SOMETIMES IT IS hard not to picture terrorists holed up in caves, with ak-47s resting against the muddy walls and generators powering broadcasts of Fox News, around which they all huddle. Giggling. Rubbing their hands. “This is making our job too easy,” one would exclaim. Gifts for al Qaeda recruiters: the Iraq war, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the burning of Qur’ans, the tortured death of an Afghan taxi driver in Bagram, waterboarding, misguided predator drones, faulty intelligence. In this theme of disastrous reactions to disastrous events comes the next chapter in Somalia’s history.
U.K.-born, Canadian-raised analyst Matt Bryden, who has lived much of his adult life in Somalia and neighbouring countries and speaks Somali fluently without a trace of an English accent, was among those who tried to warn what would happen if fears about the ICU led to their removal by force. “After more than a decade of political disengagement from Somalia, the United States has plunged back in with an approach that threatens to produce precisely the scenario it seeks to avoid: a militant Islamist movement that serves as a magnet for foreign jihadists and provides a platform for terrorist groups,” Bryden wrote in an essay for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in December 2006.
Arguing that since 9/11 Washington has viewed Somalia through a narrow counterterrorism lens, with almost no political engagement and little humanitarian aid, Bryden stated that Washington’s new policy of pledging its unconditional support for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government and for longtime rival Ethiopia is “not just self-defeating: it is inflammatory.” He wrote: “Washington appears to have designated the Courts as a strategic adversary, elevating Somalia from a simmering regional problem to a global issue. The Courts are now likely to attract support from a far broader range of anti-American and anti-Western interests than they have so far, and the flow of foreign funds and fighters to the [icu] seems bound to increase dramatically.”
Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s transitional government had lost credibility among Somalis partly due to the corruption among the government’s ranks. But as so often is the case with dizzyingly complicated Somalia, the struggle for power between the Transitional Federal Government and the ICU was oversimplified in the West. The ICU and all its members: terrorists. The TFG: good guys.
Behind the scenes, the Bush administration was focused on three men hiding in Somalia who were wanted in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. According to New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson, Michael Ranneberger, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, had attempted to negotiate with ICU leader Sharif, telling him that if he would eschew terrorism and take action against the three high-value targets, they could work together. “He listened and nodded and seemed to understand. But then he went back to Mogadishu and I never heard from him again. I guess he had no traction there,” Ranneberger told Anderson.
Further attempts for diplomatic solutions were abandoned. Ethiopia, Somalia’s neighbour, had long been wary of Islamic uprisings, fearing that any movement in Somalia would radicalize Ethiopia’s sizable Muslim population. Ethiopian tanks rolled across the border into Somalia on Christmas Eve 2006, with Washington’s blessing. No one believed the ICU could withstand Ethiopia’s army, but the speed and ease with which it captured Mogadishu was surprising. Within two days, the capital of Somalia belonged once again to the TFG. Back in Toronto, I watched these events unfold and knew that it would be a long time before there would be a peaceful scene at the Peace Hotel again.
THE TAXI DRIVER couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Stop the car? Now?
It was a few months after Ethiopia’s invasion, in March 2007, and the fighting in Mogadishu was at its worst in years. Ethiopian troops were battling a fractured Islamic insurgency, clans warred with clans, and criminals and warlords were fighting everyone. As always, thousands of impoverished civilians with nowhere to go were caught in between. The taxi was speeding away from the chaotic Bakara Market, until the passenger, a bespectacled, gentle forty-seven-year-old Somali-born Canadian named Sahal Abdulle, insisted that they stop. Actually, he was yelling, and Sahal almost never yelled.
Ambling across the street, unaware of the war raging around him, was a massive, crusty tortoise. He was going as fast as he probably could, which wasn’t very fast at all.
Sahal had thought he had seen everything in Mogadishu, but spotting a tortoise near the concrete jungle of the market and this far from the city’s rocky coastline was like finding a moose striding across Toronto’s Bay Street, or a bear ambling across Park Avenue in Manhattan. Sahal knew it was crazy to stop. He also knew he had to. “I just need to protect something,” he thought.
Minutes earlier, Sahal had been near the Damey Hotel, reporting on what the mortars and AK-47s and RPGS and bombs had left behind. In military terms, it was called “collateral damage,” civilians caught in the fighting. In real terms, it was dead children, women and civilian men, and severed limbs. Sahal was passionate about his duty as a journalist, but sometimes his work just seemed futile. Especially when no one seemed to care. And it often seemed that no one cared about Somalia.
Sahal yelled to the driver, his friend Hussein, “Give me a hand and open the trunk.”
“No. We’re not doing this,” Hussein replied, but he was already out of the car, bobbing and weaving, flinching with every crackle of gunshots.
Together they lifted the tortoise, struggling with its weight despite their adrenalin-fuelled strength. The mighty beast retracted his head and limbs and defecated on them.
The second-oldest of ten children, Sahal was born Abdullahi Abdulle in the Somali town of Galkayo on a Friday in 1962. His mother was in labour for four days giving birth to his older brother, but Sahal was delivered in less than two hours and that’s why everyone called him Sahal—Somali for easy. Sahal’s early childhood, however, was anything but. As a toddler, he developed a condition that doctors could not diagnose but which had similar symptoms to hemophilia, and his nose bled profusely if he was too active. Most of his childhood and teenage years were spent indoors with the elders, drinking tea. His pillow was covered in plastic so his blood wouldn’t ruin the fabric.
His only relief was a concoction made by his grandmother, a traditional medicine woman. Every morning, Suban Isman Elmi would rise before dawn and brew a soup made of roots, filling the house with the smells of her magic. Sahal loved his grandmother and admired her grit and otherworldly wisdom. “Whatever I had, I would eat that soup and I would be okay,” Sahal said. “I don’t know if it was psychological or physiological but that taste, even forty years later, is kindness.” When he was seventeen, he went to Nairobi, and the cooler climate cleared up his problem. Two years later, a Somali doctor gave him an injection and miraculously, mysteriously, he was cured.
But those early years shaped Sahal. He was different from other kids his age; perceived as weak, he never learned to ride a bike or play soccer. Other children called him “Sahal Oday,” Sahal the Old. He never forgot that feeling of others looking down on him, or worse, not noticing him at all. It was the main reason he became a journalist. He wanted to empower the weak. As he often told others, “I want to speak for the voiceless.”
In the late 1980s, with his life’s savings—a Nikkormat EL2 camera—hanging around his neck, and his passport stamped with a U.S. visa, Sahal left Africa for the first time, in the hopes of becoming a photographer in San Francisco. He had always expected to return to Somalia, but in 1990, when the fighting that would eventually topple the dictatorship of General Mohamed Siad Barre started, Sahal decided instead to travel north. In November 1990, he drove to Buffalo, crossed the border and asked Canada to accept him as a refugee.
He would not visit his homeland until three years later, with a better camera, a new perspective, and a desire to tell Somalia’s story. Sahal lived the life of many Somali-born Canadians, with one foot in each world, their hearts aching for their homelands, their fingers freezing in Canadian winters. His children were born in Toronto and he loved his adopted home. But as a journalist, he struggled with a need to “fix” Somalia, and after 9/11 he feared his homeland would only be considered as an incubator of terrorism; the underlying basic problems such as poverty, education and government