The World's Most Dangerous Place (6 page)

Bibi’s mobile phone rang almost constantly. He generally ignored the calls, although once when he did answer I was astonished to hear him launch into a protracted series of comedy farting noises, loud and impressively inventive. It turned out that the mobile phone company had sold or given his number to al-Shabaab, who then paid locals to plague him with nuisance calls, including death threats. I asked him why he didn’t just change his number.

‘I have,’ he said. ‘Dozens of times.’

‘But – doesn’t it drive you mad?’

‘It would take more than this to take away my sanity.’

Bibi looked weary, though, as his mobile rang yet again. This time, Will answered and propped the phone next to the speaker of an iPod he had set up. The caller, had they gone on listening, would have been treated to a diverse playlist containing everything from Eminem to Supertramp.

Nuisance-calling sounded a childish tactic, but it had in fact
significantly hampered the ability of both AMISOM and the TFG to communicate. Al-Shabaab’s access to the mobile phone companies’ customer databases was so total that Mogadishu’s residents had learned not to answer any incoming call unless they recognized the number. I also suspected that the never-ending death threats, however empty they might have been, were far more wearing than Major Bibi was prepared to admit. In the digital age, the most effective response to a technologically superior enemy was often surprisingly low-tech, as al-Qaida first spectacularly proved with their attacks of 9/11.

This memorable evening unfortunately had little effect on my bid to secure a seat in an outgoing Casspir, and the waiting about at the Bancroft Hotel continued. A pair of lion cubs in a cage at the back of the camp provided an unlikely distraction when there was no one around to talk to. The animals, thought to be orphans from the south of Somalia, had been captured by smugglers hoping to sell them on as pets to rich Arabs. Port officials had found them in the hold of a UAE-bound ship docked at Mogadishu and, not knowing what to do with them, passed them on to Bancroft. They were kittens then, perhaps just three months old, but they quickly grew into cubs that paced purposefully around their enclosure, and devoured a dead goat every three days. Like the outcome of the AMISOM mission itself, the eventual fate of the beasts was uncertain. The original plan was to have the Somali speaker present them as a gift to his Ugandan counterpart, but that scheme had fallen through. Returning them to their natural habitat had been suggested, but this was rejected on the grounds that they were already too domesticated to survive. The truth was that no one quite knew what to do with them – a bit like the international community’s attitude towards Somalia itself.

When I last saw the cubs in 2011, they had fallen gravely ill with a respiratory disease that no one could diagnose, and had lost so much weight that they tottered when they walked. The Ugandan orderly who had been put in charge of them shook his head sadly, and explained there were no zoologists or lion experts in Somalia. The lions wouldn’t eat goat any more, or even the cooked chicken he tenderly proffered them. The only hope, he said, was outside help, perhaps from the Born Free Foundation based in South Africa. So far, though, no lion vet had agreed to undertake the journey to Mogadishu; and very soon, he thought, it would be too late for these animals anyway. For both the lions and the state, foreign intervention, if it was to have any chance of succeeding, had to arrive in time; and it had to be the right kind of intervention, or it could easily end up making matters worse.

*
Qat
, the leaves of
Catha edulis
, a flowering shrub native to East Africa, have been chewed for centuries in the region for their stimulating effect. The plant contains cathinone, a naturally occurring alkaloid that acts like an amphetamine by triggering the release of dopamine to the brain.

*
Later that summer, on the advice of AMISOM’s public relations department, Rouget broke cover when he gave an interview to the
New York Times
in which he gave a good flavour of the sort of advice he dispensed. ‘Urban fighting is a war of attrition. You nibble, nibble, nibble,’ he said.
⁵

*
The CIA
World Factbook
puts the proportion at 12 per cent, but that figure relies on the census of 2002, since when Uganda’s overall population has grown from 24 million to 34 million.

*
The rules governing the use of the honorific ‘Sheikh’, a title used in many parts of the Muslim world, are particularly loosely applied in Somalia. Taken from the Arabic word for ‘elder’, the term denotes political authority and/or religious scholarship. Many al-Shabaab ‘Sheikhs’, however, are not recognized as anything of the sort by Somalis outside the movement.

*
Even Hanley, however, might have been surprised at the rate of the rise of Islam. According to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, the Muslim population in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow by nearly 60 per cent in the next twenty years, from 242.5 million in 2010 to 385.9 million in 2030, almost double the projected rate of increase for the Muslim world as a whole.

3

The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people

AMISOM HQ, March 2011

There was almost no need, in the end, to leave the base to discover what the war had done to ordinary Somalis. AMISOM’s field hospital, barely a quarter of a mile along the edge of the runway from the Bancroft Hotel, turned out to be packed with wounded civilians.

The hospital had opened in 2007 as a tented triage station for wounded AMISOM personnel; the decision to treat civilians alongside the soldiers had come later on. At first, senior UN officials in Nairobi noisily disapproved. Allowing civilians in for treatment, they argued, risked compromising the base’s security, and breached the terms of neutrality under which, as ‘peacekeepers’, AMISOM technically operated. But the commanders in the field had taken the view that since their mission was to help the people of Somalia, it would be absurd to deny them medical assistance on grounds
such as these. Enemy combatants were treated at the hospital too, after all. Winning over hearts and minds is a cornerstone of modern counter-insurgency theory – and what better way was there to achieve this when first-class trauma clinics were practically non-existent anywhere else?

Nairobi had grudgingly conceded this point, since when AMISOM had taken the principle further, and dug into their own budgets to open a civilians-only outpatients department near by. The OPD, as it was then known, was an instant success. On three mornings each week, about eight GPs treated as many as six hundred patients who came not just from Mogadishu but in some cases from as far away as the Ethiopian border, a dangerous 500-kilometre journey that could easily take several days to complete. This said much about the availability of medical treatment in this ruined country. The clinic was yet another bombed-out seaside villa. Although it did not open until nine, a long queue had always formed before dawn at the entrance in the camp perimeter, a narrow chicane of razor wire and Hesco barriers that AMISOM’s enthusiastic press officers had dubbed ‘the Gate of Hope’.

Medicine’s power to impress the locals was quickly demonstrated when al-Shabaab announced on the radio that anyone obtaining or even seeking treatment from the infidels would be considered ‘unclean’. When this admonition was ignored, an edict was passed warning that anyone found in possession of an AMISOM medical form risked having their tongue cut out. The militants also occasionally tried to mortar the OPD. And yet by ten o’clock on the morning I visited, the open-sided shed lined with crude wooden benches that served as a reception area was already full to bursting. Al-Shabaab’s threats, or the risk of a lucky mortar strike, were no deterrent at all.

The patients had segregated themselves, men to the right, women to the left where the shade was fullest. A hundred pairs of eyes swivelled in unison as this sweating
mzungu
advanced towards them, their teeth ethereally white against the darkened ovals of their shrouded faces. The atmosphere was very subdued, both here and in the clinic itself, where they queued for medicine with an almost bovine patience, dull-eyed and dazed. The patients exuded dejection, not hope, however the PR men tried to spin it.

At the head of the queue I found Sister Mary, a warm-hearted, big-bosomed Ugandan in combat fatigues, dispensing medicines from a table in the ruins of the villa’s kitchen. She offered me her wrist to shake – a frequent gesture in this infection-prone part of the world – and told me that the complaint she dealt with most often was diarrhoea; before adding that there was an even more common disorder, just as potentially serious, that the OPD was unable to treat.

‘The people here are very stressed,’ she explained. ‘They are traumatized. They do not know where to turn.’

This was literally true in the case of one elderly patient I watched being steered into the room by the shoulders, his eyes glazed and his jaw working from side to side: the effect, Sister Mary told me once he had stumbled out again, of too much qat.

‘You talk a lot in the West about PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘but for these people there is no “Post”. The trauma never ends. Psychologically, that is so much worse.’

Mogadishu was a city where violence was so endemic that it had become the norm. The sleep of its citizens was no longer disturbed by the sound of shooting at night; small boys thought nothing of playing football in their street while a firefight raged up and down
their neighbourhood. In 2011, according to the World Health Organization, nearly half of Somali victims of weapons-related injuries were children under the age of five. An entire generation of Somalis had grown up knowing that they could be violently killed, at random, at any time. Fatalism of the deepest, darkest kind was inevitable in such a place – and who knew what long-term effect that might have on a person’s mental well-being?

The suffering up at the hospital was at least easier to discern. Most of the patients there had been injured by bombs or bullets. The wards were no more than large canvas tents, arranged either side of a dust and gravel roadway wide enough for the lumbering armoured ambulances to turn. The whole place bore a striking resemblance to the set of
M*A*S*H
. A new casualty, a TFG soldier, was being stretchered down from the back of an ambulance as I arrived. The bandages around his stomach were soaked in blood and his face was twisted with pain. A white-coated reception committee clustered around him, conferring rapidly, before reaching a decision and bearing him away. Among them I recognized Ed Parsons, a bearlike Canadian medic whom I had befriended back at the Bancroft camp, who held aloft a saline drip with a rubber-gloved hand, comically taller than any of them.

Demonic laughter came from above as the wounded man passed. I looked up and saw a monkey – very obviously a male monkey – reclining deckchair-style in the concavity of the hospital tent roof. He suddenly jumped up and, still cackling, swarmed down a guy-rope to join the cavalcade of medics, strutting along behind them on his hind legs with his chest puffed out. The medics paid no attention to this freakish apparition. I later learned that the monkey was the hospital mascot, a clever animal that had learned to lick the sugar coating from painkiller pills. The risk that it might
bite and seriously injure someone had been removed by the surgeons, who had drawn its fangs under anaesthetic.

Ed came back a few minutes later, explaining that the soldier had been shot ‘through and through’, but that the wound had begun to bleed into his abdominal cavity, necessitating a rush into theatre. A veteran of military hospitals in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Ed knew a great deal about the lethality of gunshot wounds. A through-and-through wound, he said, was typical of a medium calibre round like an AK-47, and was the best kind to get. Smaller rounds such as a .22 could actually cause more damage because they tended to ‘tumble’ on impact, after which they could bounce around the body like a pinball, tearing through delicate organs and ending up almost anywhere.

‘Finding a tumbled bullet can be guesswork. A small one can even travel in the veins. People don’t fall dramatically backwards when they’re shot. That’s a Hollywood thing left over from the days of silent movies, when directors were always looking for drama. Getting shot for real is more like “bang – crump – down”. In fact, gunshot victims quite often just slump forwards. The real drama is all internal, invisible to the camera.’

The smell of stale sweat inside the ward tents was nostril-flaringly strong, as was the occasional cheesy whiff of suppurating wounds. The men in the TFG soldiers’ ward were thin and tough, and not all of them were welcoming. They were mostly locals from the same Hawiye Abgaal clan, one of the big players during the civil war and traditionally the major power in the Mogadishu region. I suspected it might not go well in here for a patient from a different clan. The new Somali national army that AMISOM were busily training up was supposed to be ethnically balanced, because favouring one clan over another during the recruitment process
risked creating one more clan-based militia. But if this hospital ward was in any way representative of the new army’s make-up, AMISOM’s training programme risked ending up doing more harm than good.

I spoke to Mohammed, a 28-year-old shot laterally through the hips, a complicated wound that had also destroyed his bladder. He had been in various hospitals for over a year, but was now two days away from being discharged back to his family.