The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (22 page)

“Everything is based on clans,” he said. “Only God is strong enough to defeat both the warlords and America.”

Down the road from the rich
man’s house, one hundred refugee families were living within the stucco walls of another ruined household, in igloo-like wooden framed domes covered in a patchwork of cloth scraps and feed sacks. The camp’s inhabitants shared whatever food they had. A six-foot-high bramble wall guarded the entrance to the community school, and inside it a dozen children under the age of ten sat in an oval. A twelve-year-old
boy patrolled the circle with a switch. Each of the children had a wooden paddle on which boys and girls were inking a verse from the Quran. Every morning, from seven until eleven, the children rocked back and forth in the dirt chanting verses in Arabic, a foreign language they neither spoke nor understood. Only ten out of one hundred Somali children attended any school at all, Abdi Salem
had told me, and only one out of one hundred of those schools was secular.

Beyond the bramble wall, someone was singing. Ducking out of the makeshift school to see who it was, I found camp residents gathered around a bearded man dressed in white and carrying a staff. He was a Sufi fakir—an Islamic monk and miracle worker rolled into one.

“God created all people from Adam and Eve,” he sang. “We
are all the same,” he continued, smiling fatly at me. “The Prophet Mohammed wanted to unite people and so we, the Sufiyah, are trying to unite people.”

When he finished, the listeners gave him a little money and wandered
away. He lingered to talk to me. “I come here to praise the Prophet Mohammed so these people will help me,” he said. A fakir is at the mercy of those he blesses, who decide what
they will pay for his blessings, or
barakat
(the Arabic root of the name Barack). This one lived as a squatter in a bombed-out Russian hospital, along with eleven other Sufi singers. Sufi prayer flags—green squares trimmed in fuchsia—fluttered over Mogadishu and marked camps all over the city. The skyline looked like a medieval encampment, with pennants from different battalions tugging against
the Red Sea’s balmy spindrift. Months later, with the mounting influence of al-Shabab—which promoted a hard-line Sunni rather than local Sufi theology—the Sufi religious leaders would be forced to flee the city as Sunnis and Sufis fractured and battled each other. Before the exodus, the Islamist government had cracked down on the fakirs. “The Islamic Courts didn’t let us come and sing like this,”
the fakir told me. “They said we were telling lies about the Prophet.” When the religious police tried to stop him from singing, the fakir argued with them. “I said I had a right to praise Prophet Mohammed how I wanted.” For this, he received eighty lashes with a cane. He stopped singing and began to beg instead. Begging was safer.

When I returned to Mogadishu on
April 8, 2008, many of the people I had hoped to see there had either left the country or been killed. As our shuddering Daallo Airlines flight turned in the sky above Mogadishu’s airport, now frequently under fire by militants, I noticed the grids of oil excavation off to the left, through the airplane’s filthy window. Somalia, it turns out, has virtually no oil; the grids date back to the fifties,
when the country seemed laden with economic promise. In 2008, it had no promise. A few hours after the plane touched down, there were two suicide bombings, which resumed that day after a several-month hiatus. The threat of mobile-phone-detonated homemade bombs rendered movement in the city virtually impossible. The technical know-how to make such weapons hadn’t existed in Somalia the year before.
But now, as militants migrated from one field of battle to another, or linked up on the Internet, the global networks of lethal technology, like ideology, had grown stronger. Here, as in Sudan, war globalized: it linked disparate battlefields through common ideology and killer gadgets.

The world ignored the mounting dead. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans were dying, but in Somalia, Somalis
were dying. It seemed to them that America had made a brutal calculation: to catch only three suspected members of Al Qaeda, it was worth placing four million people at risk of famine—more than a million lives upended for every suspect. In Somalia itself, this was fast becoming a war between moderate Muslims such as Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the former political head of the Islamic Courts Union
whom I’d met in Kenya while he was negotiating with the UN, and hard-liners such as Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the ICU’s former military head, in exile in the nearby country of Eritrea. The culprit, the scapegoat, for every mounting ill was America, America, and America.

_____

Rational or not, part of this Somali ire stemmed from the fact that in 2008, the United States and the UN were backing
yet another failing attempt at a transitional federal government led by some of the country’s most rapacious warlords. To see how these warlords actually controlled the lives of average Somali citizens, in April 2008, I went to meet one of the most notorious, Mohammed Dheere, who was the mayor of Mogadishu. With a head of thick, well-oiled curls and a double-wide girth, he rarely left the seaside
rubble of the whitewashed colonial city, the territory where the transitional federal government held on to its last scrap of power against the Islamists. Dheere was an obese Captain Bly, a land-bound scourge who out-awfuled any penny-ante pirate at sea. He used to tax mothers giving birth in the hospitals he controlled—more money for having a boy than a girl.

As mayor, he told me, his two top
priorities were “security and taxes.” Security, I knew, meant his private militia, which robbed people at checkpoints. Taxes meant that he would make the few people left in Mogadishu—those too old or poor to flee—pay for the right to live in a war zone.

Because Somalia lies within a few hundred miles of the equator, it is particularly prone to weather-borne catastrophe. Thanks to environmental
change, fickle weather patterns are making it impossible to predict the right seasons for crops and migration. In 2008, the seasonal
gu
rain was late. Since most Somalis are herders, their pastoral way of life was at risk as the land dried up. Half the population was facing extreme food shortages due to drought and war profiteering. Herders were especially at the mercy of the worsening weather,
and in Mogadishu, the price of a barrel of water—a day’s worth—was then an inconceivable ten dollars. Residents bought their water right off a donkey’s back; boys led the donkeys, strapped with yellow barrels, through the streets, delivering each day’s precious supply.

In economic terms, the Somali shilling was falling so fast in value that shopkeepers no longer accepted it. Corrupt political
leaders and businessmen were minting shillings as fast as possible and flooding the market for personal gain, as insurgent attacks shut down the city and hundreds of thousands of residents fled their homes for squalid camps as near as a few miles outside of town, and as far as Dadaab refugee camp, five hundred miles away in northern Kenya.

_____

One afternoon, Dheere took me along to a city
council meeting at a large private home called the Richmond Residence. The lady of the house, a mammoth gray-haired Somali American woman, lounging on a beach chaise in Coney Island sunglasses, cackled gleefully to see a fellow U.S. citizen. “I named this place for my home in Virginia!” The city council’s sleek members dined on roast chicken and relaxed afterward in a cool lounge drinking peach soda
and chewing
qat,
legal again and back in full force since the ouster of the Islamists a year and a half earlier. Dheere, seated as if enthroned before a leopard pelt nailed to one wall, laid out his tax plan. It was simple. Everyone had to pay.

“But my area is too small to collect tax. We don’t even have a market,” one local official protested.

“No place is too small to pay tax!” the mayor shouted.
Laughter rang off the walls.

Dheere defended his policies in the name of battling Al Qaeda. He was a member of a group of Somali warlords, the Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, which the CIA backed in return for the group’s help in capturing and killing suspected terrorists—until the plan was publicly exposed in 2006 and discontinued. “The Americans approached us,” Dheere
explained. “They had their own intelligence about the number of international terrorist suspects using Somalia as a safe haven.”

According to Dheere and another warlord named Mohamed Qanyare Afrah (who preferred to be called “a very, very, very successful businessman”), after a 2002 terrorist attack on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in the coastal Kenyan city of Mombasa, Americans and Israelis
came to the warlords for help. They gave the warlords a list of people to kill, capture, or kidnap, and paid for these services with suitcases of American dollars. The U.S. officers then flew the suspects in secret from Qanyare’s heavily guarded private airport to places unknown. The Somalis involved claimed they turned over about twenty people in this manner, and to this day, they believe they
deserve both gratitude and support from the United States for protecting its security interests. (In 2009, a CIA spokesperson, Marie Harf, told me she could not comment on the warlord’s accusations. A Special Forces commander told me that some of his soldiers had traveled along with CIA operatives to Somalia, and had been disturbed by their naïveté in dealing with the warlords.)

“Americans should
not treat their friends like this,” Qanyare chided me gently when I met him in a Kenyan hotel in 2008.

His former colleague Mayor Dheere was especially loquacious about the capture of Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, aka Isa Tanzania. Tanzania, whose moniker
Isa
is Arabic for “Jesus,” is a Yemeni linked to the 2002 attack on Mombasa’s Paradise Hotel. Dheere brags about his henchmen capturing Hemed
in Somalia in 2003 and handing him over to the Americans. According to Hemed’s lawyer, Tina Monshipour Foster, executive director of International Justice Network, an NGO that provides international legal assistance, Hemed was flown to Afghanistan and held at Bagram Airbase until eventually he was returned to Tanzania. According to Foster, Hemed claims that he was tortured while in U.S. custody.

Since the CIA program that funded the warlords came to light and was terminated in 2007, Dheere had been forced to make his money elsewhere. Here, his title as mayor came in handy: his greatest source of revenue was the main checkpoint, about eight miles out of Mogadishu, on the only viable escape route from town. Here, in trucks strapped with mattresses, on foot, and by donkey cart, almost all
of the nine hundred thousand residents who fled Mogadishu were forced to pass a posse of Dheere’s sometime soldiers. Many refugees left their few possessions at home in the shelled city, preferring to risk losing their family photographs or clothes rather than carry them through these checkpoints and have them stolen.

The blanched two-lane byway called the Afgooye Corridor was a road of horrors.
Trucks carrying food and other forms of aid from the far more secure town of Afgooye, fifteen miles away, to Mogadishu were often kept waiting for weeks because they could not pay whatever “tax” the militia demanded. Sometimes the soldiers took potshots at passing vehicles only because they were bored. One afternoon in April 2008, these soldiers strafed my convoy—the Toyota Corolla I was riding
in and the 4Runner of armed guards traveling behind me—with automatic fire. My driver stopped the car, which I thought seemed suicidal after these men had just shot at us. He yelled at the shooters, who, to my baffled relief, looked sheepish and apologized. They had fired at us simply because we were moving, the driver told me when he returned to the car. No other reason.

_____

About six months
earlier, in October 2007, not far from this checkpoint, workers distributing UN food supplies at a refugee camp clashed with Dheere’s militia. Shots were fired into the crowd, and although several people were killed, the refugees (miraculously, it seemed) forced the militia to retreat.

This camp, walled with a labyrinth of scavenged wood shanties, sat atop a hill along the main artery out of
Mogadishu, on the way to Afgooye. Dr. Hawa Abdi, a Soviet-trained gynecologist in her fifties (her education a relic of cold war alliances), had founded the camp. Each time I visited in 2007 and 2008, the camp’s main hill swarmed like a domed beehive with new arrivals. Women, in pairs, bent bare boughs and wove them into oversize baskets, then planted the baskets, like giant upside-down birds’ nests,
into the high, sandy hummock. Once Dr. Abdi handed out tarps, these frames became houses. But there were never enough tarps to go around, and the doctor had to negotiate in high-speed Somali to stop fights from breaking out among the waiting women.

For generations this scrubland had served as Abdi’s family farm, but two decades ago she opened a one-room women’s hospital here. Then, during the
famine of the early 1990s, women who knew and trusted Dr. Abdi, a divorced mother of two, flooded her farm by the thousands with their families, believing she would help them. (She had even set up a jail—an empty storeroom with a barred window—where she sequestered husbands accused of beating their wives.) First, she sold her family gold to feed them. Then, as the famine worsened, she had to pay
gravediggers in food to bury the more than ten thousand who died. For a moment, her humanitarian work had made her a national hero. When President George H. W. Bush visited Mogadishu in 1992, she shook his hand.

The hill on which we were standing was a mass grave.

“We buried ten thousand and seventy-eight bodies underneath here,” Dr. Abdi told me as we cut through the press of new arrivals and
picked our way down the steep slope to the place she euphemistically called the neonatal ward: a cracked veranda where half a dozen babies lay dying of chronic diarrhea, which is treatable. Abdi stuffed her worn hands into the frayed pockets of her white lab coat. When I first visited in June 2007, twenty thousand people had fled to her farm for safety; when I returned in April 2008, that number
had quadrupled to eighty thousand. Yet this
new wave hadn’t brought interest from the international community with them. Many of the aid dollars—and the shiny, white SUVs of the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations—earmarked for Somalia ended up in neighboring Kenya, where it was safer to work.
¹
Dr. Abdi received some help from the UN World Food Programme, and Doctors Without Borders
had set up a sand-colored field hospital tent on her land, which they were finding difficult to staff. No foreigners could stay for more than an hour, or they were likely to be found out by the insurgents and killed. So, for the most part, she was left to do her work—and to defend her camp from attacks, such as the one by the mayor’s militia—alone.