The World's Most Dangerous Place Read Online Free

faeces there are tragic glimpses of family lives hastily abandoned: a child’s rusting tricycle, a kitchen cupboard with an old kettle still in it, a pair of curtains in a glassless window frame, flapping in the salty breeze. El Hindi feels haunted by anguished, accusing ghosts.
    In an essay written in 2008, Nuruddin Farah, Somalia’s most famous novelist, described returning to his family home in El Hindi in 2002, eleven years after locking the front door for the last time. 1 He remembered a six-room home with a spacious courtyard and ‘a kitchen where my mother and her friends used to sit talking as they sifted rice and cooked . . . The city put on a sunny smile soon after siesta; the evenings were starry fun, and the city came alive. In those days, the city was innocent of the meanness of crime.’
    In 2002, however, Farah struggled to find his home of many years. The civil war, an era sometimes known to Somalis simply as Burburki , ‘the Destruction’, had turned his old neighbourhood into ‘a zone of total grief’, where the roofless, windowless and doorless houses ‘look like no houses at all’. The devastation called to mind ‘wartime images of humans with their eye sockets emptied, their noses removed, heads bashed in until they were featureless and couldn’t be recognized as humans anymore’. When at last he found his old home, he couldn’t bear to go inside, ‘fearful that I might door say something stupid, or perhaps even faint from the shock of the destruction before my eyes . . . This was judgement day, and I didn’t like the thoughts that were crossing my mind.’
    Out in the derelict gardens of El Hindi today, only thorn scrub thrives, sprouting rich crops of snagged plastic rubbish. The neighbourhood was once dotted with old neem trees, thick-leaved Indian lilacs, whose carpets of shade formed a natural place for locals to meet and sit and chat. But the neems are mostly gone now, reduced to angry jagged stumps by soldiers foraging for firewood on which to cook.
    In a small clearing on the far side of the first block we traverse, Mugarura stops and indicates a long thin pit full of ashes. The lingering smell, and unburned coils of steel mesh, show that a heap of tyres have been burned here. Richard tells Ngethe to be sure to film everything. He says the fire pit is rare evidence of a crude but effective enemy propaganda trick. AMISOM’s reputation has been damaged of late by allegations that they have accidentally killed civilians with their artillery barrages in and around the Bakara Market. Grainy mobile-phone footage of the aftermath of these attacks – a raging fire, choking black smoke, dead bodies lying about – has even appeared on al-Shabaab-controlled websites. AMISOM, while acknowledging that such ‘mistakes’ were sometimes made early on in the campaign, insist that they now never shell residential areas, and accuse al-Shabaab of faking the images, by setting fires such as this one, and dragging the bodies of people killed elsewhere into camera shot. It is a reminder that in this war, the virtual battlefield is as important as the physical one.
    We emerge on to a wider patch of open ground which we are ordered to dash across to foil snipers, and then at last we arrive at the line of control. In two weeks, Mugarura’s men have constructeda parapet with sandbags and Hesco containers that looks as though it has been here for months: nine feet high in places, complete with fire steps and built-in sniper points. We make our way along the line behind their colonel, who is clearly a regular and popular visitor. The soldiers are happy to be photographed. Several of them have slung belts of machinegun bullets across their chests, and strike moody martial poses with their weapons. One soldier mans a heavy machinegun from the comfort of a requisitioned armchair, the upholstery of which is incongruously covered in bright orange flowers. He studiedly ignores his mates laughing at him as I