The World's Most Dangerous Place (44 page)

‘The security guards knew exactly who I was.’ Nimco shrugged. ‘Sometimes the US is a very weird place.’

Nimco was phlegmatic about Somalis’ place in American society, but the despondency of Yousef Firin, a 31-year-old limo driver with a boyish face and a tufty beard who plied his trade outside the Holiday Inn, struck me as rather more typical of the mood in Minneapolis. Yousef’s family had escaped Mogadishu in 1992 when he was eight. They settled in Washington, but moved to Minneapolis in 2001 on the recommendation of friends: a classic
example of secondary migration. Minnesota had been very kind to them: ‘Like a love affair,’ he said, although the love affair was over now. The recession meant that many Somalis could no longer find work. He knew of several families who, like the nomads they were, had recently packed up and left in search of pastures new. Minnesotans, he feared, were out of patience with their Somali guests. The ‘missing kids’ story had damaged the state’s reputation, and Somali-related gang crime was perceived to have made the city unsafe.

He told me the sorry story of Ali Omar, the teenage nephew of a close friend, who the previous month had been stabbed to death in a fight in north-east Minneapolis. Yousef had had to identify the body at the coroner’s office, an experience from which he had yet to recover.

‘I told him, two weeks before he was killed, that he should do something with his life, get off the streets, maybe join the army, or he’d get into trouble – and look what happened. I had to bury the poor kid. It was really sad.’

The police’s unwillingness to investigate the murder was, he claimed, all too typical these days.

‘He was in a flat with three other Somalis when he was killed. Everyone in the community knows who did it, but the police just say they have no suspect. Their attitude is, “If you’re killing each other and you can’t sort it out yourselves, why should we get involved?” People just don’t want to know any more.’

Reading the comment thread beneath an online news story about the murder later on, it was hard to disagree.
¹³

‘It’s not good old Nordeast anymore down there,’ wrote one contributor. ‘Drive near Central and Lowry just about any time of the day. It is sad to see.’

‘Fightin over that last crack hit at 2am,’ wrote another.

‘Cut me another big ol’ piece of that diversity pie!!!!’ remarked a third.

Minnesota, it seemed, was beginning to regret its reputation for charity. For all the community work done by the imams, a significant number of Somali youth still felt lost and alienated in their adopted country, and they were angrier than ever. Despite three years of painstaking investigation, the FBI, by their own admission, had failed to dismantle the underground railway that led young Somalis into terrorism.

In October 2011, a month after I left America, another young Somali-American blew himself up in Somalia. He was the third suicide bomber from the Twin Cities since Shirwa Ahmed in October 2008. Abdisalam Ali, 22, had gone missing from his home in north-east Minneapolis the previous month. He had lived in America since he was a baby, and had become a promising student at Thomas Edison High School (motto: ‘Belong, Believe, Become’) where he had lifted weights and sold shoes out of his locker in order to support his family. His friends called him Bullethead.
¹⁴

At least ten people died during his attack on an AU outpost in Mogadishu. Shortly before the operation, Bullethead – or his al-Shabaab handlers – uploaded a recorded message that once again urged Somalis in exile to take up the jihadist cause, a message that sounded all the more persuasive for being unscripted.

‘My brothers and sisters, do jihad in America, do jihad in Canada, do jihad in England, anywhere in Europe,’ he said. ‘It is not important that you, you know, you become a doctor or you become, you know, uh, some sort of engineer. We have to believe in Allah and die as Muslims . . . Brainstorm, don’t just sit around and, you know, be a couch potato and you know, you know, just like,
you know, just chill all day, you know. It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it will not benefit you, it will not benefit yourself, or the Muslims.’

In the Twin Cities, the long war against Islamic extremism was not about to end any time soon.

*
In their excellent account of the Somali-American experience,
The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away
(University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Doug Rutledge and Abdi Roble recount a story told to them by Mariam Mohamed, the wife of Ali Khalif Galaydh, the former prime minister of Somalia (and founder of Khatumo state). Mariam’s mother-in-law came to visit them in upstate New York, where her husband was teaching at Syracuse University. One morning, she looked out of the window to find the ground covered in snow. Turning to her daughter-in-law she asked, sharply: ‘So who scouted Syracuse?’

*
The plan of the American-Egyptian imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, to build a Sufi Community Center two blocks from Ground Zero ran into intense opposition in New York in 2010.

*
This was the local franchise of a US-wide African-American gang network, originally called the Almighty Vice Lord Nation, that was established in Chicago as long ago as the 1950s.

*
The Constitution of Medina, drawn up by the Prophet Mohammed in 622, was the basis of the future Caliphate and effectively founded the first Islamic state. Like the UN Charter, ratified in 1945, the Medina Constitution was specifically intended ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’.

*
In an interview with Brian Handwerk and Zain Habboo for National Geographic News, 28 September 2001, he said: ‘There is no way that the people who [attacked the Twin Towers] could be Muslim, and if they claim to be Muslim, then they have perverted their religion.’

*
The first US drone strike in Somalia came in June 2011 near Kismayo. The target was thought to have been the al-Shabaab leader Ibrahim al-Afghani, although his death was still unconfirmed at the time of writing.

*
In December 2011, the US government briefly outlawed money transfers to Somalia under anti-terrorism legislation, but later lifted the ban following lobbying by aid agencies. ‘Through remittances, American Somalis provide a lifeline to hundreds of thousands of people,’ said Daniel Wordsworth, president of the American Refugee Committee. ‘With famine and drought already impacting families throughout Somalia, the cessation of bank transfers [would] be devastating on a national scale.’
¹¹

14

‘Clanism is a disease like AIDS’

London, February 2012

The FBI’s remit to protect America from terrorism is mainly a domestic one, but that does not stop the Bureau from keeping a close eye on London, a city with a Somali community that is bigger, more diffuse, more complex, and therefore much more difficult to engage with than any of the communities living in the US. One of the most obvious differences from the Somali viewpoint is that in the UK it is still legal to chew qat. Around the world, the leaves are consumed by an estimated 10 million people every day.
¹
Qat is illegal in the US, however; and in January 2012, when even the Dutch voted to ban it, Britain became the last country in the Western world where it was still permitted.

This anomaly troubles the FBI, which sees a link between qat, organized crime and terrorism. In April 2012, seven people in London, Coventry and Cardiff were arrested following a tip-off from the Americans, who suspected they were involved in smuggling qat to the US and Canada in order to raise money for
al-Shabaab. The news followed a startling claim by CNN that Britain’s qat-chewing dens had become an al-Shabaab recruiting ground.

‘Young [qat users] become vulnerable, not clearly thinking, and the paranoia kicks in and that’s when they start to hate the British public – especially the police,’ said Abubakr Awale, a British-Somali anti-qat campaigner. ‘They are thinking everybody is out to get them, and that’s exactly the kind of individual that the likes of al-Shabaab are targeting.’
²

I needed to know more about qat, a drug that I had never got around to trying despite its centrality to Somali culture. To plug this shameful gap in my knowledge, I went back to Southall. The location of my chosen chewing den, or
marfish
, was hard to beat for atmosphere: a grubby room overlooking the station, above an industrial unit that housed a freight-forwarding business specializing in imports from East Africa. The adventure began the moment I stepped off my train, when a cry of ‘Stop, thief!’ went up and a hooded figure was seen to jump down from the platform and run doggedly away across the railway lines, stumbling in the track ballast. The victim, a Japanese student whose iPhone had been pickpocketed, tried to give chase, but gave up as an Intercity train came blasting through with its two-tone horn blaring, only narrowly missing the pickpocket, who quickly vanished through a hole in a fence. Southall was fifteen minutes but a world away from central London. Even the welcome sign above the ticket office was written in the Punjabi Gurmukhi script.

The marfish was in the middle of a row of brick buildings to the end of which was affixed a giant Conservative Party billboard, a leftover from the 2010 election campaign, displaying a bearded and blue-turbaned Sikh, Gurcharan Singh, with David Cameron’s face
floating ethereally over his right shoulder. The accompanying slogan, VOTE FOR CHANGE, sounded a hollow note now. When polling day came, the constituents of Ealing, Southall had voted exactly as they had done at every election since World War Two, for Labour. It was doubtful, however, whether a change of party here would have made any difference so far as qat was concerned. Parliament first debated whether or not to ban the drug in 1996, but had always decided against. The argument for inaction seldom varied. Evidence of harm resulting from qat use was judged ‘insufficient to merit its control’; its use in any case was confined to a minority community from East Africa; the issue was therefore ‘culturally sensitive’, and best left alone.
³

It is true that the habit is ingrained in the culture of East Africa, where qat has been consumed in one form or another for hundreds if not thousands of years. Richard Burton reported that it produced in the locals ‘a manner of dreamy enjoyment, which, exaggerated by time and distance, may have given rise to that splendid myth the Lotos, and the Lotophagi’. These lotus-eaters, he went on, were ‘like opium-eaters, they cannot live without the excitement . . . It is held by the ulema here as in Arabia, “Akl el Salikin”, or the Food of the Pious, and literati remark that it has the singular properties of enlivening the imagination, clearing the ideas, cheering the heart, diminishing sleep, and taking the place of food.’
⁴

In 2012, qat was more popular than ever among Somalis, between 60 and 75 per cent of whom are thought to be users or sellers of the drug. Because qat cultivation requires more water than is available in most of Somalia, the majority of it is imported from Kenya, with smaller amounts arriving from Ethiopia and Yemen. The Kenyan qat trade alone is said to be worth $250 million a year.
⁵
Somalia is hooked – although not yet as badly as Yemen, where an
estimated 90 per cent of men are regular chewers. The habit certainly isn’t doing them any good. Some 40 per cent of Yemen’s scant water resources are used in the irrigation of up to half a billion qat plants, prompting experts to warn that Sana’a, Yemen’s ancient capital, could literally run out of water by 2017, the first major city to suffer such a fate in modern times.
⁶
Yemen offers a terrible illustration of what can happen if the chewing habit is left unchecked, and yet the government in London has so far shown little appetite for controlling it in Britain. In 2011, an astonishing ten tonnes of qat was permitted to pass through Heathrow from Nairobi every week.
⁷

There was no sign showing the way to the marfish above the Southall industrial unit: you had to know it was there. On the other hand, there was nothing to prevent anyone from walking in off the street and up the dark staircase to the entrance, a blue swing door with a smudged glass panel covered with peeling stickers, one of which read DON’T DO DRUGS:
Curiosity Will Kill U
. I pushed on inside. The room resembled a working man’s social club, with utilitarian strip-lighting and plastic chairs and round Formica tables scattered about on a cheap wood laminate floor. It was none too clean and smelled faintly of wet football socks. A small bar area with a fridge stood in one corner. A television opposite relayed the latest BBC news from the Middle East, although no one seemed to be watching. At the far end was a fire escape that doubled as the smoking area, which overlooked the train tracks along which the pickpocket had run away.

There were a dozen or so Somalis present, all men, all middle-aged, some sitting alone in silence, others locked in noisy conversation, and one man laughing like a hyena. None of them seemed to object to the presence among them of a gaalo. The man
behind the counter merely giggled when I explained what I was there for.