The World's Most Dangerous Place (35 page)
Read The World's Most Dangerous Place Online
Authors: James Fergusson
Khatumo, in the end, was absurd: a tiny clan entity, bankrolled by exiles nostalgic for a long-dead state based on robbery and cruelty and a cult of personality. Even Khatumo’s supporters admitted that, economically, it had nothing going for it but the livestock trade, although the possibility of oil beneath the ground, however remote, meant that neither Puntland nor Somaliland were likely to give the region up without a fight. The brave act of secession beneath the acacia tree promised nothing but more violence and instability.
Khatumo’s first murder occurred just eight weeks after the new state’s declaration, when gunmen in Taleh shot and killed a provincial court judge, Abdirashid Igge. The judge had been one of the delegates in the Somaliland convoy ambushed by Puntland militia the previous year, and had only recently been released from jail in Garowe. This unfortunate man was no partisan. Before Hargeisa appointed him a judge, he had been employed by Garowe as an official in the Ministry of Employment and Sport. Khatumo authorities launched an investigation. It was to no one’s surprise that the killers were never caught.
*
According to Shuke, the Director of the Puntland Development Research Centre in Garowe and an authority on East African history, the Sayyid and the Mahdi may even have been taught by the same Islamic scholar, a Wahhabi Sheikh in Mecca called Mohamed Salih.
*
‘Dhollowaa’ meant ‘No incisors’, the absence of which, he explained, was a genetic trait in his family. ‘I think maybe it’s because we’re nomads and we drink so much milk, so we don’t need teeth,’ he said.
*
There are said to be forty-six ways to describe a camel in Somali – almost as many as the fifty-two words for snow employed by the Saami people of Lapland.
8
*
The British ambassador to whom the citizens of Taleh wrote was either Robert Purcell or William Fullerton, who took over from Purcell in 1983. In 1984, Fullerton advised the newly appointed US ambassador Peter Bridges to read
First Footsteps in East Africa
, noting that Burton said Arabs called Somalia
Bilad wa issi
, the ‘Land of Give Me Something’. Bridges wrote later in his memoir: ‘“The longer you are here,” said Bill Fullerton, “the more you will think that name is apt.” He was right.’
9
London, July 2011
It was late on 1 July, Somali Independence Day, and the crush to get into the Tudor Rose nightclub in Southall, west London, was so dense that my arms were pinned to my sides. The bouncers, three over-inflated men with shaved heads and earrings and black and orange bomber jackets, looked on from the other side of a strong mesh door with heavy-lidded eyes, indifferent to the discomfort of the crowd and the cat-calls of impatience from the back. It was a warm evening, for London. The heady smell of scent and soap rose from the many young women in the crush, some of whom had spent a lot of time preparing for this evening, a big night out in the Somali exile calendar. There were hundreds of young Somalis trying to get in, and they had converged on this spot from every corner of the city. The girl in front of me looked understandably grumpy as the blue and white stars painted on her cheeks started to run. There was a sudden forward surge as the door was opened and five more people ahead of us were allowed to wriggle through the crack.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said one of the bouncers through the grill, ‘are you quite sure you want to come in here?’
It was a reasonable question. I was the only non-Somali he could see apart from the other bouncers, a shining white beacon in an ebony sea. I was underdressed compared even to the Somali men here, and a good twenty years older than the average customer in the queue.
‘I’m with her,’ I said, indicating my companion and guide for the night, Ayaan, who had been channelled away slightly by the squeeze of people.
Several heads turned to look, and the bouncer actually laughed. Ayaan was beautiful by any standards, a mesmerizing mixture of African and Arab with her sculpted cheekbones and delicate, skijump nose. Tonight, however, she was shimmering like a supermodel. She stood tall and proud in a traditional, off-the-shoulder silk dress called a
guntiino
. Long sparkly earrings dangled beneath her blow-dried coiffure. She was wearing blue eye-shadow and glossy red lipstick, and her breath smelled of honey and menthol from the Lockets she sucked.
‘Mind how you go then,’ grinned the bouncer, swinging the door open for us. Ayaan sashayed regally through, and I trailed smugly after her. At last we were in.
Ayaan’s outfit had come as a surprise when I picked her up from her council flat in the Ealing suburb of Greenford. Despite the late hour, I had come mentally prepared for a work assignment. I had asked her where I could see young Somalis having a good time, for once, and she had offered to accompany me to the Tudor Rose, arguing that I couldn’t possibly go to such a place on my own; she said it would look weird, and might even be risky. And now she was making a night out of it, a feisty, 30-something, single
Somali girl with an obviously older white man on her arm, determined to have a good time too. She knew she was pushing the boundaries of convention by appearing here with a gaalo. It looked racy. But it was just as obvious that she took a mischievous, sassy delight in that, and especially in the confusion and affront on the faces of some of the younger men, all of whom mistook us for a couple on a date.
We had been introduced by a British journalist friend who had met Ayaan while researching a story about Abu Ayyub al-Muhajir, whose family Ayaan had come to know in the course of her job as a part-time social worker for Ealing Council. Al-Muhajir, whose real name was Ahmed Hussein Ahmed, was a 21-year-old Somali from Ealing who dropped out of his business studies course at Oxford Brookes University in 2007, flew to Kenya, crossed the Somali border on foot, and blew himself up in Baidoa in a suicide attack that killed twenty Ethiopian soldiers.
He was the classic example of a diaspora al-Shabaab recruit, the sort that most alarms the security services; his case was one of those that the former International Development Minister Andrew Mitchell had in mind when he remarked, in late 2011, that there were ‘probably more British passport holders engaged in terrorist training in Somalia than in any other country in the world’.
1
The law of averages alone makes it likely that there are other would-be suicide bombers at large in Britain, or, an even scarier possibility, British passport holders who have received explosives training from al-Shabaab in Somalia and have already returned.
No one knows for sure how many Somalis call Britain home. The Office of National Statistics estimated there were 108,000 Somali-born immigrants in 2010, although most other sources, including those within the Metropolitan Police, believe the real
figure is closer to 250,000 or even 300,000. Even at 108,000, the UK’s Somali community is far and away the largest in Europe. Britain’s past colonial involvement in East Africa had drawn Somali émigrés to her shores ever since the mid-nineteenth century, forming a natural magnet for the hordes of civil war refugees who followed on at the end of the twentieth. The UK’s immigration rules in the early 2000s were liberal compared to most other Western nations – or lax, depending on your political affiliation – leading to even greater inflows, including a significant amount of secondary migration from other European countries, particularly from Scandinavia. By 1999, for whatever reason, over half of all applications for asylum in Europe by Somalis were made in the UK.
Earlier in 2011, in Nairobi, I had met the future British ambassador to Somalia, Matt Baugh, over a beer on the veranda of the heavily guarded British Residence. As a glossy green ibis pecked its stately way across the immaculate lawn below us, he described how Somalia had become the destination of choice for would-be jihadis from the UK. Until recently, he explained, British policy had been to try to ‘contain’ the security threat these people undoubtedly posed, both to East Africa and to the British homeland. But the government had now realized that ‘containment’ was never going to work.
‘Somalia represents a kind of threat we haven’t seen before. It’s got the longest coastline in Africa and a huge porous land border. There are massive numbers of Somalis living in all the neighbouring states as well as around the world. It is not a traditional, geographical country, but a diffuse, global entity – and that is not physically containable.’
This was nowhere more true than in London, where the vast majority of British Somalis had settled: at least 80,000 of them, and
perhaps as many as 200,000. The enormous size and variety of the capital’s Muslim community, of which the Somalis are just one small part, made it almost impossible to police adequately.
‘The international community needs to wake up,’ said Baugh. ‘Will it take another terror attack in the West to make them do that?’
In early 2010, Baugh continued, David Cameron’s new National Security Council had formally abandoned the old containment strategy for Somalia in favour of one of ‘engagement’ with the ‘main drivers’ of the security threat. For the Foreign Office, this meant helping the TFG to end al-Shabaab’s insurgency much more proactively than before, while urging them on with the process of political reform. For the security services at home, it meant working with Muslim communities to try to counter the causes of radicalization that led to terrorism, instead of just trying to catch the terrorists by themselves. The new emphasis was on prevention rather than cure. This is why, since 2007, the main domestic ‘workstream’ in the Home Office’s counter-terrorism strategy has in fact been called Prevent – a strategy that was formally ‘refocused’ following a judicial review in 2011.
Al-Shabaab’s diaspora recruits have a well-known profile. They tend to be young, disaffected males, alienated both from their families and from their adoptive society, and it was this dark side of the diaspora that I hoped Ayaan would help me explore. As a London social worker, she had spent years working among troubled Somali families, an experience that had made her an almost perfect bellwether of extremism. She had, it seemed to me, an extraordinarily acute feeling for what was happening at the bottom of the Somali exile heap, in part because that was a place where she had once been herself.
Ayaan’s life story, told to me a few weeks previously in a scruffy KFC restaurant in Northolt, was like a Dickensian parable of urban suffering and redemption. She had arrived in London alone in 1993 at the age of fourteen. Her father was absent in those days, working as a chef in Saudi Arabia. Her mother, desperate to get her away from the civil violence raging around the family’s home city of Burao in Somaliland, had taken her to Addis Ababa, the capital of neighbouring Ethiopia, and put her on a plane to London in the care of a nicely spoken young Somalilander she had just met in the airport, and who was going the same way. This stranger promised to deliver her daughter to a cousin who lived in east London. On arrival, however, he took Ayaan to his own family in west London, where she was effectively enslaved.
‘They took away my travel documents and put me to work, cooking and cleaning. I didn’t speak any English. I didn’t have a clue where I was, and I was very sick.’
She hadn’t told her mother that she was, in fact, pregnant by her best friend’s father back in Somaliland.
‘That’s life,’ she shrugged, without rancour or further explanation.
Ayaan never made contact with the cousin from east London, and was too proud, or too scared, or too broke to phone home. After eight weeks of being shunted between houses belonging to various relatives of the man from Addis airport, she ran away. She ended up in a care home in Wembley, a council-funded orphanage for runaways, where she eventually had her baby, a girl who was now seventeen. The two of them had lived in council care for the first four years of her daughter’s life, and still live together in Greenford.
Ayaan was certainly no Islamist, yet that did not translate into outright condemnation of al-Shabaab.
‘They’re Somalis, not aliens from outer space,’ she said. ‘They’ve got a different ideology and I don’t agree with it, but they still have to be part of the solution. We have to talk to them.’
She took a dim view of AMISOM, whom she called ‘mercenaries’. The Westerners who employed those mercenaries, meanwhile, were ‘hypocrites’, especially Britain.
‘When I arrived here the IRA were bombing London. And I thought, this place is another warzone, it’s not so different from Somalia: how interesting! And Martin McGuinness was a hardliner, but now look where he is.’
She disapproved of al-Shabaab’s terror tactics – ‘Their bombs kill women and children. All Somalis hate that,’ she said – and yet she understood why the Ealing student, Abu Ayyub, had felt the need to blow himself up in Baidoa.
‘If the UK wants to stop Somalis joining al-Shabaab, maybe the UK needs to change its foreign policy and stop bombing Muslim countries.’
Ayaan’s views on everything were shot through with a fierce, combative pride that could supplant all logic and reason.
‘Well done to them!’ she exclaimed when I asked what she thought about piracy. ‘The shipping is a legitimate target: a gift from Allah. Foreigners stole our fish and destroyed the reefs with their toxic dumping. I think you deserve it. I hate your navy warships. They behave like bullies in a playground.’
