The World's Most Dangerous Place (27 page)

A captured communications trench, one of a vast network dug through the city centre. AMISOM and al-Shabaab front lines were just 50 metres apart in some places.

Soldiers used ‘mouseholes’ such as this to pass between abandoned homes: often safer than the front door.

Somalis refer to the years of civil war simply as
Burburki
, ‘the Destruction’.

AMISOM troops quickly settled into life on the front line.

Somalia has been afflicted by wild street fighting for twenty years.

Al-Shabaab took power with a promise to restore discipline; footage of well-drilled militiamen in uniform became an important propaganda tool.

Newly captured al-Shabaab fighters, all schoolboys. They said they volunteered in exchange for a daily piece of fruit.

Al-Shabaab’s recruitment process often begins even earlier, in a nation said to contain 14 million guns in a population of 8 million. Boys as young as seven have been put to work on the front line.

A food queue at Mogadishu’s Badbaado refugee camp where some 35,000 famine victims arrived in the space of three months

The 2011 drought was the worst for sixty years, affecting over 12 million people. The international aid community were initially slow to respond – unlike the ex-health minister, Osman Ibrahim, here seen dousing a camp latrine with Dettol retrieved from the boot of his car.