Tristan McConnell in Mogadishu

January 30, 2010

On Monday afternoon a seven-year old boy called Mohamed was hit when an 82mm mortar shell exploded outside a health clinic in Mogadishu where his mother works as a cleaner.

Afterwards he lay on a hospital floor, shivering and terrified. His bandaged left arm, hand and leg were peppered with angular chunks of shrapnel. Crouched beside him his mother, Fatima, wiped tears from her eyes.

But Mohamed was luckier than the five Somali civilians and Ugandan peacekeeper who died in the explosion at the busy outpatient centre.

The mortar landed just beyond the concrete and razor-wire perimeter of the main base of the African Union peacekeeping force, known as Amisom. There were dozens of civilians, mostly women and children, waiting to be seen by doctors. Only two hours earlier Captain Ronald Mukuyi, an Amisom doctor — the peacekeeping force runs the clinic and the nearby hospital — had told The Times: “When people are inside we can ensure their safety but when they are outside we cannot.”

Death or injury comes often and randomly to the inhabitants of Mogadishu, a place where the thump of mortars and staccato pop of machinegun fire punctuates day and night. The human cost of 22 years of war has been catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands have died, more than half a million scrape by in refugee camps across East Africa and almost half the population depend on food aid for survival. This month another 80,000 were forced to flee their homes.

The Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has been in place now for exactly a year. To mark the occasion al-Shabaab, the Islamist militant group linked to al-Qaeda, launched a ferocious attack yesterday morning. It was the worst fighting that residents had witnessed in months: explosions rocked the capital and bursts of gunfire rang out through the night.

Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the President, has the backing of the UN and Western powers but his administration and its security forces face almost daily attacks by al-Shabaab and another Islamist fighting group, Hizb al-Islam. Today Somalia is a new frontline in the global war against terror, its violent anarchy the perfect breeding ground for jihadist fighters who train here and in Yemen, a few hundred miles to the north.

Throughout the overlapping and almost continuous rounds of fighting it is the ordinary people of Somalia who have suffered most. Nowhere is this clearer than in Mogadishu, a city that stands as a blasted monument to the years of destruction. Spread along the Indian Ocean coast, the city offers glimpses of its former beauty. Close to the port are ornate piazzas, colonnades and extravagant curving façades overlooking a clear blue sea.

But an array of weaponry has taken its toll, the gutted and wall-less buildings left like listing honeycombs. Mile follows mile of shattered city blocks and sun-bleached broken streets. In some areas multistory buildings have crumpled to the ground; others are flecked with fist-sized bullet holes gouged out by high-caliber weapons. Barely a pane of glass or doorframe remains, just crumbling walls, rubble-filled rooms and staircases rising through broken roofs to nowhere.

Mad Max-style battlewagons known as technicals race along the roads — they are made by welding a high-caliber machinegun on to the flatbed of a pick-up truck or a 4x4 with the roof sawn off. A single bullet can rip a person in two. These DIY killing machines are ever present in the street battles between Somali gunmen.

From the city’s central business district of Bakara market, a forbidden zone where al-Shabaab holds sway, occasional mortars fall on the tiny part of the city under the nominal control of the Government and its 5,300 Amisom protectors.

On Tuesday afternoon the sounds of assault rifles, machineguns and mortar fire rang out for hours. On Thursday morning the barrages were just as heavy. Yesterday al-Shabaab fighters lobbed mortars until AU peacekeepers returned fire with tanks.

For the visitor it was unrelenting and frightening but it was nothing unusual to the people of Mogadishu, who have learnt to live with the imminence of death. “We can be talking like this, then a minute later a stray bullet or a mortar, and you are finished,” one resident said.

Despite the horror and destruction, a semblance of life goes on. Battered minibus taxis rattle down the streets; money transfer agencies funnel remittances to relatives; shops sell electronics from Dubai. Men in sarong-like cotton macawis, sandals and shirts drink sweet strong tea and smoke cigarettes on the dusty pavements. Some have guns but most do not. Veiled women walk by, their bright robes billowing in the sea breeze. Children wave eagerly from behind the corrugated iron doors of makeshift homes tucked into abandoned ground-floor shops.

At the seaport, thousands of stevedores earn a few dollars a day unloading goods brought in on wooden dhows from Yemen, India, or Saudi Arabia. Sacks of second-hand clothes, plastic jerry cans of vegetable oil and pallets of fizzy drinks pile up on the quayside. Control of the port means control of Mogadishu’s economy and it has been bitterly fought over by warring militias in the past, but for now it is firmly under Amisom control.

Even so, the twice-monthly peacekeeper supply ship invites a flurry of mortars launched at the port by al-Shabaab. When locals saw white foreigners there this week, they muttered that mortars would surely follow.

Yasin Osman, the deputy port manager, concedes that almost nothing is exported but the port is nevertheless a key earner for the cash-strapped Government, bringing in $11 million (£7 million) in taxes last year. “Government revenue only comes from here and the airport,” Mr Osman said.

Amisom also defends the airport, where a new departure terminal has just opened, complete with lounge, coffee bar and duty-free shop. Two airlines connect Mogadishu with Nairobi and Dubai and a handful of local and private flights also land daily.

Mahamoud Sheikh Ali, the director-general of the Civil Aviation Authority, says that in the next few weeks he will be getting an X-ray machine and a computerized passport control system donated by the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental group. He proudly explains that insurgents have not mortared the airport in more than six months.

Even this apparent normality is a façade: arriving passengers complete an immigration form demanding their name and address as well as the type, serial number, trademark and caliber of their weapons.

Torn nation

• Somalia was formed in 1960 by amalgamating Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland. The democratic Government was overthrown by Major-General Mohamed Siad Barre in 1969. He aligned himself to the USSR but Moscow later withdrew its support

• In 1991 General Barre was forced to flee Mogadishu. An insurgent group in the former British Somaliland then proclaimed the Somaliland Republic and a power struggle began between forces loyal to Mohamed Ali Mahdi and those of Mohamed Farrah Aidid

• The UN sent peacekeepers and food aid in 1992 but became embroiled in the conflict when convoys came under attack. The US sent in Marines but they were forced to withdraw in March 1994 — but not before the notorious Black Hawk Down catastrophe of 1993

• UN peacekeepers abandoned the country in 1995. Somalia was controlled by warlords until 2006, when they were defeated by militias loyal to the Union of Islamic Courts

• Fighting between the militias and government forces backed by Ethiopia continues

Sources: Times archive; BBC

RELATED LINKS

Somalia chaos spreading far beyond its frontier

I will send fighters to Yemen, vows Somali ally

Year in power marked by a rain of mortars

Source: The Times Online, January 30, 2010

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