The World's Most Dangerous Place (5 page)

One of these drivers, a short, bespectacled private from Kampala called ‘K’, was the toast of the Bancroft Hotel for his fearlessness. The story went that Private K was clearing a road near the front
one day when he and his supporting ground troops were ambushed by al-Shabaab. His comrades beat a retreat, but not Private K who raised the bucket of his bulldozer and slowly advanced on his attackers, the bullets pinging off the glass and metal of his armoured cab. His surprised opponents broke and fell back into the surrounding buildings. Private K roared on, demolishing the exterior wall of a house as he went. The South Africans hooted with laughter as they described how he caught up with a gunman and ran him down in slow motion, even methodically reversing back over him to make sure that he was dead.

The Bancrofters were far from the only interesting people in the camp. There was, for instance, a team of Frenchmen, po-faced DGSE intelligence officers and glowering special forces soldiers, who used to barricade themselves in a corner of the bar each evening behind a wall of open laptops and (I suspected) specialist tracking equipment that they kept in dustproof metal suitcases. They spoke to no one other than themselves, but were assumed to be focused on the rescue of a DGSE colleague, Denis Allex, who had made the fatal mistake of staying at the Sahafi Hotel in July 2009 while masquerading as a journalist. Kidnapped by al-Shabaab, he was still in their custody three years later, the longest-held foreign hostage in the country.

Then there was a British military adviser, Roger Lane, a moustachioed former Royal Marines brigadier and another veteran of Afghanistan, who was trying to persuade AMISOM to deploy a radar system that would locate the launch point of shells and mortars, thus allowing them to prove they were not responsible for the civilian deaths that al-Shabaab accused them of.

Most colourful of all was another Frenchman, Richard Rouget, a former soldier of fortune of about fifty. He once fought for the
presidential guard in the Comoros Islands, a former French colony almost synonymous with political coups and mercenary activity. Under the sobriquet ‘Colonel Sanders’, he had also commanded a force of South African-recruited mercenaries during the Ivory Coast’s civil war in 2003 on behalf of President Laurent Gbagbo, an adventure that led to his conviction in a court in South Africa. He was a product of
Françafrique
straight from the pages of
Tintin
.

His knowledge of Somalia’s clan structure was encyclopaedic, and he worked closely with the boss of Bancroft, Mike Stock, the 34-year-old scion of a wealthy Virginian banking family, who had used some of his private fortune to found the company soon after graduating from Princeton in 1999. Stock was a regular visitor to Mogadishu, and maintained an idealistic, almost preppy enthusiasm for his company’s Somali project. On a later visit he arrived accompanied by two young blonde women who were described as ‘assistants’ from the firm’s Washington headquarters. They were noticeably shy of fraternizing with the Bancroft regulars who, being too polite to ask, speculated wildly on their true reason for being there.

In the summer of 2011, by when visits to Mogadishu’s front line were no longer such a novelty to me, I came across Stock and Rouget at a forward operating base in the district of Bondhere, just north of the Bakara Market. They were wearing non-khaki flak jackets and helmets, and stood out in the open, discussing battle tactics with the hand-waving intensity of true enthusiasts.
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I was
travelling in a group of three other journalists then, with a Burundian press handler who insisted that on no account were we to photograph the ‘foreign advisors’; which of course meant that we all did when he wasn’t looking.

Stock, for his part, didn’t seem particularly troubled by our presence, and certainly wasn’t trying to conceal his – although, as it turned out, he might have been wiser to do so. The following day an al-Shabaab spokesman, Sheikh Abdi-Aziz Abu Mus’ab, called a press conference specifically in order to announce – inaccurately – that ‘a white man and an American military expert’ had been shot and killed by an insurgency sniper.

‘We are fully aware that more Westerners are fighting alongside our enemy which is also the enemy of Allah,’ he said. ‘We are calling all Muslims to come to Somalia and fight the enemy of Allah and the infidels whether they are black, red or white, because they are fighting together against us.’

Abu Mus’ab gave no names but could only have been referring to Stock and Rouget, who must have been spotted from an enemy position the day I was there. No wonder the US State Department were anxious not to ‘Americanize’ the conflict, if al-Shabaab were using even Mike Stock’s lone presence on the front line as an international recruiting sergeant against the Islamist world’s most hated infidels.

But that was in the future. Back in March 2011, I was stuck on the AMISOM base, fascinated and frustrated in equal measure. As an embedded journalist I was entirely reliant on AMISOM’s Casspirs to reach the city where the story was. But securing a place on one of these vehicles proved a slower and more difficult process than I had anticipated. There were a great many false starts and long waits.

Access was controlled by a legendarily capricious Ugandan press officer, Major Bibi, who had been in Mogadishu for three years. This was a long front-line tour by any standards – the British Army, for instance, limits its tours in Iraq or Afghanistan for most personnel to six months – and he had perhaps inevitably grown cynical about the war. His posting was at last coming to an end, however, and now he could hardly wait to go home. His enthusiasm, not surprisingly, had been slipping for months. Nevertheless, the success of any journalist’s Mogadishu visit could depend on whether or not he liked you. And so one evening, Richard and Will, another British ex-soldier resident at Bancroft, took me to meet him, bumping along the sand dunes in an armoured Land Cruiser with the hazard lights on, as camp regulations required.

They knew their mark well, and had brought a bottle of Monkey Shoulder Scotch whisky for me to give to him, along with a set of Perudo liar dice. Bibi turned out to be a droll and sophisticated 51-year-old, who had once spent seven years studying in Cuba – President Museveni had flirted with Marxism in the 1960s – and consequently spoke Spanish as well as English fluently.

‘Ahhh, Espada de Mono!’ he purred, when I presented the whisky. ‘Welcome to my palace!’

His quarters amounted to an officer’s Portakabin set down in the ruins of a once lovely seaside villa, and were palatial only in the sense that they were better than the tents that the UPDF’s rank and file had to make do with. I asked him if he had managed to pick up any Somali during his time here.

‘The only way to learn any language is socially – drinking with them, screwing their women,’ he replied, his eyes glazing at the
memory of his youth in Cuba. ‘Unfortunately there has been no opportunity for me to do that here.’

The evening was balmy, as usual. Bibi sent his lanky batman, Mubarak, to fetch glasses while we sat down at a plastic table with the dice on what remained of a patio. Somewhere off in the darkness to the north, a Dushka heavy machinegun opened up with a kettledrum flourish.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Bibi announced, flipping out the whisky cork with practised thumbs, ‘the music is playing and the nightclub is open.’

I had played Perudo often before, but Bibi’s rules were new to me. Instead of the normal last-dice call of ‘Palefico’, we were instructed to use the phrase ‘Al-Kabaab’. And instead of saying ‘Dudo’ on suspicion that the previous player was lying, we had to say, inexplicably, ‘On the knob, John.’

The hilarity grew as the whisky flowed. Bibi was a mine of good stories. He recalled an incident, early on during his deployment, when the militants tried to attack AMISOM’s heavily defended checkpoint at the K4 junction, but threw away any element of surprise by arriving in a minivan.

‘A bus full of martyrs!’ he laughed. ‘Can you imagine? They got out one by one, all of them wearing white, with their hair nicely oiled and singing Muslim chants. We ordered them to move on but they just kept coming closer and closer . . . We had no choice in the end. The van was turned to ashes.’

It sounded a strangely wasteful sort of suicide attack, although Bibi said he’d seen such things before. Most of his military contemporaries had fought bush wars back home against Joseph Kony’s eccentric Christian insurgency, the Lord’s Resistance Army, or against his even more eccentric predecessor Alice Lakwena’s
Holy Spirit Movement. ‘The possessed priestess’, as Lakwena was known, notoriously sent her fighters into battle smeared in shea butter that she told them would ward off bullets, and armed with rocks that were supposed to explode on impact. She added her own insane injunctions to the Ten Commandments, including: ‘Thou shalt not go into battle armed with a walking stick.’ It was a reminder that Islam is not the only religion that harbours extremists, and that Christians in Africa are just as susceptible as Muslims to outlandish superstition.

A bottle of rum joined the Monkey Shoulder on the table, and before very long we were all uproariously drunk. Only Mubarak stayed sober, watching his master impassively from a daybed by the door. He sat cross-legged and with a Zen-like stillness, moving only to answer his mobile phone, the shrill and unnecessarily loud ringtone of which was a muezzin’s call to prayer. I asked Bibi discreetly if his batman was a Muslim. ‘Mubarak?’ he roared. ‘Is the Pope a Catholic? Of course he is!’

I had not appreciated until that evening how big a proportion of Ugandans were Muslim – as many as 30 per cent, according to Bibi.
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What, I wondered, did Uganda’s Muslims make of al-Shabaab?

‘Ask Mubarak,’ Bibi replied.

Mubarak smiled inscrutably and said nothing.

‘There is a very small number of Muslims in Uganda who are extremists,’ Bibi answered for him. ‘
Not
in the army . . . political Islam is tightly controlled in the ranks.’

But, as Bibi pointed out, the world was changing. Radical Islam
was on the rise in Uganda, just like everywhere else; and terrorist campaigns do not require large armies.

On 11 July 2010, three suicide bombers attacked Kampala, killing seventy-four people and injuring seventy more. Most of the victims were football fans who had gathered at a rugby club to watch an open-air screening of the World Cup Final. It was al-Shabaab’s first-ever terrorist strike outside their homeland: a significant step towards the al-Qaida-style internationalization of their cause that the West had feared for so long.

‘Uganda is a major infidel country supporting the so-called government of Somalia,’ one of al-Shabaab’s leaders, Sheikh Yusuf Sheikh Issa,
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announced. ‘Whatever makes them cry makes us happy. May Allah’s anger be upon those who are against us.’
⁶
The suicide bombers did not act alone. Ugandan police made several arrests and eventually charged thirty-two people with murder. Somali nationals were naturally among the accused but so, alarmingly, were several Ugandans. There were also Kenyans among the suspects, and even Pakistanis.

Opponents of Museveni often questioned his motives for involving Uganda in AMISOM’s battle, accusing him of strutting on the world stage at the expense of the lives of his people. None of the AU’s other members had responded as fulsomely as Uganda when the appeal for troop contributions was launched in 2006. They argued that al-Shabaab was not Uganda’s problem, and that Museveni had brought the Kampala bombings upon himself. Yet
Uganda, it was easy to forget, is just one country away from Somalia, with only the increasingly lawless, Somali-dominated regions of northern Kenya to separate them.

It occurred to me that Museveni might understand, better than his critics, how much Uganda had to lose from the growth of Islamic extremism in the Horn. There are Muslim communities in every sub-Saharan country between Somalia and Mauritania, many of whom live as minorities with legitimate social grievances. AQIM, al-Qaida In the Maghreb, was active in Algeria, Mauritania and Niger. Ansar Dine, a militant Tuareg group thought to be linked to AQIM, was taking control of northern Mali. Another group, Boko Haram – ‘Books Forbidden’ or ‘Western education is sinful’– was already terrorizing swathes of northern Nigeria. Did Museveni worry that such Islamist groups could link up in the future, and that Islamism, if left unchecked, could topple his country like a domino? He was not alone, if so.

The Ugandan military had encountered a contingent of Boko Haram operating from a former pasta factory in northern Mogadishu when they first arrived in 2007.
⁷
In 2012 General Carter Ham, the commander of Africom, the US Africa Command, told an audience in Washington that there were other more recent indications that extremist groups, particularly AQIM and Boko Haram, were attempting to coordinate their efforts through the sharing of funds, training and explosives; and he warned that others, including al-Shabaab, could do the same in the future.
⁸

The westward creep of Islam, including its extremist elements, was hardly a new phenomenon in Africa. Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, theorized in 1971 that it was a reaction to a century or more of colonial racism. ‘Christianity is right to worry about the spread
of Islam in Africa, and must honestly face the question of why it has happened,’ he wrote.
⁹
‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people . . . I have never been able to find any colour bar in Islam, and, dreary though the ignorant and fanatical portion of Islam can be – as dreary as Victorian Imperial Christianity was – it does start off from a firm base about colour. It does not
try
to show it has no colour bar; it has none.’
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