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 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-yearold 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 ofhis 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 cavedwellers 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 remotecontrolled 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 dozen of sayings and words of inspiration taped on walls or sitting frame 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 Duhulow 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 go 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.......
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WE HERE IN THE WEST MOSTLY SIT IN OUR IVORY CASTLES, IN PEACE, WITH OUR MANY TOYS OF IPADS, BOATS, CARS, BIG SCREEN HD TVs AND OTHER JOYS. BUT OUT THERE IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD.......WELL YOU'VE JUST READ ABOUT IT......AND SOME HAVE THE COURAGE TO GO OUT AND REPORT IT.......OH HOW WE NEED TO KEEP PRAYING "THY KINGDOM COME FATHER, THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS DONE IN HEAVEN."
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