The World's Most Dangerous Place (43 page)

‘By 1997 I was one of their gunmen,’ he said, miming a pistol with his hands. ‘I went to war for them in Chicago: bam! Bam!’

What I had at first taken as a blemish on Chino’s cheek was, I now saw, a teardrop tattoo: an indication, in America, that the wearer has killed someone, although it can also be a sign of mourning for a slain gang comrade. I doubted whether one teardrop was enough in Chino’s case. He was quite open about killing people, something he claimed to have first done not for Mr Rico, but back in Beledweyne when he was just fourteen. He told his story with startling brevity.

‘This clan militia broke into our house and raped my two sisters, right in front of me. I knew who they were. So I borrowed a gun from a soldier in the market and killed all five of them. I killed one a day for, like, a week.’

By 1998 in Minneapolis, this boy killer had set up his own Somali-dominated faction known as the Conservative Vice Lords. He rolled up a sleeve to prove it: ‘CVL’, in large medieval script, was tattooed all down the length of one arm. What began as a neighbourhood cocaine- and heroin-dealing operation quickly grew into a business with Colombian and Mexican connections in New York. As it expanded, it split into half a dozen sub-gangs with names like the Riverside Rs and Murda Squad. But Chino remained the boss of all of them, feared by everyone and known as Lord Chino.

‘I’m not a god. God’s above me,’ he explained, his face hard and serious again, ‘but I am a leader of people.’

The gangs were organized like an army: every member was given a rank. He had private doctors and nurses on his books – ‘I ain’t never been to hospital in my life,’ he said – and even, he claimed, three policemen, to whom he slipped $10,000 a month.

‘I was rich, man. I had a Mercedes, a BMW. I made $200,000 a month, easy. I once made $50,000 in one day.’

He said he didn’t miss the money because he served God these days, not Mammon; although not, apparently, to the point where he wished to be martyred for his faith. He said he had no wish ever to go back to Somalia. If he did, he thought, he would certainly be hunted down by the vengeful relatives of the Beledweyne rapists he had killed. The threat of this, he said, was one of the reasons he had to leave Somalia in the first place.

I wondered how much of Chino’s story was really true. What he said happened in Beledweyne seemed almost too vivid to be real, like the blood-thirstiest scenes from a Quentin Tarantino movie. A little later, in a small office off the Da’wah Center prayer hall, I repeated what Chino had told me to the man responsible for keeping him on the path of righteousness: the orange-bearded imam, Sheikh Hassan Mohamud.

‘Yes, well . . . A lot of bad things happened during the civil war,’ was all he would say about Chino’s childhood.

The Da’wah Center served both as a mosque for the general public and as a religious school for around 150 college and high school students, to whom he offered classes on how to be a good Muslim in America. From the way that members of his flock kept popping in to ask his advice or simply to kiss his hand hello, it was obvious that Sheikh Hassan was a dedicated and popular leader of his community. He was a trained lawyer who went by the nickname Jaamici (‘the Educated’): an articulate, cerebral conservative, and the kind of man who tended to speak his mind. In the past he had apparently argued that suicide bombing was justified (albeit only in Palestine). He had also spoken in a fundraising video of ‘the hell of living in America’, and had publicly defended the right of
Somali taxi-drivers to refuse to accept passengers carrying alcohol or dogs.
¹⁰
These views had made him something of a target for the right-wing media, where he had been identified by some as a potentially dangerous radicalizing influence, so he was wary of me to begin with, insisting that our interview be recorded. But he relaxed soon enough; and when he was called away to officiate at the Jumu’ah, he invited me to come back afterwards for a further chat. I found him clever, honest and thoughtful, and ended up spending much of the day there.

As an imam, he saw himself as a kind of social lightning conductor.

‘I absorb a lot of anger in the community, and try to neutralize it through engagement and debate,’ he said. ‘I sit on the police advisory board. I do whatever I can to reduce violence in the Twin Cities.’

But he was also a political operator, evidently still deeply involved in the affairs of his homeland. He blamed the social anger he had to deal with in Minneapolis squarely on US policy in Somalia, especially Washington’s decision to back the Ethiopian invasion of 2006.

‘Mogadishu has been destroyed as a result. Thousands have been killed, two million people displaced, yet no government has yet mentioned human rights violations . . . the young are angry at the silence of the world.’

He had little time for the ‘untrustworthy’ TFG, or for the African Union troops who supported them. The Ethiopians might have left physically, but their influence was still felt in Mogadishu: ‘No president or prime minister can be appointed without Ethiopian approval.’

The answer, he thought, was fresh elections. He described
himself as ‘democratic by nature’, and was convinced that genuinely ‘free and fair’ new elections would produce a moderate Islamic government with a constitution based on Sharia law. Such a regime, he insisted, would pose no security threat to the West.

‘Al-Shabaab would never be elected now. The vast majority of Somalis are moderate by nature,’ he said.

The problem, in his view, was America’s inability to see that a preference for Sharia and support for al-Shabaab were entirely different things. He cited a recent debate on Universal TV, which he said showed 95 per cent support among Somalis for a constitution based on Sharia.

‘The Constitution of Medina and the UN Charter are 80 per cent the same document. But how do I explain to the US that Sharia is workable? I want to form a bridge between the two worlds I live in, but I can’t!’
*

The news that morning had been dominated by a sensational development in Yemen: the killing, by an American drone-launched missile, of the famous al-Qaida ideologue (and US citizen), Anwar Al-Awlaki. Sheikh Jaamici, however, had been too busy that morning to listen to the news, and his eyes widened when I asked what he thought about it. He was genuinely shocked.

‘Well,’ he said eventually. ‘I think – and I don’t care if you
are
recording this – I think that is very sad. Many Muslims here love Awlaki. His scholarship was extraordinary. Ask anyone. Haqim, have you heard this news?’

His portly young assistant, who had appeared in the doorway, affirmed that he had. I had spoken to Haqim earlier and learned that he had been a student in Birmingham, that he still had a sister living in Chingford in east London, and that his favourite food in the world was fish and chips.

‘And what do you think of Awlaki?’ said Jaamici.

‘He recorded the
best
series of talks on the life of the Prophet,’ said Haqim.

‘You see?’ Jaamici said. ‘This is a big loss to America. Awlaki was misunderstood. He was never the problem: it is like shooting the messenger! And killing him will do no good. It will only create more anger and more radicalism. You will see.’

He had to break off then, to lead the Jumu’ah in the carpeted prayer hall across from his office. The shoe rack by the entrance was already overflowing. In the corridor I swam upstream against an incoming tide of worshippers, a couple of hundred of them at least, and went out to the parking lot to talk to Chino again. By the time Jaamici and I resumed our conversation, the corridor was empty once more apart from the warm smell of breath and old socks.

‘I had to say something about Awlaki,’ he confided as soon as we sat down. ‘Two people came up to me just now, and said: “We are so angry about this” . . . As their imam, I had to give a statement. I told them that his killing won’t help. You are not Fox News – but they would
turn
this!’

The gap between his world and Washington’s had just yawned wider. Obama had been on television all morning, explaining how Awlaki had taken the lead in ‘planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans’ and boasting that his death was ‘another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat
al-Qaida and its affiliates’. Sheikh Jaamici, by contrast, thought Awlaki ‘one of the most moderate imams in the world . . . Based on his teachings, I don’t think he’s even al-Qaida.’ Awlaki, he pointed out, had unequivocally condemned the attacks of 9/11 soon after they happened.
*
The Yemeni-American’s eloquence and ability to reach out to young Muslims via the internet, Jaamici implied, could and should have been Washington’s most powerful weapon against radicalism. It was tragic that instead, in the intervening decade, Alawki had turned into America’s
Public Enemy No. 1
.

Jaamici returned to his theme that American foreign policy was responsible.

‘The US targets those who are angry with them, but it never stops to try to find out
why
they are angry.’

What was desperately needed, he thought, was more civil and less military engagement, or as he put it, ‘more debate, fewer drones’. US strategy, disastrously, was under the control of military ‘extremists’ who were unwilling, or unable, to countenance an alternative approach.

‘Obama may be in office, but Bush is still in power. America is still cowboy country! But there
are
moderate imams in Somalia. There are even relative moderates within al-Shabaab.’

The US had failed to recognize that al-Shabaab’s decision to embrace al-Qaida and its goals had not been taken unanimously. Obama had instead lumped the moderates and hardliners together, the Robows with the Godanes, and seemed intent on
expanding his drone war rather than exploring paths towards reconciliation.
*
If Obama didn’t reverse that strategy, Jaamici added, then Somalia risked ‘turning into another Pakistan’.

He was unequivocal in his message that al-Shabaab’s interpretation of Sharia was wrong, and had even led a demonstration against the movement in Minneapolis in 2009, footage of which was still viewable on YouTube.

‘Al-Shabaab do not like me,’ he said.

And yet his condemnation of the movement was not total.

‘The fact is that al-Shabaab’s areas
are
more peaceful than the government areas. They are more organized, and corruption is never reported there. This must be put into the balance.’

His brother, he said, had chosen to return to live in al-Shabaab-controlled Elesha Biyaha, just west of Mogadishu, because he felt his family were safer there than in the capital. Jaamici compared the situation to Kabul in 1996 when the Taliban, despite the harsh social restrictions they imposed, were welcomed because of the security they brought to the streets. To a populace as tired of violence and lawlessness as the Afghans then were, security counted more than anything – and peace was just as much a priority now for Somalis.

Jaamici knew how ambivalent he sounded. His voice was lower, telling me things I was sure he would never say to Fox News.

‘I still send $50 each month to my brother in Elesha. I send it the same way everyone else does – by one of the hawala money transfer companies. But Amaana are taxed by al-Shabaab. Such taxes form a big part of their income. It means that, technically, the US
could accuse me of providing material support to a terrorist organization. But what am I to do? There is no other way to send money, and I cannot let my brother starve.’
*

It was, to say the least, not easy being a Somali in America, where the lead weight of suspicion had dropped over them all. Their case wasn’t helped by a national public awareness campaign launched in 2011 by the Department of Homeland Security called ‘If you see something, say something’. At Minneapolis’s privately owned Mall of America – the largest shopping mall in the US and, as the Twin Towers once were, a conspicuous symbol of the country’s economic might – security guards had responded to the DHS campaign with frightening zeal. According to the guards’ own ‘suspicious activity reports’, hundreds of customers had been confronted for the tiniest aberrations in what they considered ‘normal’ behaviour.

One man was stopped – and detained, and questioned in the basement for two hours – because he ‘wasn’t holding his video camera “like a typical tourist would do”’. Another customer was accosted by a guard who thought he was looking at him ‘oddly’ and walking ‘nervously’. He turned out to be an insurance company manager looking for a SpongeBob SquarePants watch for his son.

No Somali was immune from suspicion in so fevered an atmosphere, where racial profiling had become the norm. Minnesota Public Radio, who broke the Mall of America story,
found that nearly two-thirds of the shoppers stopped were ‘people of color’, in a state that was 85 per cent white. And yet the mall’s management felt little need to apologize.

‘Unfortunately the world has changed,’ said Maureen Bausch, the mall’s vice president. ‘We assume you’d want your family and friends to be safe if they are in the building. And we simply noticed something that we didn’t think was right.’
¹²

Every Somali I spoke to had their story. Sheikh Jaamici recalled how a group of imams had once been arrested at a gas station simply for praying; they had earlier been attending a counter-terrorism conference in Minneapolis dedicated to improving community relations. Laura Yuen, a Minnesota Public Radio reporter, told me how a Somali policeman, Mohamed Abdullahi – ‘one of only two Somali beat cops in the whole state’ – was once detained for two hours at the airport where he was repeatedly asked if he was a Muslim. Yuen added that the affront to his badge hurt him so much that he cried. Nimco Ahmed told me that she too had been detained recently as she returned through the airport from Nairobi. Not only was she well known locally: this was a woman who sat on the DHS advisory panel that actually initiated the ‘If you see something, say something’ campaign.