Decade of Fear. Michelle Shephard

Sharif the same man I had met three years earlier? Or had he adapted to the times? Some analysts believed he was a chameleon, a politician ready to say what both the United States and the hard-line Islamists wanted to hear. Others just thought he was well meaning, but weak. He laughed when I asked how he had changed, how Somalia was different today.

      “The challenges people were facing before were kidnappings, rape, violence, all kinds of problems. No one at the time believed change could come but I had a lot of hope,” he said of his 2006 tenure with the ICU. “I find myself in the same spot now where we have a lot of serious challenges and people saying this is not going to work. But I am full of hope.”

      Same man, different times?

      Sharif was among the ICU leadership that fled for safety during Ethiopia’s 2007 incursion. According to New Yorker