurtured an entire generation on violence and poverty. Say Somalia and most think Black Hawk Down, three words that sum up the 1993 failed U.S. intervention that ingrained an image of a savage Somalia into the Western consciousness.
The U.S. Special Forces mission was an attempt to back a un humanitarian mission trying to quell the chaos that followed 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 Cup soccer match made headlines around the world. A ban of the ubiquitous and much-loved leafy narcotic qat had many grumbling and in some cases mounting small protests. But even with these reservations, after years of bloodshed, most Somalis acquiesced since they were thankful for the stability.
When my editor gave the trip to Somalia a green light, I tried to recall the lessons I had learned a few months earlier in my “Hostile Environment Training” course. British ex-marines offered these sessions for journalists heading into conflict zones. (A course certificate also lowered the insurance rate our papers paid to cover us when we travelled.) Basically, it was a week in a Virginian field where the tough Brits beat the snot and scared the shit out of us. The first morning began with a surprise hostage-taking as “kidnappers” in balaclavas ran from the woods, stopped our car and hauled us out of the vehicle (I went by my pony tail since I was awkwardly stuck in the back), threw burlap sacks over our heads and then had us march, kneel, lie motionless face down in the dirt in a drill that felt all too real. The entire exercise was videotaped and later analyzed so we could learn what made a “good hostage” and a few other tricks. Other lessons that week included how to negotiate checkpoints, cover riots (wear natural, not manmade fabrics that could melt and stick to your skin if burned), identify different types of explosions and negotiate a minefield, as well as general orienteering, which was by far my worst session—not surprising, as I cannot read a map in Toronto, either, and lasted only two days in Girl Guides as a kid.
My favourite session was first aid, thanks partly to a background in lifeguarding, but also because I found our instructor endlessly amusing. Tall, lanky and right out of a Monty Python skit, his every sentence included the phrase “Happy with that?” As in “Your leg has been severed by a machete. Happy with that? What do you do now?” Or, “You’ve run out of water. Happy with that? Happy with that? Do you drink your piss?” The scenarios they set up for us were resplendent with fake blood and Oscar-worthy performances, and my hands shook every time I tended to the “victims” or used a Sharpie to write on someone’s forehead the exact time I had tied the tourniquet so the doctors would know if the limb could be saved or if it had to be amputated. The only time I saw one of our instructors break role was when I tried to stop a femoral artery bleed. “Lovie, that’s not working,” said the smirking instructor as he pushed my quaking hands south of his crotch to his inner thigh.
I arrived at Washington’s National Airport after that week with fake blood still on my cargo pants and my dirty hair tamed in two braids, so exhausted that I fell asleep at the gate. I woke only as my name was called over the speaker and ran breathless onto the flight. Startled passengers looked up and I am sure more than one thought, Great, we’re about to be hijacked by a deranged Pippi Longstocking.
How any of this would help me in Somalia if things got bad I had no idea, but I packed a big first aid kit anyway. There were two such different versions of what was taking place on the ground, it was hard to know what to expect. Was this the long-awaited chance for peace, or the startup of al Qaeda’s next franchise?
I could never have imagined that over the years my tour guides into this part of the world would be a Toronto grocer, a wanted terrorist, a stubborn tortoise, a primary school teacher who would become president, a Somali-Canadian journalist and a teenage boy named Ismail who broke my heart.
FLYING HIGH OVER Mogadishu’s chiselled coastline, looking at the soft haze beyond the airplane window, I could imagine what once was: the beachfront cafés, lively soccer games and vibrant markets that only Somali elders nostalgically recall. At the safety of ten thousand feet, all that was visible were the outlines of the bone-white Italian architecture, built by the capital’s former colonial rulers, and the turquoise Indian Ocean. Descend farther and see Mogadishu today: the broken, pockmarked, crumbling city of bombed-out buildings, the sun relentlessly beating down on arid red dirt, a city that has been ravaged by two decades of war.
I flew to Mogadishu from Nairobi with Star photographer Peter Power in October 2006 as the only foreigners on a commercial flight into the newly opened airport. Pete is an affable, tough Newfoundlander and an excellent partner. Aside from his mighty photography skills, he had spent a brief stint in the army before entering journalism, which came in handy in tense situations or when the military mindset confounded me to the point that I was ready to scream. Besides, Pete had a superhero-like last name that people loved wherever we travelled. Somalis especially delighted in greeting him and always seemed to do so with gusto: “Mr. Power! Time to go.” “Welcome, Mr. Power!” “Mr. Power! Over here.” It was hard not to like Pete. He laughed often, talked openly (and incessantly), told bad jokes and after a few beers you might even hear traces of his Newfoundland accent. Like most photographers he also possessed an endearing blend of bravado and insecurity.
Before leaving for Somalia, we had hired one of the country’s best “fixers.” That’s a term used by journalists for local contacts who will fix everything from setting up interviews and security, arranging hotels, telling you what to wear, what to eat, providing translation, driving and, although it’s not part of the job description, almost always becoming cherished friends. Foreign journalists are often only as good as their fixers. They’re especially important when the journalist arrives in a country for the first time.
There have been cases since 9/11 when fixers have sold journalists to kidnappers offering a higher price. Others talk a bigger game than they deliver. But most fixers are respected local journalists, and hire themselves out as a lucrative side business. The journalism community worldwide is small (and more collegial than most would expect), so reputations—both bad and good—spread quickly. Fixers are paid well, but they put themselves at risk to help us. Aside from facing danger alongside us, fixers working with foreigners can be targeted as traitors. We have passports and go home. Most fixers have nowhere else to go.
Abdulahi Farah Duguf came highly recommended as a skilled and trusted fixer in Mogadishu. Even though the city was the safest it had been in years, there were always risks for foreigners. Swedish freelance photographer Martin Adler had been shot in the heart by hooded assailants as he covered a street protest just a couple of months before we arrived. Months before that, BBC producer Kate Peyton had been killed within hours of arriving in Mogadishu. Even the most prepared or experienced journalists can be killed or kidnapped, but having a good fixer was the first step in reducing risk.
Duguf was a close friend of Ali Sharmarke, a Somalia-born Canadian and a giant of journalism, and also a friend of mine. Ali came to Canada as a refugee in 1990 and built a life with his family in Ottawa, becoming a citizen and completing a master’s degree in public administration at Carleton University. In 1999, Ali left a good job with the Canadian government’s finance department, and with two other Somalia-born Canadians, started HornAfrik, Mogadishu’s most popular radio station. Somehow HornAfrik had managed to survive amid the chaos. Ali was one of those people who always seemed untouchable, even physically, since he was taller and more robust than most Somali men. When he strode through my newsroom during a visit in the summer of 2006, people turned to watch because he had a presence—you just wanted to know who he was.
It wasn’t hard to find Duguf as we disembarked from African Express Flight 525 and dozens of excited passengers ran onto the tarmac. He was the only person coming toward the plane. Duguf walked with arms outstretched, the morning sun bouncing off his bald head and a grin consuming the lower half of his face.
After brief introductions and hugs, he ushered us into a small office where, as the only two non-Somali visitors, we were told by bored-looking officials of the Islamic Courts Union that we would have to pay a “visa” fee of $250 U.S. They were not a governing force, but our passports were stamped anyway with a very professional-looking ICU symbol, an entry that would cause many raised eyebrows among airport immigration officials in the years that followed. Mogadishu’s airport security consisted of having our bags thrown in a pile and being “inspected” by men armed with handheld metal detectors, who, descending seemingly out of nowhere, pounced upon the luggage, eliciting a cacophony of beeps. I kept my knapsack on and one of the inspectors tentatively came over and waved his wand around my back as if he were conducting an opera, before nodding me on.
We climbed into our Jeep, with Duguf at the wheel. We were the middle car in a convoy of three we had hired, armed guards representing a variety of clans hanging out of Jeeps in front and behind us in case we had any troubles. We set out to meet “Somalia’s Taliban.”
THE BLUE DOORS of Al-Furqaan University opened to reveal a driveway with intricately laid chipped tiles, upon which a rusted red Vespa was parked. It was an idyllic snapshot, with chirping birds and students, clutching books, who stopped to stare and smile at the foreigners. The cool breeze in this oasis of education brought relief from Mogadishu’s sun-baked, sandy streets.
We were here to meet Canadian Abdullahi Afrah, known to friends by his nickname, “Asparo.” His involvement in the ICU is what convinced my editors that the transformation of Somalia under the ICU was a story worth telling.
The Star may be Canada’s largest circulation newspaper, but our readership is largely based in Toronto and the surrounding region, known as the Greater Toronto Area, or GTA. As with many papers, the Star gives precedence to stories with a local connection—which is why, after 9/11, I sought out Cindy Barkway. Many reporters like to poke fun at old-school Star editors who believe every foreign story needs a Toronto connection. How far would we go to seek our “gta man”? Earthquake in Pakistan? Find that injured guy who once lived in Toronto or has a cousin in Mississauga and suddenly your story is moving from A17 to the front page. Crime wave in Mexico? Only important if Oakville tourists were hurt. Asparo was our GTA man in Mog.
Surya Bhattacharya, a Star intern and a friend of mine, had come across an ICU press release in August 2006, announcing the group’s executive members. One of the leaders was Asparo, which surprised many in Toronto. Asparo had come to Canada in the early 1990s, and by all accounts he led a life in Toronto like that of many struggling newcomers. He was quiet—almost shy—and religious, but no more so than most Somalis. Asparo moved between jobs, working for a brief time as security supervisor at Toronto’s Catholic school board, and he once ran a hawala bureau—a money transfer service popular for wiring funds home to Somalia—that would come under intense focus after 9/11. Ahmed Yusuf, a well-known community leader in Toronto, knew Asparo when he lived in Canada. “No one could believe it,” he said about the ICU press release. “We thought it couldn’t be the same man.”
Asparo stood at the university’s front doors, shaking Pete’s hand and acknowledging me with a nod. He appeared neither annoyed nor pleased with our visit and was certainly in no hurry to talk. In fact, he was reluctant to speak at all. The fifty-four-year-old insisted that we visit one of the university’s professors before our interview. Leading the way up the stairs, he laughed and said to no one in particular, “There are so many lost Canadians here.” After introducing us to Professor Ibrahim Hassan Addou, he dipped his head and departed, leaving us to wonder if our GTA man would return.
Many were also surprised to see Professor Addou listed as one of the ICU’s executive members, because, like Asparo, he was not considered an aspiring religious leader or politician. He was a Western-trained academic, a scholar, and that’s exactly what he looked like standing behind a desk in his sunny classroom, with students’ papers piled high on it and a chalkboard behind him. He gave us a wan smile as he peered over the rim of his owl-like glasses. We had a feeling we were about to get a lesson in Islam rather than an interview.
Addou had returned to Somalia in 2002, having lived for twenty-four years in Georgetown, where he worked as an administrator at Washington’s American University. He was proud of his American citizenship and enjoyed life in D.C., but like many other expats he felt a responsibility to his country of birth. His philosophy? “Educate the lost generation,” he said. Enlightenment was the only way out of poverty. He was also an environmentalist, which may have seemed like an insignificant vocation when war and poverty consumed Somalia. But Addou believed fixing problems such as deforestation, illegal commercial fishing or the polluting of Somalia’s coast by foreign companies was key to securing a stable future.
Addou, like Asparo, was considered a “moderate Islamist,” an ambiguous term that in Somalia generally meant the person supported a more tolerant interpretation of Sharia law. Before leaving Toronto, I had been in contact with Addou, since the only safe way to travel in Mogadishu was with the ICU’s consent. Addou had emailed me a form titled “Visa Regulations by the Islamic Courts.” The application stated that foreign nationals could not enter Mogadishu without written permission. Within ten working days, they would respond as to whether we could come—all very formal, professional. “Finally, please be informed,” the form concluded, “foreign nationals who attempt to enter the country illegally as well as their sponsors (if any) will face swift penalty.”
As Addou finished talking about the merits of education about an hour later, Asparo slipped silently back into the room. He seemed surprised that we still wanted to talk with him. Haltingly, he answered our questions, his eyes turned down to his hands or stroking his red, henna-dyed beard. His lined face looked older than fifty-four. He kept insisting he couldn’t understand why we were curious about his involvement with the ICU. “This is something that just happened. When things happen, someone’s lucky to be moved up. It’s not something I was looking for. It’s not something I even enjoy doing, but it’s something I have to do.”
He echoed what others were saying about how the ICU had transformed Mogadishu and brought order, and urged other Somalis around the world to return and help. “There’s a bright future if things go on like this. We can say people will be saved, resources may come back, international relations may improve, construction may happen, people’s trust in each other may be renewed. Many, many things that were happening before. People were running around doing whatever they wanted to do. Law and order may now be restored. Somali people are talented people if they get some sort of environment where they can work on their own. Somalis have something in their hearts that they’re attached to their country even though they’re better off over there. He has a nice car, a good life, but he needs to get back to see his broken home.”
Like Addou, Asparo wasn’t interested in answering questions about perceptions in the West about their group, or to debate the ICU’s restrictions on women’s rights and harsh punishment under Sharia law. Just exaggerations, he said.
Before we left, Asparo had one more message for me, something to put in the newspaper he used to read every day: “You have the power. Use your pen in the right way.”
IF ASPARO AND ADDOU were considered the moderates, then Hassan Dahir Aweys was one of the ICU’s radicals. The night before we left Nairobi, I sat with Pete in our hotel, discussing the trip on a conference call with our editors. One senior editor wanted to know how likely it was that we would get an interview with Aweys. When I said I had no idea, the reply was something to the effect of, “Well, can’t you get his address and knock on his door?” I lied, unsure if he was joking or not. “Good idea.”
The thing is, you don’t drop in on Aweys. He lets you know if you are welcome, and when. Luckily, we were. While sitting on rugs in the shady cool comfort of HornAfrik’s media compound, we got a call to see him. The call meant we had to leave now, before he changed his mind. “Go, go,” yelled Ali Sharmarke, who was delighted and surprised that Aweys would meet a female reporter.
Duguf knew exactly where Aweys lived, but when everything started to look the same as we sped along the sandy streets, I was sure we were lost. Mogadishu’s main street, named 21 October for the day General Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in a 1969 military coup, was lined with vendors’ shacks hawking everything from goat carcasses to cellphones. Merchants stared as we passed. Ribbons of purple from the bougainvilleas, and the reds and blues of the women’s abayas, created a colourful blur beyond the car window. Down a small alley off the unmarked Ballad Road, we neared Aweys’s home. Children scattered as we roared in, except for one boy, who curiously cradled a dusty blender as he waved furiously with his free hand.
Two months after the 9/11 attacks, Aweys was put on the U.S. terrorist list because of his alleged connections to Osama bin Laden. He became one of the men U.S. President George W. Bush liked to call the “evildoers.” The reclusive seventy-one-year-old former army commander was a well-known figure in Somalia. He was nicknamed “the Red Fox” because of his shrewd military career—but his red, scraggly beard and long face certainly didn’t hurt.
Aweys had been a powerful leader with Al Itihaad al Islaam, a group that was formed in the final years of Barre’s dictatorship, and fought against Somalia’s most powerful warlords in the early 1990s—General Mohamed Farah Aideed and Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. (Aideed, of Black Hawk Down fame, was the warlord U.S. Special Forces targeted during their disastrous 1993 mission. Ahmed became the unpopular president of the Transitional Federal Government. A month before we arrived, he survived an assassination attempt that killed his brother and several others; he publicly accused Aweys of orchestrating the attack.) Aweys and other former Al Itihaad leaders were some of the founders of the ICU and held sway in the various Islamic courts across the south.
On MSNBC’s Meet the Press, three months before our trip, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold criticized the war in Iraq and inaction in Somalia during an interview with host Tim Russert: “You know, Tim, today it was announced that a guy named Hassan Dahir Aweys is now the head of the government that has taken over in Mogadishu, in Somalia. He is on the State Department’s terrorist list. He is known as an al Qaeda operative or somebody that is connected with al Qaeda. While we are asleep at the switch; while we are bagged—bogged down in Iraq; while we are all focused on Iraq as if it is the be-all and end-all of our American foreign policy, we are losing the battle to al Qaeda because we’re not paying attention. I asked Ambassador (Henry) Crumpton at a hearing the other day how many people in our federal government are working full-time on the problem in Somalia. He said one full-time person. We spent two million dollars on Somalia in the last year, while we’re spending two billion dollars a week on Iraq. This is insanity, if you think about what the priorities are in terms of those who have attacked us and who are likely to attack us in the future.”
The day we met, Aweys had the flu and sat listlessly in a stuffed velvet chair with a blue-and-white crocheted doily on one of the armrests. He didn’t stand when we entered, but motioned to some chairs. His lethargy likely wasn’t helped by the fact that we were visiting during Ramadan, so he had not eaten or had water since dawn. Flies buzzed around the house, which was humid and dark, except for a narrow ray of sunlight slicing through heavy gold and green curtains.
“Ask me anything,” he began, peering through filmy round glasses.
But after more than an hour, it was clear that Aweys was happy to talk in circles. Many of our questions were met with questions. “Ties with Osama bin Laden? If I met Osama bin Laden, did I make a mistake?”
“We don’t care what they say,” he said eventually, about reports of the ICU’s formal allegiance to bin Laden. “We don’t have any links to al Qaeda.” Finally, exasperated, he almost pleaded: “Why don’t they give us a chance?”
I snapped shut my notebook, and we emerged squinting in the punishing sun, saying our final goodbyes. We wanted to be careful not to overstay our welcome. Aweys had undoubtedly agreed to an interview because he wanted us to tell the story of Mogadishu’s pacification. More than once, he mentioned the fact that he was meeting a Western woman as proof of his modernity. But despite this desire for good pr, Mogadishu was Mogadishu and not all of his followers appreciated our presence. The scowling faces of some of the youths lounging on soiled mattresses in Aweys’s courtyard were starting to unnerve us. We were keen to get back to the guarded walls of Horn-Afrik, or to the Peace Hotel, where we were staying—its name made us feel safe.
As we turned to leave, however, shouting began. Or it sounded like shouting. Aweys was speaking loudly. Quickly. Passionately. I tensed, wondering what we had done wrong, self-consciously touching the rim of my hijab. Thinking we had been set up, I turned slowly around, locking eyes with Duguf before looking at Aweys. The Red Fox had come out onto the porch and was staring at my feet, which I had just slipped into my boots. He was grinning. In the bright sunlight his age was more apparent and he looked frail, and, well, goofy, with his toothy white smile slicing through his red beard. My eyes went to my scuffed Blundstones, durable if not fashionable Australian footwear popular among journalists. (The company motto is “Because Life’s Tough.”)
Soon Duguf was grinning too. “He likes your boots,” he said. Aweys was nodding violently. The boys in the courtyard were snickering. For a second I contemplated slipping them off and giving them to the man the United States wanted dead—if for no other reason than I was so relieved. I started to laugh. Aweys laughed. Pete snapped a picture. I bowed my head and put my hand to my chest in an awkward goodbye, then quickly marched those Blundstones out of there.
WITH SHEIKH SHARIF SHEIKH AHMED, the soft-spoken teacher turned political leader of the ICU, agreeing to see us next, we managed to interview the leadership of the organization in less than twenty-four hours. Duguf would later call us the luckiest journalists he had ever worked with.
We met Sharif at Villa Somalia, the guarded presidential compound the ICU had commandeered. He sat in a room that looked as if a Saudi prince and California surfer had collaborated on the decor. The wood was polished, and burgundy drapes with gold stitching covered the windows. From the ceiling hung streamers, deflated balloons and beach balls bearing Fanta, Pepsi, 7Up and Coke logos. More than a dozen men lounged on cushions along the walls murmuring into their constantly ringing cellphones. Sharif nodded to me but did not offer his hand to shake.
Like Aweys, Sharif was happy to talk, but revealed little. He described the chaos that had reigned before the ICU took over and spoke of his newfound optimism for peace. “People were not anticipating there would be light at the end of the tunnel,” he said, with a grandiose sweep of his arms.
Sharif may have comported himself like a politician, but he was born into a family of Sufi scholars, not powerbrokers. Sharif left Somalia in his twenties to study civil and Sharia law in Libya and Sudan. But when he returned to southern Somalia in 2002 and tried to set up an Islamic court, he faced bitter disagreements with a warlord from his own clan. He accepted the setback and returned to Mogadishu, where he gave up law and became a primary school teacher. One of his twelve-year-old students was kidnapped for ransom in the crime-prone city, and Sharif, along with the school principal, managed to negotiate the boy’s rescue. That kidnapping became a defining moment in Sharif’s life. He had brought about change in this one case; he could do it for his country. Believing that Islamic law was the only way to overcome clan differences, this time he focused on Mogadishu, with a goal of eventually uniting all the existing courts in the country. He had no following of his own, but aligned himself with Aweys. Though diplomatic in nature, Sharif was no pacifist, and his first step was to get rid of what stood in his way—the embattled UN-endorsed government. He found support among Somalis fed up with the cruelty of the warlords, some of whom were reportedly backed by the CIA. This foreign support for marauding militias only made the Somali-run courts more attractive.
Sharif became frustrated when I mentioned comparisons between the ICU and the Taliban during our interview. He also denied claims that foreign fighters were training recruits at ICU camps and said he had nothing to do with the recent audio statements by al Qaeda leaders about their “brothers” in Somalia. It was what we expected him to say and it was clear he would offer little else.
As we left Sharif’s compound, Duguf suggested we see a remnant of one of the downed Black Hawk helicopters. Pete thought it could be a good photo and I was curious to see the site that Mark Bowden had described so vividly in his book Black Hawk Down, the scene that forever haunted my friend Paul Watson. As our convoy stopped on an empty street, a woman emerged from her home and a young girl with tassels hanging from her red hijab like a fringe of bangs stared at us. Duguf showed us an overgrown thorny bush decorated like a Christmas tree with bits of garbage. A piece of the wreck was supposed to be under there. But before we could look further, suddenly, people were shouting, the woman’s hands were flailing and Duguf looked annoyed. Within seconds, the once 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 two days, the capital of Somalia belonged once again to the TFG. Back in Toronto, I watched these events unfold and knew that it would be a long time before there would be a peaceful scene at the Peace Hotel again.
THE TAXI DRIVER couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Stop the car? Now?
It was a few months after Ethiopia’s invasion, in March 2007, and the fighting in Mogadishu was at its worst in years. Ethiopian troops were battling a fractured Islamic insurgency, clans warred with clans, and criminals and warlords were fighting everyone. As always, thousands of impoverished civilians with nowhere to go were caught in between. The taxi was speeding away from the chaotic Bakara Market, until the passenger, a bespectacled, gentle forty-seven-year-old Somali-born Canadian named Sahal Abdulle, insisted that they stop. Actually, he was yelling, and Sahal almost never yelled.
Ambling across the street, unaware of the war raging around him, was a massive, crusty tortoise. He was going as fast as he probably could, which wasn’t very fast at all.
Sahal had thought he had seen everything in Mogadishu, but spotting a tortoise near the concrete jungle of the market and this far from the city’s rocky coastline was like finding a moose striding across Toronto’s Bay Street, or a bear ambling across Park Avenue in Manhattan. Sahal knew it was crazy to stop. He also knew he had to. “I just need to protect something,” he thought.
Minutes earlier, Sahal had been near the Damey Hotel, reporting on what the mortars and AK-47s and RPGS and bombs had left behind. In military terms, it was called “collateral damage,” civilians caught in the fighting. In real terms, it was dead children, women and civilian men, and severed limbs. Sahal was passionate about his duty as a journalist, but sometimes his work just seemed futile. Especially when no one seemed to care. And it often seemed that no one cared about Somalia.
Sahal yelled to the driver, his friend Hussein, “Give me a hand and open the trunk.”
“No. We’re not doing this,” Hussein replied, but he was already out of the car, bobbing and weaving, flinching with every crackle of gunshots.
Together they lifted the tortoise, struggling with its weight despite their adrenalin-fuelled strength. The mighty beast retracted his head and limbs and defecated on them.
The second-oldest of ten children, Sahal was born Abdullahi Abdulle in the Somali town of Galkayo on a Friday in 1962. His mother was in labour for four days giving birth to his older brother, but Sahal was delivered in less than two hours and that’s why everyone called him Sahal—Somali for easy. Sahal’s early childhood, however, was anything but. As a toddler, he developed a condition that doctors could not diagnose but which had similar symptoms to hemophilia, and his nose bled profusely if he was too active. Most of his childhood and teenage years were spent indoors with the elders, drinking tea. His pillow was covered in plastic so his blood wouldn’t ruin the fabric.
His only relief was a concoction made by his grandmother, a traditional medicine woman. Every morning, Suban Isman Elmi would rise before dawn and brew a soup made of roots, filling the house with the smells of her magic. Sahal loved his grandmother and admired her grit and otherworldly wisdom. “Whatever I had, I would eat that soup and I would be okay,” Sahal said. “I don’t know if it was psychological or physiological but that taste, even forty years later, is kindness.” When he was seventeen, he went to Nairobi, and the cooler climate cleared up his problem. Two years later, a Somali doctor gave him an injection and miraculously, mysteriously, he was cured.
But those early years shaped Sahal. He was different from other kids his age; perceived as weak, he never learned to ride a bike or play soccer. Other children called him “Sahal Oday,” Sahal the Old. He never forgot that feeling of others looking down on him, or worse, not noticing him at all. It was the main reason he became a journalist. He wanted to empower the weak. As he often told others, “I want to speak for the voiceless.”
In the late 1980s, with his life’s savings—a Nikkormat EL2 camera—hanging around his neck, and his passport stamped with a U.S. visa, Sahal left Africa for the first time, in the hopes of becoming a photographer in San Francisco. He had always expected to return to Somalia, but in 1990, when the fighting that would eventually topple the dictatorship of General Mohamed Siad Barre started, Sahal decided instead to travel north. In November 1990, he drove to Buffalo, crossed the border and asked Canada to accept him as a refugee.
He would not visit his homeland until three years later, with a better camera, a new perspective, and a desire to tell Somalia’s story. Sahal lived the life of many Somali-born Canadians, with one foot in each world, their hearts aching for their homelands, their fingers freezing in Canadian winters. His children were born in Toronto and he loved his adopted home. But as a journalist, he struggled with a need to “fix” Somalia, and after 9/11 he feared his homeland would only be considered as an incubator of terrorism; the underlying basic problems such as poverty, education and government corruption would be overlooked.
I had become friends with Sahal in Toronto, but it was during my trips to Kenya and Somalia that I really got to know him. In Toronto, we often rushed through a meal or coffee, apologizing that we didn’t have longer to talk. Yet in Africa we were on Somali time, and one tea led to the next as we apologized for having kept each other so long.
Sahal was working for Reuters while the war with Ethiopian forces was raging in 2007. He had a large home in Mogadishu, across the street from the Shamo Hotel, which was a hub for foreign journalists who were brave or crazy enough to make repeat trips. They liked to tease Sahal about his quirky habits, even though they all had their own ways of coping with war. Sahal had four.
On days when the fighting would wake him before dawn, Sahal, the Constant Gardener (yet another nickname), would seek solace in the cool dirt of his yard, where he had managed to cultivate more than seventy-two different flowers and vegetables. He even grew ginger, which he required for his special brew of Kenyan Ketepa tea. Working in the garden as the sun rose—weeding, watering, caring for these fragile crops—calmed him. At night, he would put on earphones and blast John Coltrane while he smoked a cigar—coping mechanisms two and three. Foreign journalists were his main cigar suppliers and would bring Sahal boxes of Cubans each time they visited.
The rescued tortoise became Sahal’s fourth passion. He didn’t have a name. He became, simply, “Tortoise.” Often when Sahal came home to edit and send photos and articles to his bosses in Nairobi, he was still numb. The lens offered a small measure of detachment in the field, an ability to document but not fully absorb the horrors he was witnessing. But once the fatigue set in and the laptop displayed the reality in full colour, allowing Sahal to zoom in and out and crop. . . well, that’s when Tortoise would start his slow walk. “I would be looking at my computer and I would be stressed out,” Sahal recalled. “Then out of the corner of my eye, I’d see him on one side of the computer, just slowly, slowly walking.” It would take about twenty minutes for Tortoise to make his trek, disappearing for a time behind the laptop screen, before emerging out the other side. “By the time he got there,” said Sahal, “whatever you were doing, you would just think of him.”
I heard news of the war mostly through Sahal, Ali Sharmarke or local journalists and their reports. Increasingly there was talk of al Shabab. When the ICU was in power, a violent splinter group that called itself the Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen was vying for control. More commonly known as “al Shabab,” meaning “the youth,” the group’s origins likely pre-date 2006, but that was when they became an organized force. Aden Hashi Farah, or “Ayro,” was one of the original founders and had reportedly been appointed to this youth militia by Aweys, the Blundstone-boot-loving Red Fox. Shabab were ruthless and had little support among Somalis until Ethiopia’s invasion gave them the recruitment pitch they needed, not only among young, impoverished Somalis, but also among neighbouring Kenyans and disenfranchised Somali youth living around the world just as analyst Matt Bryden had predicted. Those giggling cave-dwellers had another gift they could spin endlessly. Christian crusaders were trying to take over Somalia. This was a war against Islam.
The 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 to her sisters and parents at the camp, I went back to Dadaab. This time I worked with Lucas Oleniuk, a Star photographer favoured by editors and reporters alike. Over years of working together, we had developed a sibling-like relationship.
A Prairie high school football star and son of a Saskatchewan 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
