City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  At about the time those black steel birds crashed out of the sky, the wife of a former military officer of the collapsed Somali government of the dictator Siad Barre gave birth. Guled was born in a modest house near the stadium, just a few blocks away from the crash site, and he grew up in the shattered city playing among the shells of those two ruined helicopters. During his childhood, Mogadishu’s beautiful boulevards, its grand mosques and cathedrals, its ancient Omani, Portuguese and Italian waterfront and sparkling white villas had been reduced to rubble thrice over. Growing up in a country without a government, in a permanent state of civil war, Guled learned to go with the grain.

  He was a slight boy with a narrow head that tapered to a pointed chin. His eyes were black and quick; they missed nothing and betrayed nothing. By adolescence, both his parents had died, the city had changed hands more times than he could count and he had perfected the art of looking nondescript. He still lived in the house by the stadium with his sister and a collection of other children whom, one by one, the war had methodically orphaned. They survived on the little money his elder sister made from selling biscuits, cakes and sweets and, when she could get it, petrol.

  While over a million Somalis fled to the vast refugee camps in Kenya, across the sea to Yemen or on foot through the Sahara to Libya and then Italy, he and his sister stayed. The main effect was to inoculate Guled against ambition. ‘I don’t have dreams,’ he would say, conscious that his life choices up until that point resembled more a series of lucky each-way bets. Guled’s priorities were playing football and staying alive.

  Unfortunately for a boy addicted to soccer, Guled’s coming of age coincided with the rise of the Islamic Courts Union and its most powerful faction, al-Shabaab, who placed a ban on what they saw as the decadent hobbies of soccer, smoking and watching movies. At the outset, in 2006, the ICU had been a hopeful thing. After fifteen years of conflict, the warlords seemed to have fought themselves to a standstill and, for a brief moment, it looked as though a harsh peace might break out in Somalia beneath the common flag of sharia law. But Ethiopia and America were nervous of an Islamic government and the US and other nations sponsored Ethiopia to invade Somalia and dispatch the ICU. This they did in 2006 with astonishing speed, force and cruelty, pounding Mogadishu to rubble and blazing a trail of looted homes, massacred civilians and raped women across the country, while those who had paid for the invasion looked away.

  With UN backing, the Ethiopians reinforced the puppet administration called the Transitional Federal Government and made a base at the stadium near Guled’s house. When things were quiet, Guled played football after school nearby but games were often cut short by explosions. The ICU had been defeated but its radical rump, al-Shabaab, had been energized and now it sought revenge. Western governments, unwilling to risk their own forces again, paid for an African Union peacekeeping force called AMISOM to guard the TFG. But the Ugandan and Burundian soldiers charged with the difficult mission could not distinguish al-Shabaab among the ruins and they simply kept up a desperate, random stream of mortars. In turn, al-Shabaab would fire rockets at their bases with little regard for accuracy. During Guled’s early teenage years, heavy bombardment was routine as the al-Shabaab counter-attack pushed AMISOM towards the sea and sent the Ethiopians home.

  Guled experienced the Ethiopians’ surrender on the soccer pitch: one day a militia arrived on the playing field and the game came to a halt. In their black uniforms and headscarves, the austere believers admonished the boys for wearing shorts and for playing football during prayer time. As al-Shabaab reclaimed the stadium it became the place where the militants paraded traitors, spies, unbelievers and others who had made mistakes. They cut off hands, stoned and beheaded people according to their interpretation of Islamic law. You could be punished for listening to music, for shaving your beard or for not wearing a dress of sufficient thickness and length. Sometimes they filmed the punishments and put them on the internet to burnish their image among the jihadist community abroad.

  Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahidin – ‘The Movement of Striving Youth’, or ‘the Youth’ for short – were a shadowy presence; they ruled through a mixture of iconoclasm, charisma and fear. Militants would enter schools, take pupils hostage then try to convince them of their cause with ideological lectures. Some of the propaganda could seem quite persuasive. ‘Jihad’ was needed, they said, to cleanse Somalia of foreigners: Ethiopians, Americans, Christians. Their Swahili-language newsletter was called Gaidi Mtaani – Terrorist in the street. ‘All over the world,’ it proclaimed, ‘people have heard about Somalia and they think that life is impossible here.’ But we are here, the dispossessed youth would answer. And for a moment a different life might be glimpsed.

  Al-Shabaab seemed right about many things. The newsletter said that international aid was brought to ruin Somali agriculture and to make people dependent on foreign food; both had indeed been side effects of the relief effort. They said that the West wanted Somalis to be held in ‘camps, like animals’, which could be an accurate description of Dadaab. Most of all though, it was the rhetorical question posed in the newsletter that had the biggest impact among Guled’s traumatized generation: ‘Why invade a country that has been fighting a civil war for a decade and a half the moment they have decided to live in peace?’ The Islamic Courts Union had brought peace. It had been wildly popular and Somalis resented the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion. ‘The United States cannot abide a situation in which Islam is the solution,’ the newsletter argued. And to many that seemed like the truth.

  The message was preached by recruiters in playing fields and playgrounds by teachers who had been imposed on schools by al-Shabaab. But it wasn’t only a question of ideology. ‘A whole generation,’ a teacher lamented, ‘join the armed groups because of hunger.’ He took to paying his students to come to school instead of joining the fight. But in a lawless city where money had little value and could be taken from you by any number of armed crooks, the boys even had a chant that summed up their stark choice: ‘no gun, no life’. The recruiters’ work was terrifyingly easy.

  Guled was a normal kid with a strong sister and an affection for music and Manchester United football club: he wanted nothing to do with al-Shabaab. But it wasn’t always a choice. Some children who refused to join had their hands cut off. One boy who lived nearby had said no when the recruiters came knocking. They took him anyway. The next day his thirteen-year-old sister opened the front door of their house to find his head on the step: a warning.

  Al-Shabaab had even come to Guled’s school, Shabelle primary, a modern concrete building near the old spaghetti factory in Yaqshid district. The previous year, the school had closed briefly after al-Shabaab held a parent-teacher meeting and forced parents to sign an agreement permitting their children to join the group. The bodies of two fathers who refused were later found in the central Bakaara market with notes pinned to their clothes explaining the consequences of refusing to allow children to join al-Shabaab. They had been shot.

  When the fighting got too hot or came too close, when they ran from a mortar behind them only to meet another one in front, Guled and his sister and friends would go to Warshadeh, the former industrial area on the edge of town. When it went quiet, they would creep back to see if their house was still standing. Sometimes they could predict when the storm of ammunition would hit. At night, they watched the sky to see which way the fire was moving. The ‘Katyusha’ rockets people called foriya (the whistlers) made a signature sound so you had time to take cover. With the mortars – hobiya – death came silently. The flames burned so fierce they could melt a metal bed. The children ran and returned countless times. Once, people fled across the street using mattresses as shields. Then one day at the end of 2009, about the time al-Shabaab had come to Guled’s school, a silent hobiya hit their block, littering the street with injured people and filling their home with shrapnel. In the neighbouring house, a mother and all her children were dead.

  Guled and his sister
weighed their chances and fled further, across the industrial road, out into the bush beyond to a place called Debideh, near the ruined hospital of Arafat. They found a tree, stretched a piece of fabric over the thorns to protect them from the harsh sunlight and slept on the sand along with a thousand others. No one looked at the situation of the war and considered their options rationally: you took decisions like a rock climber on a treacherous face making one move at a time to stay alive. The children had finally become part of the 870,000 who had been displaced from their homes in the capital since the Ethiopian invasion in 2006.

  The year before the invasion, Mogadishu had had a bustling population of 1.2 million. But now the city was an advertisement for what Ethiopian Mi-24 helicopter gunships, T-55 tanks and AMISOM mortars could do. It was a ghost town. Many of those who remained, flitting among the ruins, roaming the eerie streets, fighting with the crows for scraps of food, were children: Mogadishu’s orphans, abandoned by parents or separated from them in the chaos. Child-headed households ballooned, surviving however they could. This created certain opportunities for a sharp boy who knew how to drive.

  Guled was lucky. Grown men were in short supply and he landed a job driving a minibus. In the morning he went to school from his perch beneath the tree, and in the evening he drove the route along the edge of the city through the zone controlled by al-Shabaab: Arafat–Warshadeh–Towfiq–Afgoye–El-Shabiye. Sometimes he went down into the city to Hodan and Tarbuunka and he saw the slums made of sticks, cloth and plastic of the people huddled among the ruins. He saw them camped in the stadium, in the roofless ruined nave of the cathedral, on waste ground near the parliament and the harbour and in the countless little campsites in between advertised on hand-painted tin signs. They had nice names like ‘Saviour Camp’ or ‘Charity Camp’, but everyone knew the words were a lie. The gatekeepers who controlled the camps used the presence of ‘Internally Displaced Persons’ as bait and then stole the aid that came.

  Sometimes, when Guled drove his minibus across the front line into the coastal strip where the TFG was still clinging on with its fingernails, the Ugandan troops manning the checkpoints, sweating in their heavy flak jackets, demanded money, and, one time, his phone. They viewed all those crossing from al-Shabaab areas as terrorists and treated them as such. Everything here was sandbagged with bomb-proof walls encased in green mesh and the streets were filled with men in dark glasses and an array of uniforms: light blue, khaki, green. There were peacekeepers, military, police and even special traffic police who controlled the vehicles at the central K4 roundabout with gunshots. For barely a square mile of territory, there was a surfeit of internationally remunerated armed men.

  On the way back into al-Shabaab territory, Guled would stop the bus some way from the checkpoint and ask all the female passengers to move to the rear; al-Shabaab doesn’t permit men and women to sit together. But sometimes frail old women could not be safely squeezed into the back and Guled didn’t like to force them. For such acts of kindness he would be told to park the bus and dismount to receive twenty strokes with a cane. He learned to take his punishment without argument or emotion. The same thing happened when he tried to overtake. There was no overtaking on al-Shabaab roads; God wanted you to wait in line.

  After a while, in early 2010, Guled and his makeshift family moved to a larger settlement of displaced people on the outskirts of the city where agencies were operating with the consent of al-Shabaab, giving out food and tents. It was called El-Shabiye – the boreholes. Life acquired a pattern, which, in the war, was as much as one could hope for; Guled remembers those days almost fondly. There was enough food, he had money. He went to school in the morning, drove in the afternoon, and at night he watched the battle for the city light up the sky.

  As the rains failed, in July 2010 al-Shabaab launched its ‘massive war’ called the ‘Ramadan Offensive’, a final push against AMISOM. And, for a while, it seemed as though Mogadishu might be the first capital to fall into the hands of extremists since the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. But the US sent in private contractors to train AMISOM snipers, as well as weapons in violation of the UN arms embargo, and by October al-Shabaab was in a bad way, trucking in ever more reluctant and inexperienced conscripts from the drought-stricken countryside. In three months it had lost an estimated 1,300 fighters, and a further 2,300 civilians were dead. Despite all of this, Guled and his sister didn’t think of leaving: they had food and an income; neither of which they could be sure of elsewhere.

  ‘It’s only the poor left in Mogadishu now,’ said a man who had fled the fighting to the Dadaab camps in Kenya, but that wasn’t the whole story. To flee one needed three things: money, courage and imagination. Money, because nothing in Somalia was free and transport was especially expensive when in demand. Courage, because the route south was booby-trapped with checkpoints, lawless militias and bandits that attacked one in three vehicles heading for the border. And imagination because, for a mind shaped by the confusion of war, the ability to imagine that life might be different or better elsewhere is an uncommon leap. It helped if you knew someone who lived there. Guled knew one boy, Noor, who had run away to Kenya, but Guled’s sister, his only family, was in Mogadishu and solidarity was in many ways as important as survival.

  That was why, despite the risks, he was still here. And why he went to school as normal that October morning in 2010. At seven o’clock, having swept his classroom, Guled lined up in the courtyard along with the other remaining pupils for the assembly they called ‘energizing’. As usual that day, one boy read out the results of the sports competitions between the classes and another recited verses from the Koran. Two girls read poems, one in English and one in Somali. Another did a comedy sketch. Afterwards, Guled’s class teacher, Abdirashid, made an announcement. In recent weeks al-Shabaab had started kidnapping children from some other schools in the city, so, he said, ‘Go straight home after school and if you see al-Shabaab, avoid them.’

  That there were still children in school at all seemed remarkable. That year, only a quarter of those left in the country were enrolled in primary schools. And in Mogadishu even half of those had dropped out. Still, some students carried on. Sweeping the classrooms. Ringing the bell. Running the gauntlet and showing up for class. Like al-Shabaab, the teachers were committed to an idea, desperately tugging the soul of a generation from the clutches of cynicism and despair.

  At break time, Guled bought samosas. In the school uniform of yellow shirt and blue trousers he and the other children stood out as one of the few slabs of colour amid the white rubble and jagged grey ruins of the city; the Indian Ocean shimmered blue on the horizon. The students threaded in and out of the school gates and bunched around the snack stall, habituated to the sound of gunfire in the distance.

  After break, Guled returned to his classroom and rearranged the desks while another boy cleaned the blackboard. Discipline was rarely necessary in Shabelle primary. What happened next, he remembers precisely.

  The teacher Abdirashid wrote the date in the top left-hand corner of the blackboard, and the subject: ‘Geography’. As he faced the class, his face appeared taut, stretched in alarm. Turning, Guled saw five men at the back of the classroom, swathed in black with only their eyes showing. They shouldered machine guns, and calmly surveyed the room. Two of them moved towards the teacher and, silently, took him by the arms and marched him outside. Three other fighters strode among the desks and began pointing at the bigger boys as the class watched, rigid. The pointing was accompanied by a voice, commanding in Somali, ‘Stand up … Stand up … Stand up.’ A finger halted on Guled. His lips trembled. His stomach loosened. The room was silent, brittle as glass.

  ‘Stand up!’ said the man. Guled’s immediate thought was that he was going to die. Either in battle, or for a crime he could not yet comprehend: for playing football, for wearing shorts, for listening to music, for going to a secular school; his offences were several. His second thought was that he would never see home again.


  Six boys were on their feet now. The class held their breath. No one moved. One of the fighters announced with foreboding: ‘You are going to fight the Christians and the infidel government. This will be your last day at school.’

  With that, the armed men hustled the chosen ones down the corridor and out into a pick-up truck with canvas sides that was waiting on the street outside. Two other trucks crammed with gunmen were behind. Guled saw that the teacher Abdirashid was already in the truck before he felt hands over his face and a blindfold cover his eyes. He could hear the other classes still blithely chanting their lessons. It had taken less than a minute for Guled to become one of the two thousand children kidnapped that year in Somalia. His heart was hammering out of control. He was puzzled that his hands were free, not tied, and he gripped the bench beneath him as the truck zig-zagged at speed through Mogadishu’s gridded streets.

  3

  Maryam

  When the blindfold was removed Guled found himself standing under a tree. Now they were only five. The teacher Abdirashid and one of the boys were gone. But there were others he didn’t recognize, sitting on the ground. A light-skinned man dressed in black with a large beard and his face uncovered addressed them mechanically in Somali: ‘You must work and you must die for Islam,’ he said, and then left them, under the tree, to wait.

  The tree was in a wide open space. Off to the side, armed men walked in and out of low buildings. The camp was surrounded with a fence made of feeble sticks, easily scaled, but it was fear, not the sticks, that made it a prison. The new conscripts chattered anxiously about being asked to put on suicide vests, about being sent to carry food to the front line or to retrieve the bodies of fallen mujahedin. They all knew what could happen to boys who refused to fight, and, worse still, what could happen to their families if they escaped. Guled had someone else to think of now too. Beneath the tree, he agitated a ring with a coloured stone on his middle finger. It was a wedding ring. Of all the fears racing through his mind, he was surprised at himself that the most pressing need was to tell his new wife that he was alive.