Call Me American

by Abdi Nor Iftin

  A man whose face was obscured under a thick beard, his forehead dark with dirt from constant prayer, came before me with a huge leather whip. He started flogging me as he counted down the lashes: “Twenty…nineteen…eighteen…” When the lash hit my skin, it was like a dozen needles stabbing me.

  After the whipping, my counseling began. Same guy, he just set down his whip and quizzed me on the Koran. “What are the names of the prophets? Recite the ninety-nine names of Allah!” On and on.

  I answered all his questions no problem. During this time people kept pouring into the building, all of them accused of crimes against Sharia law such as smoking cigarettes, not praying on time, stealing, or not wearing clothes of a certain length and thickness. Our counseling came to an end when the call for evening prayers rang from the nearby Marwaaz mosque. I was never so happy to hear the call to prayer.

  Of course I had to go to the mosque. I was sitting in the back, away from the scary face of the magistrate who had sentenced me. But when the prayer ended, the magistrate approached me, led me outside, and started asking me questions about my life.

  “Do you ever listen to music?”

  “No.”

  “Are you obedient to your parents?”

  “My dad is gone.”

  “Where is your dad?”

  “In Baidoa with his other wife.”

  He let me go home but told me to report in the morning for more counseling. I came the next day, other young men were there, and we all crammed into a minibus. They drove us to a soccer stadium they were using to perform Sharia punishments. There was a metal table in the center of the pitch. As we stood around nervously, four men appeared from the other end of the pitch, dragging a man who was blindfolded. The prisoner’s hand was placed on the metal table as two guys held him tight. Another pulled out a machete and swung it down hard on the man’s wrist; his machete must have been quite dull because it took four blows to remove the hand. As the prisoner screamed in agony, they dipped the stump of his wrist into water to wash off the blood, then wrapped it with a bandage. An emir stood in front of us. “See, everyone! Take this as an example!” Then they let us go, warning us we would receive more counseling later at the mosque.

  Faisa was lashed as well, then sent home with a warning that if they saw her going to the beach again, she would regret it for the rest of her life. I never showed up at the mosque. Friday prayers were a time of massive recruitment for the holy war, and I suspected my counseling would be a trap to enlist me. On that Friday alone they recruited over three hundred men.

  I knew that if I were to avoid the recruiters, I had to blend in. My jeans and cap had already been slashed by my old soccer pal Mukhtar. Now I stopped speaking English, dancing, and playing soccer. Falis’s video shack was gone; the movies were gone. Everything fun was done. Even my meager source of income was lost, because it was no longer safe to teach English. I canceled classes.

  * * *

  —

  Many young Somalis had been crossing the Gulf of Aden on rickety boats into Yemen, then registering as refugees. Hundreds of men, women, and whole families were doing this, and some were lucky to be resettled in Europe or America. Others crossed into Saudi Arabia and found jobs cleaning houses, working in day care, or herding goats. I decided to try. I knew I might die trying, but I would surely die staying.

  But leaving Somalia was not easy. First I needed money for ground transport to Bosaso, the northern Somali port on the Gulf of Aden, some nine hundred miles from Mogadishu. Once there I would need to pay the smugglers for the dangerous overnight passage to Yemen. Other people who left had been given money by family members abroad, but of course I had no one to help me overseas. Hassan could barely feed himself in Nairobi, much less give me money, because illegal refugees could not work.

  I went to see my mom in Bakara market. When I told her about my plan to leave, she scoffed. “Hassan is suffering in Kenya,” she said. “He can’t work, has nowhere to go, nothing to do.”

  “I have no work here.”

  “At least you could join the Islamists; you would get things for free. And maybe you will be able to find a good job in the Islamist government in the future.”

  It’s what she always said. I asked her if she could help me with some cash, at least to get to Bosaso town.

  “I pay zakkah,” she said, referring to the religious tax. “After that is only money for food.”

  Her zakkah was going to support the Islamist army, exactly what I was trying to escape. It all seemed so hopeless, rigged against me. In desperation I went to Bakara’s regional transport section and wandered over to the line of brightly decorated minibuses leaving for the north of Somalia. I had no money in my pockets, and no driver would take me. I saw other young men in the depot working as “conductors”—basically touts who round up passengers for the buses and try to collect tips from the drivers, as well as from passengers for carrying belongings. I started going to the depot every day, from early in the morning until sunset, working for tips. It was not an easy job, I had to run down the alleys grabbing people by the hand and leading them to the buses. At times people got angry and threw rocks at me. It was so noisy—loud calls, jostling around. Sometimes the drivers ignored me and never handed me cash, even when I helped fill their buses, but other times they gave me some money. I helped passengers carry heavy things like mattresses and furniture from the market to the bus depot, and sometimes they threw some cash at me. In this way I saved fifty dollars.

  On a July morning in 2006, I was off on the road to Bosaso. The bus was crowded with people, women in the back, men in the front. We would need to pass checkpoints manned by the Islamists, so it was important to maintain Sharia law. I sat in the middle seat, next to a bagful of carrots, onions, and potatoes. The bus smelled like a produce market, but at least I wasn’t riding with a goat like Hassan. A few hours out of Mogadishu we came to the first checkpoint. A boy jumped onto the bus, his angry eyes scanning the passengers. His head was wrapped in a scarf that said “There Is No God but Allah.” Luckily, he was only checking that women were seated separate from men, and he waved us to go. At the second checkpoint, armed enforcers removed four men from the bus whose hair was considered too long. I was one of them. A young man ordered us to our knees. One by one they cut our hair roughly with scissors. I got back on the bus with the worst haircut of my life—whole chunks of hair missing on top. It was embarrassing, but at least I still had my head.

  After five hundred miles, deep into central Somalia, we reached the junction town of Galkayo, a strategic place where many roads meet and the Islamic Courts were still battling with clan militias. We heard gunshots, rockets, and shells landing in the distance. I was not scared of the sound of battle; in fact it felt good to know we were entering an area that wasn’t totally controlled by the Islamists. Women and men on the bus started talking to each other, and soon everyone was moving around to sit together like normal adults. People started telling their stories of life under the Islamist rule. Everyone had a story. I shared mine about the terrible day on the beach with Faisa.

  Our bus was only going to a depot just north of Galkayo, where I found another bus on to Bosaso. On it I sat next to two men named Ahmed and Abaas, both from Mogadishu, who just like me were escaping the Islamist rule. The three of us became friends in a few minutes, laughing at stories we told about Mogadishu and our old neighborhoods.

  At four in the morning our bus pulled in to the desert seaport of Bosaso. We were eager to find the place where people catch the boats to Yemen, but it was still dark. We sat at the side of the street, waiting for the morning sun. After a while we walked around town for an hour. As dawn broke, we headed in the direction of the water, which we could smell. Along the way we came across militiamen who were preparing for a war with the Islamists, who they said were on their way to Bosaso. Probably they wanted to control the port, a source of money. Finall
y we saw the water. It looked just like the wide sea off Mogadishu, but this was the Gulf of Aden. Not far beyond that horizon were Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

  As we got closer to the harbor, we heard the commotion of men, women, and children. They were all leaving Somalia to be refugees in Yemen. The port was protected by a long jetty of concrete blocks and rubble; rows of wooden boats were tied up along the inside of the quay. Militiamen with guns were walking up and down the quay, and the smugglers were collecting boat fare. Then I heard how much it cost: eighty dollars.

  I had only forty dollars left after taking the bus. I had to figure out what to do. My new friends, Ahmed and Abaas, had the money; they paid eighty dollars each and got onto a boat. The smugglers filled this small boat, meant for maybe twenty-five people, with more than a hundred, pushing and cramming bodies into every space like a slave ship. Now I could see why so many of these boats capsized, though I’d heard many passengers also died from suffocation, dehydration, or beatings by the smugglers. The crew had to keep the people from moving or the boat could capsize, but passengers were so crammed in that they would be in agony without stretching an arm or a leg. As soon as they tried, they were whipped and beaten. Women were sometimes raped. Some crews robbed the passengers and then threw them overboard to the sharks. In Yemen they had to swim from deep water to the beach because the smugglers were avoiding the Yemeni patrol boats. Many died within sight of Yemen because they could not swim or were eaten by sharks. Someone said on the beaches of Yemen were mass Somali graveyards.

  There was a lot of jostling, and the militias fired shots into the air to control the crowd. Finally the boat was ready to leave, the passengers hidden under a heavy tarp. They were off to Yemen. I wanted to be on that boat with my friends. I didn’t care how dangerous it was, I did not want to go back to Mogadishu. I wedged into the line for the next boat. When it was my turn to pay, I handed the smuggler my forty American dollars.

  “Where is the other forty?” he shouted. “The boat is eighty dollars!”

  I started telling him I didn’t have the rest, but he didn’t want to hear my story. He threw the cash back in my face and said, “Fuck you!” and moved on to the next person. In a few minutes that boat was off, me still on the pier, miserable beyond belief.

  Evening was settling in Bosaso, and the crowd waiting to get on boats grew larger. I needed forty more dollars. I did not know what to do, so I walked back into town to see if there were any jobs available. I found nothing. There was no big market like Bakara where you could find odd jobs as a tout or porter. And I knew that the more time I spent in Bosaso, the less money I would have, because sooner or later I would need to eat. I skipped dinner, but I had to get breakfast. Locals figured the migrants came with a lot of money, so they were gouging prices on everything. Bread and tea that would have cost twenty cents in Mogadishu were a dollar.

  That night I lay on the beach, next to a crowd of migrants waiting for the sun to rise, a few hundred feet from the pier. In the morning I went back to the pier and saw a familiar face. It was Abdullahi Madowe, a man from my neighborhood in Mogadishu. His wife and two kids were with him, all trying to get to Yemen. When he saw me, he ran over. We chatted a bit, I told him I had financial issues but that I too was hoping to go to Yemen. He wished me good luck. I watched as he and his family boarded a boat and slowly disappeared over the horizon.

  By afternoon we heard that Abaas and Ahmed’s boat had made it to Yemen safely. I was happy for them, but all I could think about was my own sad situation. I paced up and down the beach for hours. Mostly I didn’t want to admit to myself the obvious: I would be going back to Mogadishu. Then came terrible news: Abdullahi Madowe’s boat had capsized a few hours off the Somali coast. More than seventy people drowned. Abdullahi and his family did not return. Had I been on their boat, I probably would have died with them; had I been on Abaas and Ahmed’s boat, I would have lived. As I trudged back to the bus depot, I felt my whole life was like that; every day that I could remember was a matter of life and death.

  11

  No Number

  Hassan was right. By July 2006, while I was trying to escape, the Ethiopian army, supported by the United States, was amassing along the border and preparing to drive out the Islamists. Finally they crossed over and slowly advanced toward Mogadishu—tens of thousands of well-trained soldiers, backed by tanks and airplanes.

  Abu Jihad was so happy. My old soccer pal could not stop talking about the istishhad, martyrdom death. “If the Christians kill us, we are going directly to heaven!” he kept chanting. On December 20, 2006, the full-scale war broke out. Abu Jihad was on the front lines and among the first to die. A week after the war broke out, Ethiopian troops marched into Mogadishu. Now it was my turn to be happy. I walked through the streets for hours with no signs of an Islamist. All that remained were their black flags, snapping in the fresh breeze.

  * * *

  —

  On New Year’s Day 2007, the sun rose above the blue flag of Somalia, flying for the first time in years. I woke up to find two uniformed soldiers standing in the middle of our courtyard. One was Ethiopian and the other Somali. They had come to search for weapons because the entire city was being disarmed. The Somali soldier was Rahanweyn, so my mom and Dhuha happily explained to him in Maay that we had no weapons. Satisfied, he leaned his gun against the neem tree and asked for a cup of tea. The Ethiopian was busy searching rooms; when he came outside and saw his Somali partner sipping tea, gun against a tree, he grew enraged and started yelling in Amharic. Of course none of us could understand him, not even the Somali soldier, but from his body language it was clear that he did not believe this was teatime. The Ethiopian didn’t understand that Rahanweyn families in Mogadishu weren’t allowed to have guns. The Somali soldier knew my mom was telling the truth.

  A little tea party, a foreign soldier’s tirade—not much to speak of, but it symbolized a larger problem and foretold the catastrophe to come. The foreign peacekeeping troops that poured into Mogadishu from Ethiopia and the African Union did not understand the complex history of Somalia’s clan rivalries. They didn’t realize how the majority Hawiye clan of the city would resent the new Darod president and fear all the Darod soldiers now swarming into Mogadishu. When the civil war started in 1991 the Hawiye militias had killed thousands of Darods and then invaded the Rahanweyn land. Would these Darod and Rahanweyn soldiers now take revenge on Hawiye civilians? When the order came down to disarm the city, the Hawiye felt threatened and vulnerable.

  It didn’t take long for the Hawiye elders to declare Ethiopia an occupying army. “We kicked America out!” they said. “It won’t take us long to defeat you!”

  The call from the elders became an opportunity for the Islamists to regroup and launch a holy war. This time, with the enemy right in their midst, it became guerrilla warfare. Suicide bombers targeted government buildings. Masked assassins killed anyone even remotely suspected of helping the Ethiopians and the new government. Market women who happened to sell some tea or qat to government soldiers were murdered in their homes. These newly radicalized Islamists massed in heavily guarded camps on the outskirts of town; at night they brazenly marched forth on murderous missions. They called themselves al-Shabaab, “the Youth.”

  With the clash of international armies and suicide bombings, the world was again paying attention to Somalia. But very few international journalists would risk coming. One who did was Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter then with the Chicago Tribune.

  One day I was walking through town, hopping over the smoking rubble from a fresh shelling, when I heard the click and whir of a motorized camera from a building across the street. Cameras were not normal sounds in Mogadishu. Up on the balcony of a guesthouse was an Asian photographer and a white man. They disappeared into the walls of the guesthouse, but I stood there, watching and waiting. Finally they reappeared. The white guy waved. I waved back. Then his
bodyguards, some hired Somali militiamen at the gate of the house, thought I was making trouble for them. They pointed their AK-47s at my head.

  “Go away!” said one. “Leave now.” The white guy was still watching from above.

  I was so afraid I would be shot, but I summoned all my courage and yelled up at the white guy. “I want to talk to you!” I said in my best English.

  The man again disappeared inside. The militiamen were getting angrier, shaking their guns. “You can’t communicate with the white man!” one said.

  “You stupid man!” said another. “Leave!”

  “He is okay. Let him come.” The voice from the courtyard was in English. It was the white man, now at the gate. His guards didn’t understand his words, but of course I was the movie translator of Mogadishu.

  “He says let me in to meet him,” I told the guards in Somali. They thought I was tricking them; what twenty-two-year-old Somali man could speak English? And after all, they were getting paid to protect this guy. But the white man used hand gestures to let them know it was okay. They searched me thoroughly before I walked into the building. Finally Paul Salopek and I shook hands.

  “Hi,” I said. “It is good to meet you, sir. I am very excited!”

  When he heard me speak English, his eyebrows went up. “Wow! Come on up, man.

  “What do you drink, hot or cold?” Paul asked.

  We were on his balcony. He had a Pepsi in one hand, and a kettle of tea was on the table. I never had Pepsi in my life, I only saw it in movies.

  “That one,” I said, pointing to the Pepsi.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name is Abdi.”

  “Abdi. Are you from this area?”

  “Yes, I live down that road, toward the big tree over there.” I pointed down in the direction of our house. I took a sip of the Pepsi. I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life. “Wow, I like this!” I told Paul. He brought out two more cans of Pepsi for me to take home, but I finished them all on the spot.