The World's Most Dangerous Place Read Online Free Page B

ago, journalists visiting Mogadishu tended to stay at the Hotel Sahafi, a pensione near a major street junction prosaically known as Kilometre 4, or K4 for short. In February 2005, however, the BBC producer Kate Peyton, 39, was shot dead outside the Sahafi by gunmen loyal to Aden Hashi ‘Eyrow’, an al-Shabaab hardliner linked to al-Qaida. The Sahafi, and indeed every other city-centre hotel, has been shunned by sensible foreign visitors ever since.
    During 2011, my home in Mogadishu was an air-conditioned Portakabin on the military base by the airport, which was protected by sandbags, barbed wire and several battalions of combat-ready African Union troops. Security had been tightened greatly since a spate of devastatingly successful suicide bomb attacks. In September 2008, the militants tricked their way past thecheckpoints in a stolen UN truck which blew up at the convoy point, a large open square where AMISOM’s armoured vehicles and their crews formed up before going out on patrol in the city. Around fifty Ugandan soldiers were killed. I passed through K4 many times in the spring and summer of 2011, but only because it lies on the road to the airport; and I only ever did so in the back of a Casspir, an 11-ton, South African-built armoured vehicle with a V-shaped hull designed to deflect mine blast. As a guest of AMISOM, there was no other means of reaching town.
    The narrow rectangular windows in the sides of the Casspirs were cracked and dirty and didn’t afford much of a view of Mogadishu’s street life. My first and many subsequent impressions of the city were gained in jolting cinemascope, as the vehicles lurched and bumped along the disastrously pot-holed roads. What I did see, however, was that something approaching normal civilian life had returned to the TFG-controlled areas. Spectacular ruination was everywhere, but shops had reopened between the ruins, and hawkers sold fruit, sweets or plastic kitchenware from rickety barrows. K4 had turned into a bustling street market, a sure sign of security and progress, as the AMISOM press officers were quick to point out. In places there were quite surprising numbers of private vans and cars moving about – enough, even, to form the occasional traffic jam, which had the security-conscious drivers revving their engines with nervous impatience.
    Here and there one spotted an ancient Vespa, with spinning flywheels where the engine casing should have been, still splendidly serviceable after half a century of independence from the Italians. These rickety machines are not the only legacy of Somalia’s colonial past. Older Mogadishans still routinely greet foreigners with a cheery Buongiorno . The taps in the city’s bathrooms, wherethey have not been ripped out and looted, are still marked C and F for Caldo and Freddo . A strong flavour of Italy also remains in the city’s white-painted buildings, even in their super-dilapidated state. The public buildings and shops along the city’s main artery, the Makka al-Mukkarama, are still organized into shady colonnades, with balconies and decorative crenellations along their tops. The café culture thriving along the shattered pavements also retains a distinctly Italian feel, even if habits have evolved somewhat since colonial times. For instance, it was evident even from the back of a bouncing Casspir that many of the customers were animated by the chewing of qat * rather than the drinking of espresso; while the shirts and suits that Somalis working in the colonial administration had once been obliged to wear had been replaced for the most part by the macawiis , a colourful, sarong-like wrap much better suited to Mogadishu’s equatorial heat. The cafés looked especially inviting from the back of a sweltering Casspir, and I longed to jump out and go into one. To report properly on the war against al-Shabaab required an understanding of the society and culture from which the insurgents sprang – and that meant talking to