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African Union members are awaiting a report on Somaliland and other political issues in the Horn

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ADDIS ABABA (Somalilandpress) — The Namibia Foreign Minister, Mr. Marco Mukoso Hausiku stated in an interview with Geeska Afrika, that African Union members are awaiting a report on Somaliland and other political issues in the Horn of Africa.

Speaking in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, before the gathering of AU Foreign ministers, Mr. Mukoso Hausika, confirmed to members of the Somaliland media, that the African Union is awaiting the final report on the situation in the Horn of Africa relating to the political conflicts between Eritrea and Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia and the case of Somaliland continued campaign for international recognition.

Responding to a question from the Somaliland media regarding the international recognition of their country, Mr. Mukoso Hausika stated “It is not prudent for Namibia to commit itself to a position without receiving the forth coming report on Somaliland . But, we will judge the issue on its merits and take into consideration the conclusion of the report.”

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Mr. Mukoso Haukisa continued “Namibia is willing to explore co-operation with all the people of Africa and the world. We would like to see more mutual co-operation between African nations, in terms of the exchange of ideas, knowledge and all manner of assistance.”

Mr. Marco Mukoso Haukisa has been Namibian Foreign minister for the past seven years.

The Republic of Namibia formerly known as South West Africa gained its independence from South Africa in 1991 under the leadership of Sam Nujoma.

The Republic of Namibia is a multi-party democracy and a member of the Commonwealth.

Source: Geeska Afrika, 2 February 2010

Somaliland journalists meet with African leaders and UN Secretary-General in Ethiopia

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ADDIS ABABA, (Somalilandpress) — Reporters from Somaliland have been invited to the African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital who have been discussing a range of issues from security and conflict to development.

A total of four reporters from both government and independent media houses joined the 14th ordinary session of the Assembly of the African Union which opened on Sunday built around the theme of ‘information and communication technologies’ in Addis Ababa.

Mohamed Hussein Jama of Geeska Afrika (independent), Abdiweli Farah Jambir, Ogaal news (independent), Abdullahi Ali Sudi, Somaliland National Television ‘TV Qaran’ (government) and Moha Farah Jirde from TV Qaran joined the the 53-member body’s annual meeting with another 528 journalists from around Africa and abroad.

Moha is also the president of Journalists for African Renaissance (JAR), an African Union agency founded by members from Somaliland, Kenya, Botswana, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia, with the help of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a non-profit German political foundation.

The often flamboyant reporter and regular presenter in the state-owned Qaran TV, Moha Farah, who played an important role in convincing African heads of state to invite journalists from Somaliland to the conference thanked the Ethiopian government for their hospitality on behave of all African journalists. Ms Moha also thanked the AU leaders for “allowing the media free access.” She praised Ethiopia’s positive attitude towards free press and urged the international press to refrain from misleading the public via falsely depicted information about Ethiopia’s press freedom.

She has over the years built up a considerable stable of contacts in Addis Ababa, which she says is home to thousands of diplomats, intellectuals and politicians. She emphasised the need for reporters from Somaliland in such gatherings by African leaders, who invited reporters from other continents.
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During the summit, Somaliland reporters met with various leaders from Africa including the leaders of Zambia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, Botswana, Namibia and Ethiopia as well as  the current Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki-moon.

Ban Ki-moon joined the African summit at a time when the Senegalese head of state, Abdoulaye Wade was proposing relocating the people of Haiti to Africa based on their African roots and for carrying the “flame of liberation and freedom for the black people.”

Ban Ki-moon on his part thanked the AU leaders for their support for Haiti and briefly touched on their African links.

The earthquake which struck Haiti on 12 January has killed an estimated 170,000 and made over a million people homeless. The emergency relief has attracted an international response including a number of Christian charities in the United States, where at least ten of them have been accused of illegally smuggling out Haiti children out off the country.

This is the first time press from Somaliland have been invited to an African Union summit.

In a related development, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader is said to have been angered by a number of African head of states who secretly discussed the issue of Somaliland recognition with him. According to Geeska Afrika, Col. Qaddafi told the African leaders he was opposed to dividing Somalia, who he said was a “small state and a member of the African Union and Arab League” and that “the world is changing into 7 or 10 countries”, and Africa is trending in the opposite direction. He argued if Somaliland is recognized, others in Africa will follow such as regions in Sudan (referring to South Sudan) and Congo.

According to an early interview by Geeska Afrika, AU leaders are awaiting a report on Somaliland to be brought in front of the Assembly according to the Namibian Foreign Minister, Mr. Marco Mukoso Hausiku.

Col. El-Qaddafi was both surprised and angered by his sudden replacement by President Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi and many political analysts believe El-Qaddafi never really believed in the so called “African United States” but was his way of denying the self-determination of people like Somaliland.

Somaliland journalists were invited as ‘Somaliland journalists’ and not as ‘Somalia’s’, they rubbed shoulders with the political elites of Africa and beyond bringing home another milestone in Somaliland’s self-determination as the journalists are the gateway to information.

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Somalilandpress, 2 February 2010

Arr Goes To Somaliland Part V: The Finale

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The past eight months I’ve spent in Somaliland have been amongst the most exciting, memorable and humbling of my life. Immersing oneself in the customs and local aspects of such a great culture can prove difficult even for those whose blood it is native to.

I was new and naïve in my previous articles but will not apologise to those who found my continued criticisms of our country difficult to swallow. I will, however, apologise to those who somehow perceived my genuine excitement/bewilderment and discovery of my family’s rich history and roots in Somaliland as outright bragging. Being a member of the Diaspora and genuinely feeling let-down by the level of our accomplishments in comparison to members of other nations who migrated en masse; I was happy to see my people doing so well for themselves here at home. As ‘Somalilanders’, I can still say that, we have a lot to accomplish both inside and outside of our borders. The truth hurts but it is only the truth and real reflection that can vindicate us of our shortcomings.

Not much has changed in the eight months I’ve been here that is easily visible. While I have left and returned three times in that period many of the same feelings and experiences I initially had remain true. I still feel proud that we are not a lawless nation, and that we have a government that caters to a certain degree for its citizens; but there is a lot more that needs to be done.

Before drifting off into politics I’ll explain what I’ve been up to in the past eight months. I’ve learnt a great deal about our culture and gained a lot as well as lost a great deal. I had to bury my uncle Ali Marshaal who was a true lion and patriot of Somaliland as well as experience the hardships of setting up business legitimately in a country where the rule of law is often left to the hands of dishonest and money hungry government employees. I’ve been privileged enough to take part in events where Faisal Ali Warrabe was speaking and have never heard so many quotable Somali punch lines come from one man. While I do not think the time for his party has arrived, this man has definitely been given the ‘gift of the gab.’
I have also had the experience of falling victim to the Somaliland Gem’s Scam in which low quality grade imported from other countries such as India and neighbouring African countries (genuine materials that are not suitable for any form of jewellery production beyond cabochons, etc [essentially the leftovers]) are used to ‘salt’ mines and sold on at above 1000% to susceptible and naïve travellers from abroad who dream of making easy millions. I learned my lesson with a smile like the time I purchased a laptop bag full of Argos catalogues off of Irishman (instead of the two laptops I paid for) and moved on.

While there are genuine gems here and real deposits I would sincerely advise those interested in this trade to take precaution and not be fooled by the apparent lustre of the low-grade gems presented to them by the highly intelligent and heartless men who happily perpetrate this fraud. The old adage of ‘if it seems too good to be true then it probably is’ is a lesson I had to learn a second time around. Doh!

The most meaningful experience I have had while here is that I had the chance to become one with my people. I take the bus and prefer to walk even when offered a ride so I can immerse myself in the culture completely. I no longer get harassed by others for being an ‘outsider’ and have been accepted as ‘one of us’ or ‘inankeena’. I try my best to exemplify ‘when in Rome do as the Romans do’ and avoid standing out like a sore thumb. There are a few things I still do that may seem odd; such as having three pet dogs (Arsene, Gunner and Walcott!) and chiding children for throwing rocks at wild animals, but for the most part I am one with my countrymen.

My neighbourhood initially thought we were crazy for keeping pets until I told them that I used them to protect me from the wild goats! That left them confused just long enough for me to avoid their passing harsh judgement and stop cursing me, and I have made up for it by leaving my shorts sitting idle in my closet and avoiding the temptation to wear them like food during Ramadan.

I feel like I now understand what it means to be a Somalilander and can relate to the dreams and aspirations of the local population. We all want the same basic necessities in life and it’s a simple matter of fate that has placed the equally capable in various personal situations and standards of living. Having read old documents belonging to my parents from the early SNM period written by SNM heroes I can only marvel at the fact that what those brave people worked towards accomplishing is partially here for me to witness today. When we are in a position where equal opportunities are available for everyone, and all can pursue endeavours they choose freely; will be the day I will agree that the job of the SNM is fully completed.

I still live and breathe and eat Somaliland and I recently sent a nasty response to my embassy in Kenya after they emailed me a warning about being in ‘Somalia’. I told them to get their facts straight and that Hargeisa is in Somaliland and not Somalia! I also told them I’ve been hiking with my Caucasian friends to the middle of nowhere without security and that they are just as safe here as I am. I also told them that I had expected Canadians to be better at geography than Americans and that they should go take a hike themselves! I’m sure they felt insulted by the tone of my letter but they now know that I was equally insulted by their confusing Somaliland with Somalia.

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Now, gone are the days I worried about recognition and I am now only concerned with the improvement and development of our infrastructure so that the local population can benefit directly. While we will eventually require recognition so that all of our citizens are free to travel and pursue their dreams internationally, I am of the opinion that seeking recognition hastily and without considering the consequences and repercussions will lead to outright exploitation.

Like the old movie field of dreams (and the story of Dubai) I believe in the ‘If You Build It; They Will Come’ philosophy. We no longer need the outside world to give us everything like when they brought us electricity and airplanes. If we can pull together on a greater level, and with good government oversight; we can start to build a stronger nation in isolation and the world will be forced to recognise our accomplishment. Until we have good governance, yes, we will depend heavily on the generosity of the Diaspora and their increasing intellectual capacity to get things done.

My forecast is that this dependence will decrease dramatically as the output of our many universities supplying us with a brilliant and ambitious future generation muscles its way into both the private and public sectors. A good example of where our current organisational level and transparency stands is that the bridge in Hargeisa is yet to be completed and has fallen greatly beyond schedule due to either financial mismanagement or outright incompetence. If we can’t build one bridge then how can we build our nation? Yes there are many other bridges that have been built privately but this one is in a strategic location (around the corner from the President’s house). Equally concerning is that the government won’t reveal how much money they made off of the sale of prime government owned land that was sold to the private sector (India Line) or where the money has gone.

Forgetting the government for a moment, it’s only after the ‘I’m new’ feeling wears off you start to see things here that wouldn’t have made themselves apparent unless you had a long time to observe and reflect on them. When you see things going utterly wrong you can only point fingers for a while before asking yourself what you have brought to the table. I began to realize this and appreciate thoroughly that I am more fortunate than some and have made it my personal obligation and priority to help those in genuine need and to share whatever I have of benefit to whoever seeks it. This not only makes me feel more in touch with my people but also makes me more human.

The people of Somaliland are amongst the most ingenious and creative when given the chance, and the vibrant cities are buzzing with the activity of an entire nation rebuilding itself after enduring forty-odd years of suffering then neglect. The markets are also buzzing and commerce is steadily increasing and we are moving from being mere consumers to exporters and manufacturers. A lot of our produce is exported to neighbouring Ethiopia and you would be happy to find that many of the items consumed in Somaliland are manufactured in Somaliland itself. We also benefit heavily from a landlocked Ethiopia relying on our port to import their goods. Many a wise businessmen have begun to import goods solely for the purpose of re-exporting them to Ethiopia. [Oh you wise businessmen! Maybe one of you can invest in a recycling plant so we can stop burning valuable recyclable plastic and paper in our dry creeks?]

Anyhow, yesterday, Silaanyo made a triumphant return to Somaliland to the cheers of the hundreds of thousands who showed up to welcome the SNM Hero. I’m sure that even the president’s inner circle found it both comical and ironic that he should be ‘banned’ from Somaliland by an administration headed by a former NSS agent. The recent news from the former Udub spokesman indicating that the previous election result was a sham only goes to highlight what most are already aware of; the current administration does not have the interest of this country at heart and that it is only the will and determination of the Somaliland people to live in peace and avoid conflict that has kept our country together. I remembering being annoyed that I had to pay an ‘Eastern Tax’ at the ministries when I was well aware that not a penny would reach our eastern states and that they would still be left in neglect and essentially left to fend for themselves. Maybe the next government will be able to use this tax appropriately?

The current government is not all bad though, and I am not an enemy of Udub, or a partisan but a patriot. I would be happy to vote Udub in another four years if they revert to the ideals of our country’s founder the late Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal. There have been some notable accomplishments from members of the Udub government including the recent news arriving from China regarding the rebuilding and expansion of Hargeisa Airport and it testifies to the fact that the Aviation Minister as an individual is a highly competent man who has and will continue to fulfil the obligations of his post.

The recent addition of a new Director General at the Ministry of Commerce has also been immensely beneficial as the ministry is now perhaps the only one fully employed for the hours of operation stated and the previous pay as you go method of getting things done has been thrown out the window. No longer are bribes accepted at that ministry, however, anyone who would like to donate office supplies and equipment are welcome to do just that. This ultimately benefits the business community by empowering and enhancing the abilities of the Ministry of Commerce to do their job more effectively. I raise both my hands to both of these patriots (and all credit is due to others I may have missed.)

The last subject I would like to touch on is the fact that Somaliland has been a safe-haven for many people fleeing their country either due to conflict, persecution or famine. I commend Somaliland for being able to give and share from what little they have but at the same time feel used to the point where I have no choice but to thumb my nose at the Neo-Faqash movement. I find it surprising that the same ones who actively deny and undermine Somaliland are also the same ones waiting in lines at Somaliland owned Dahabshiil to send their relatives money while they live in peace in, um, Somaliland!

The endless finger pointing and bitterness that has brought their country to an endless cycle of civil war has also lead to them falsely accusing Somaliland of being a fantasy state or nation. I find it doubly ironic that it is this fantasy state that they urge their relatives to move to in order to escape persecution while at the same time cheering the complete rubbish and hate filled nonsense spewed by Mohammed ‘Peanut-Brain’ Shamsudinn Maglomitis and terrorist organisations such as the NSUM who have nothing better to do with their lives than hate the great nation of Somaliland. My message to you is that we will continue to take the high road and pray that at some point you remember the late Michael Jackson’s words and start talking to the man in the mirror. We will not take responsibility for your personal situation and will only engage you in dialogue when you are willing to accept the hard cold fact that Somaliland exists and is here to stay. No longer will I pay attention to the members of the Neo-Faqash movement (Somaliland deniers) and they can busy themselves by barking at each other and debating whether their fantasy government in Nairobi actually exists.

But let’s forget those petty enemies for a moment. We have bigger enemies present who are actively working to prevent the bright future that is in store for this nation; enemies such as greed, selfishness, incompetency, complacency and overt laziness. In closing I would like to call all of my fellow Somalilanders to arms. Not the arms that project bullets but the arms that project peace, change and prosperity. I urge all Somalilanders who have never been home to skip that vacation and come and see your country for the first time. I ask those who visit to go back thinking of ways to improve their country so that they can ultimately return to and settle in it permanently. I urge all that are in Somaliland to be patient while at the same time working towards the betterment of our nation. I call on all nations and the AU in particular to accept us now rather than later and to not hold back our eventual recognition. I call on the Neo-Faqash movement to give up its laughable and futile campaign to discredit and undermine Somaliland. I call on our current government to pull itself up by the bootstraps (boots, get it?) and remember that they are inheritors of a struggle that cost a great deal in blood and lives. I call on all my fellow Somalilanders to at least make the chewing of qat a once in a while social activity and not a full time occupation. I call on all the youth currently studying in Somaliland to take their studies seriously and to be patient as the opportunities will eventually arise, and for those abroad to pick their subjects and professions with Somaliland in mind. I call on all of those entrusted with finances from generous donors to know that they will be held accountable for how they spend every penny whether in this life or another and to act responsibly. I ask all those who encounter the orphans of the war and SNM fighters who have fallen to mental illness to not be afraid to give from what they are able to when they see them and specifically call on the government to do more for them. I call on all who are eligible to vote to go out and vote and to vote in the interests of Somaliland as a nation and to put their personal financial gains and tribal ties aside. I ask all Somalilanders worldwide to remember that what makes us Somalilanders is what we give to our country, and not what we take and will end with the words of the late JFK; “ask not what your country can do for you, but ask for what you can do for your country.”

I thank you all for joining me on this journey and series and would like to dedicate this final instalment to the Madax Yar family of Dhahran, KSA.

By Arr

Somalilandpress, 2 February 2010

Somalia leader appeals international support, rules out talks with rebels.

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MOGADISHU (Somalilandpress)-The president of the Transitional Federal
Government of Somalia, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmad, has accused the
international community of failing to play their role towards Somalia,
adding that his country was in dire need of their support.

Speaking at the African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital, Addis
Ababa, The president has asked the world for political support, troops
and weapons, which he said will be used to fight against Islamic
groups fighting his government and western countries policies..

‘’ We ask for more troops to join the African Union Peacekeeping
Mission those are doing a very good task’’ he said in his speech.

He waved the international community to show their commitment of
pacifying Somalia, as well as restoring law and order.

He has also outlined that his government is in what he termed as
“preparation of liberation”, which is about a war against the armed
rebel groups.

“The Transitional Government is ready to liberate its country. We are
fighting against terrorists who invaded our country and its our duty
to fight them” said Sheikh Ahmad, said on the sideline of the African
Union leaders.

He did not mention on the civilians suffering [because of the war] and
ways to help them, but he said that Somalis are in need of peace, law
and order, adding that all these depend on implementing the interest
of the transitional government.

The president has also said that the era of talks has ended, by
accusing Al-Shabab of trying to take the control of the East African
region, adding that the military power which Al-Shabab has
substantiated that.
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He urged neighbouring countries to extend full support to his government.

The prop up call by Sharif came as the rebels dug trenches near the
presidential palace, posing threats to his weak government. Residents
are critic to the government for failing quick security measures and
long-drawn-out failed promises on the security.

Somalilandpress
Mogadishu-Somalia

House of Elders Reject Its Deputy's Resignation

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HARGEISA, 1 February 2010 (Somalilandpress) – The members of the Somaliland’s Upper house known as “Guurti” rejected a request from the House’s deputy who submitted his resignation letter to the Chairman. In today’s session, the chairman of the Guurti, Mr. Suleiman Mohamoud Aden informed the members that the issue is serious and he believes that the Deputy should stay in his position. He asked the members to vote for the resignation.

The Chairman apologized that he quickly closed yesterday’s session without explaining the issue further. He said that was due to the importance of the Deputy and his role in the house.

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The members then voted for the resignation as they rejected the request anonymously.

At the end of the session the Deputy chairman, Sh. Ahmed Sh. Nuh thanked the members and said his reasons relate to that fact that he has been holding the position for a long time and he needed a break. “It also related to the recent conflict within the Guurti which was difficult to solve” he concluded.

The session which was attended by 65 members was Chaired by Mr. Suleiman Mohamoud Aden who officially concluded the session.

Somalilandpress

Somaliland: A Country Suffering From Little Land Use

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HARGEISA, 1 February 2010 (Somalilandpress) – I wonder sometimes, if the evergrowing population of China or India ever know a country like Somaliland. A country of only 3.5 Million population, a country the land exceeds its population and so are its resources, yet suffering from lack of exploitation. I am a citizen of that country, and sometimes I hardly get an answer to questions related to our land, especially when my classmates ask me how big is our country. When I tell them the area of our territory, and our number they surprise and put their hands on their cheeks. Wonderful, they say we are a population of 25 million, and our main problem lies on the effort of getting a fertile peice of land to grow crops and vegetables.

Last Year, I travelled to a mountainious region with a group of students, mostly foreigners. I can’t really describe what I saw there, houses were built at the top of mountains, the cliffs, the lagoons and everywhere. Surprisingly, could you ever imagine a farmer using a donkey to dig his piece of land at the very top of a triangular shaped mountain. I asked myself, how could an old man in his late 70s can reach there. When you travel from city to city you will never see unused land, it is inhabitted and occupied. Farms and houses are there, and people are working.

This is not a very populated country, twenty five million is just too little to be compared to a country like Egypt with approximately 80 Million or to India, and let alone China, yet they are ready to invest their country. Every one is busy with his farm when you go to the country side and they mostly eat what they grow. Their villages is like their cities, some of them more congested and have the basic infrustructure. Some of our classmates told me, that they want to follow me to my country and settle there.

Contrary to the above mentioned, I spent my summer last year in Somaliland. I was very longing for my homeland. From the very minute I put my legs on my soil, I felt relaxed and free, but I was disappointed. The land between Berbera and Hargeisa, was too long yet without investment. We didn’t invest our country. Despite it is a coastal area, and may not be good in agriculture yet we could have used for other purposes. When you go east or west of Somaliland, the scenario is the same. I went many places during my visit, each time what was falling in to my mind was the land, the large hectors of land, that no one made use of it. Planes could have landed even without need to pave their way. Play grounds could have at least been built there.

The active things in these areas were desertification process and soil erosion. Then no one ever mentions that danger. We think that the outside world is the paradise, a haven or something similar. IF today a plane landed there, and asked the near persons if they want a lift to USA or Europe or to the Arab world, many would have said Yes from the bottom of their heart. However, if we are given fertilisers, bulldozer and machines and told to dig our land, and use it for agriculture, many of us could have put their hands in their bockets, saying It is difficult. It is difficult and hard because, we are people who need self made food and material.

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We always talk about recognition, and some of us think that urbanisation is the solution, but we rarely realise that agriculture is our master economy. Most of our country is useful for agriculture. We have unlimited areas yet the number of farms we have are countable. Who will make use of this land? Our great grand fathers left like this, may be better because some of us have mis used and polluted it. Shall we leave it like this. The real citizen is that who makes use of his power house-the brain-that Allah has bestowed on us.The treausure that distinguishes as from other creatures.

The healthy mind tells that we Somalilanders should focus on agriculture. You may say I am living in cukoo world, because I am talking about agriculture when we depend on livestock. Yes, it is true that we depend on livestock , but if we shift to agriculture while keeping livestock will be the best solution. This is of course helpful in this very time, where we are suffering from rain shortage, drougths and similar facts. If we planned earlier, and not depend always on livestock we could have survived when the world is in economic depression. They say ‘ don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, and I say ” let us not always depend on livestock, while we have better options-agriculture, fishing, tourism etc.

Finally, I hope that we shall think twice,and will collectively work together. We are a nation of politicians, every one talks about politcs everyday, so let us not focus on politics, it will be straight when we provide our politicians with sorghum and maize from our land and not foreign food.

Written By:
Ahmed Mohamoud Elmi (Shawky)
Social activist and journalist
A reporter for Somaliland Education Network and Golisnews.com
shawqi06@hotmail.com

___________________________________________________________________________________
Views expressed in the opinion articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the editorial

Hijacked Cambodian cargo ship no pirate attack: official

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HARGEISA, 1 February 2010 (Somalilandpress) – A hijacked Cambodian cargo ship is being held off Somalia’s Berbera port by businessmen owing to a deal which has gone sour and not pirate attack, a regional maritime official confirmed on Saturday.

Andrew Mwangura, East Africa’s Coordinator of Seafarers Assistance Program (SAP), said the MV Layla-S which was seized on Wednesday after it unloaded at the port in the semi-autonomous region of Somaliland has 14 crew members on board from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Syria.

“The ill-fated Cambodian flagged cargo ship MV LAYLA-S is being held hostage in port Berbera by Somali businessmen owing to a deal which has gone sour,” Mwangura said by telephone from Mombasa, east Kenya.

“It is said that the vessel has link with Syrian and UAE business men. We are informed that she was taken by gunmen after discharging her cargo,” he said.

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Piracy has become rampant off the coast of Africa, especially in the waters near Somalia, which has been without an effective government since 1991.

Ransoms started out in the tens of thousands of dollars and have since climbed into the millions.

The Horn of Africa nation is at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, which leads to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most important shipping channels.

The country has been plagued by factional fighting between warlords and hasn’t had a functioning central administration since the 1991 ouster of former dictator Mohammed Siad Barre.

The Gulf of Aden, off the northern coast of Somalia, has the highest risk of piracy in the world. About 25,000 ships use the channel south of Yemen, between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.


Source: Xinhua

The Jihadist Next Door.

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ON A WARM, cloudy day in the fall of 1999, the town of Daphne, Ala., stirred to life. The high-school band came pounding down Main Street, past the post office and the library and Christ the King Church. Trumpeters in gold-tasseled coats tipped their horns to the sky, heralding the arrival of teenage demigods. The star quarterback and his teammates came first in the parade, followed by the homecoming queen and her court. Behind them, on a float bearing leaders of the student government, a giddy mop-haired kid tossed candy to the crowd.

Omar Hammami had every right to flash his magnetic smile. He had just been elected president of his sophomore class. He was dating a luminous blonde, one of the most sought-after girls in school. He was a star in the gifted-student program, with visions of becoming a surgeon. For a 15-year-old, he had remarkable charisma.

Despite the name he acquired from his father, an immigrant from Syria, Hammami was every bit as Alabaman as his mother, a warm, plain-spoken woman who sprinkles her conversation with blandishments like “sugar” and “darlin’.” Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar went to Bible camp as a boy and sang “Away in a Manger” on Christmas Eve. As a teenager, his passions veered between Shakespeare and Kurt Cobain, soccer and Nintendo. In the thick of his adolescence, he was fearless, raucously funny, rebellious, contrarian. “It felt cool just to be with him,” his best friend at the time, Trey Gunter, said recently. “You knew he was going to be a leader.”

A decade later, Hammami has fulfilled that promise in the most unimaginable way. Some 8,500 miles from Alabama, on the eastern edge of Africa, he has become a key figure in one of the world’s most ruthless Islamist insurgencies. That guerrilla army, known as the Shabab, is fighting to overthrow the fragile American-backed Somali government. The rebels are known for beheading political enemies, chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning women accused of adultery. With help from Al Qaeda, they have managed to turn Somalia into an ever more popular destination for jihadis from around the world.

More than 20 of those fighters have come from the United States, many of them young Somali-Americans from a gritty part of Minneapolis. But it is Hammami who has put a contemporary face on the Shabab’s medieval tactics. In a recent propaganda video viewed by thousands on YouTube, he is shown leading a platoon of gun-toting rebels as a soundtrack of jihadi rap plays in the background.

He is identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, “the American,” and speaks to the camera with a cool, almost eerie confidence. “We’re waiting for the enemy to come,” Hammami whispers, a smile crossing his face. Later he vows, “We’re going to kill all of them.”

In the three years since Hammami made his way to Somalia, his ascent into the Shabab’s leadership has put him in a class of his own, according to United States law-enforcement and intelligence officials. While other American terror suspects have drawn greater publicity, Hammami exercises a more powerful role, commanding guerrilla forces in the field, organizing attacks and plotting strategy with Qaeda operatives, the officials said. He has also emerged as something of a jihadist icon, starring in a recruitment campaign that has helped draw hundreds of foreign fighters to Somalia. “To have an American citizen that has risen to this kind of a rank in a terrorist organization ­— we have not seen that before,” a senior American law-enforcement official said earlier this month.

Not long ago, the threat of American-bred terrorists seemed a distant one. Law-enforcement officials theorized that Muslims in the United States — by comparison with many of their European counterparts — were upwardly mobile, socially integrated and therefore less susceptible to radicalization. Perhaps the greatest proof of this came with the absence of domestic terrorist attacks following 9/11, a period that has brought Europe devastating homegrown hits in Madrid and London.

America is now at a watershed. In the last year, at least two dozen men in the United States have been charged with terrorism-related offenses. They include Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant driver in Denver who authorities say was conspiring to carry out a domestic attack; David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American from Chicago who is suspected of helping plan the 2008 attacks in Mumbai; and the five young men from Virginia who, authorities say, sought training in Pakistan to fight American soldiers in Afghanistan.

These cases have sent intelligence analysts scurrying for answers. The American suspects come from different backgrounds and socioeconomic strata, but they share much in common with Europe’s militants: they tend to be highly motivated, even gifted people who were reared in the West with one foot in the Muslim world. Others may see them as rigid or zealous, but they envision themselves as deeply principled, possessing what Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago, calls “an altruism gone wildly wrong.” While their religious piety varies, they are most often bonded by a politically driven anger that has deepened as America’s war against terrorism endures its ninth year.

The presence of Western troops in Afghanistan and Iraq has brought those conflicts closer for many Muslims in America. Through satellite television and the Internet, the distance between here and there — between Fort Hood, Tex., and Yemen, between Daphne, Ala., and Somalia — has narrowed. For Omar Hammami, the war in Iraq provided a critical spark as he turned toward militancy.

In an e-mail message in December, Hammami responded to questions, submitted to him through an intermediary, about his personal evolution and political views. “We espouse the same creed and methodology of Al Qaeda,” he wrote. Of Osama bin Laden, he said, “All of us are ready and willing to obey his commands.” Did Hammami, like bin Laden, consider America a legitimate target for attack? “It’s quite obvious that I believe America is a target,” he wrote.

OMAR HAMMAMI’S SISTER, Dena, is a petite 28-year-old woman with silky brown hair and a graceful manner. She lives with her husband and their baby daughter in an airy house overlooking a small American city, which she asked that I not identify for their protection. The walls are decorated with Dena’s whimsical paintings, which draw inspiration from Kandinsky. Wind chimes dangle over the front porch, by a sign that reads, “Hippies use side door.”

One morning in September, she was sitting in her kitchen when she opened her laptop, logged on to Facebook and saw a message that read, “Rolling farting leotard.” Her heart began to race.

Years earlier, Dena had put a note in her little brother’s school binder, trying to crack him up. She told him to picture a fat girl in a leotard, rolling across the floor and passing gas. It had become one of their many inside jokes. Now, she realized, it was her brother’s way of reaching out from Somalia, of saying, “It’s really me.” He had created a fictitious Facebook profile, listing his alma maters as Stanford and Harvard.

“Things are pretty good,” he wrote. He and his new Somali wife (“the wifey,” he called her) had a baby girl. “Sometimes marriage is up,” he wrote. “Sometimes it’s down. The lifestyle is not exactly normal for most.”

Hammami wouldn’t say where he was, but he urged Dena not to worry about him. He was prepared to meet death, he said. “I don’t do anything too dangerous except once every month or so,” he added. “It’s all in God’s hands.”

Hammami’s life in Somalia appears to be more precarious than he let on. He spends much of his time shuttling between villages in southern Somalia, where many of the Shabab’s camps are based, according to Somali intelligence officials. In addition to his role as a military tactician, they said, Hammami helps guide the Shabab’s recruitment strategy and management of money — exercising surprising power after landing in Somalia as a 22-year-old rookie. The Somali government is seeking increased American aid to fight the Shabab and may have reason to play up the threat of foreigners like Hammami. But they were adamant about his role. “This guy is dangerous,” says Abdullahi Mohamed Ali, the Somali minister of national security. “He’s a threat to the region. I want him to be eliminated.”

When Hammami engages in combat, he makes an impression on other militants, said a former Shabab commander, Sheikh Mohamed Sheikh Abdullahi Sheikh Mohamed. “He doesn’t blink in the face of the enemy,” said Mohamed, who recalled four battles in 2008 and 2009 in which he and Hammami took part. In combat, Hammami used a sharpshooter’s rifle, firing calmly and with precision, said Mohamed, who spoke to me by telephone this month from a government compound in Mogadishu after defecting to the government’s side. Somali officials said they were keeping him there for his protection.

Until recently, the few visible images of American jihadis were of young men on the margins: John Walker Lindh, a Californian loner who wandered into Afghanistan to join the Taliban; or Adam Gadahn, now a Qaeda spokesman, who grew up home-schooled on a goat farm and channeled his teenage energies into death-metal music. If Omar Hammami followed his own compass, others followed him. Years later, more than one of his classmates compared him to the incongruous high-school hero of the 1986 film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Hammami’s journey from a Bible Belt town in America to terrorist training camps in Somalia was pieced together from interviews with his parents, sister, best friends and law-enforcement officials, as well as hours of home videos and passages from his e-mail messages, journal entries and hundreds of his postings on an Internet forum. If anything has remained a constant in Hammami’s life, it is his striving for another place and purpose, which flickered in a poem he wrote when he was 12:

“My reality is a bore. I wish, I want, I need the wall to fall and the monster to let me pass, the leash to snap, the chains to break. . . .

“I’ve got a taste of glory, the ticket, but where is my train?”

DAPHNE SITS ALONG Alabama’s serene Mobile Bay, just north of the Gulf of Mexico. The town seems stopped in time. Colonial-style cottages and gazebos dot the bluffs. The wide, blacktopped streets are shaded by pecan trees and Southern maples. At dusk, the tide slaps the docks as fishermen loll, casting silhouettes against a golden sky.

Shafik Hammami was searching for a quiet American town when he left Syria in 1972. He was reared in Damascus, the oldest of nine children whose father ran an import-export business. Shafik wanted to study medicine and heard that small colleges in less-populated parts of the United States were best suited for immigrants, “so you don’t get lost in the shuffle,” he told me recently. By chance, a translator working in Damascus handed him a brochure for Faulkner State Community College in Bay Minette, not far from Daphne. He looked no farther.

At Faulkner, Shafik, then 20, stuck close to the handful of other Middle Eastern students, part of a wave of Arab immigrants who were ushered into the United States by looser immigration laws. With wavy black hair and halting English, he stood out in a place that was historically suspicious of outsiders. One evening, while driving through nearby Mobile, he came upon a group of men wearing white cones on their heads and asking for money, his first brush with the Ku Klux Klan.

But Alabama’s conservative Christian culture agreed with him. Most of the women he encountered didn’t drink or smoke. Those were the first things he liked about Debra Hadley, a perky high-school senior he met through friends. The daughter of a butcher, she had rosy cheeks and a fluttering laugh and rarely missed a Sunday service. Soon Debra and Shafik were engaged.

It did not violate Shafik’s Muslim faith to marry a Christian. Debra got her mother’s blessing after promising never to convert to Islam. They had a church wedding, followed by a Muslim ceremony in the reception hall. They each wondered if, eventually, the other might cede ground.

By the time Omar was born eight years later, his parents and sister had moved into a ranch house in Daphne, a town of 19,000 where cotton fields have given way to subdivisions with names like Plantation Hills. Shafik had become a civil engineer and was working at the Department of Transportation. Debra taught elementary school.

The first years of Omar’s life followed the cues of his mother’s Southern upbringing. Freckled and blond, he answered to Omie. He spent summer afternoons on his grandparents’ farm in nearby Perdido, shelling peas and eating watermelon on the porch. He lost himself in “Tom Sawyer.” His uncles taught him to hunt deer.

On Sundays, Omar, Dena and their mother settled into the wooden pews of Perdido Baptist Church, a tiny congregation whose preacher warned of hellfire and damnation. At first, Shafik had no idea. Debra told the kids to keep their churchgoing a secret. They also attended Bible camp in the summers (Omar won $10 for rattling off the names of all the books of the Old Testament). When he was 6, he voluntarily walked to the front of the church to be baptized. “I believed it; I wanted it,” he later told his friend Trey Gunter.

Shafik tried to teach his children Arabic and later Islam, but the lessons held little resonance. Syria remained a distant backdrop amid the Fourth of July fireworks, Halloween costumes and shrimp gumbo of their American youth. Omar had gone from calling his father Babba — Arabic for “father” — to Bubba. Still, the Hammami home remained culturally Muslim. They left their shoes at the door. Koranic inscriptions decorated the walls. Pork was forbidden. “It was like two different schools of thought under one roof,” Dena says. “Thunder and lightning.”

The children learned to adapt. So did their parents. In one of the family’s home videos, shot on Oct. 8, 1992, Shafik points the camera at a cake. “Today is Debra’s birthday,” he says in a Syrian accent that has acquired an Alabaman lilt. “We’re fixin’ to celebrate her birthday in a few minutes.” In the next shot, Debra stands by the cake, smiling brightly, as a Lebanese love ballad echoes through the house. Eight-year-old Omar licks frosting off the candles as his mother opens presents. She lifts a bottle of perfume to her nose.

“That’s worth getting old for, ain’t it?” Debra says with a laugh.

“I reckon,” Shafik answers from behind the camera.

A smirk crosses Omar’s face as he repeats, mockingly, “Ah reckin.”

That trademark smirk — the same one that would later appear in the Shabab’s propaganda — hinted early at Hammami’s delight in causing trouble. He was exceedingly smart but easily bored and short-tempered, once turning over his desk in second grade. His teachers tired of his endless questions. “He had a big mind in a small-minded place,” Dena says.

Hammami finally found a kindred soul in middle school. Kathleen Hirsch, his teacher in the gifted-student program, was a quirky Jewish woman who wore Ugg boots before they became popular and drove a bottle green Jaguar convertible. She turned her classroom into a salon, replacing the desks with sofas, brewing coffee and filling the shelves with Dylan Thomas and Gertrude Stein. She taught Hammami to “think outside of the box,” he later wrote.

He began to read voraciously, losing himself in “The Catcher in the Rye” and “1984” and even the dictionary. A natural debater, he was fiercely competitive, chiding himself for finishing second in a countywide speech contest. “He went over and over every minute detail, continually asking me what he had done wrong: How was his posture? Eye contact?” Hirsch, who taught Hammami for six years, recalled in a recent e-mail message. “He hated to lose.”

She found him introspective for his age; a seeker of weighty subjects. In a journal he kept at school, Hammami wrote: “I don’t believe war should exist. It doesn’t have a point.” In a later entry, on April 13, 1996, he described the Oklahoma bombing as “stupid,” adding, “I wish violence would vanish clear from the earth.”

LOOKING BACK ON their childhood, Dena remembers a pestering little brother who followed her like a shadow. She wore hemp necklaces and Birkenstocks and thought nothing of cutting class. Hammami, who idolized her, soon followed her lead, getting high on marijuana and mushrooms by eighth grade, friends recalled.

Shafik was always a strict father (he once washed out his son’s mouth with detergent, causing him to throw up). But as the kids entered adolescence, Shafik became consumed with trying to keep his daughter on what he saw as a respectable path. He forbade her from talking on the phone unsupervised. He ruled out prom and even insisted that she wear leggings during soccer practice to avoid exposing her legs.

Dena did her best to flout the rules, with her brother as her ready accomplice. He helped her trade phone calls with boys and sneak out of the house. She and Omar shared the intimacy of twins; each was the other’s witness to an upbringing that only they could understand.

Finally, when she turned 16, Dena decided she could no longer bear her father’s rules. She hugged her brother tightly as she left.

“Sorry I can’t take you with me,” she told him.

She moved in with a friend’s family and returned only years later, to visit. The episode forced Hammami, he later wrote, “to think for myself and make my own way.”

That fall, Hammami claimed his place as one of the more popular kids at Daphne High School. The jocks found him funny; the nerds, literary; the skateboarders, alluringly rebellious. Though he was short and rail thin, girls were drawn by his cocky bravado. He soon won over Lauren Stevenson, one of the most beautiful girls in school. “He could just command people with his energy,” she says.

Yet for all of his social triumph, Hammami was consumed with a profound internal conflict. He didn’t know whether to be Muslim or Christian. On rare trips to Damascus when they were little, Omar and Dena were warned by relatives that they would go to hell if they weren’t Muslim, Dena recalled. In Perdido, their mother’s family insisted that hell was reserved for non-Christians.

When he was 12, Hammami wrote in his journal, “Sometimes I get confused because the Bible says one thing and our textbooks and Darwin say another.” He had a hard time understanding how God could have a son. That same year, his father began urging him to study Islam.

Shafik had experienced his own religious renewal after drifting from his practice during college. There were no mosques in Daphne (the Chamber of Commerce lists 43 churches). But in nearby Mobile, the University of South Alabama had given rise to a small Muslim community of Palestinian, Pakistani and Egyptian professionals. By the time Omar was in high school, his father had become an active member of a growing mosque, the Islamic Society of Mobile, and helped found the area’s first Islamic school.

A trip to Damascus the summer before Hammami’s sophomore year would make a lasting impression on him. He loved the order of things: how his aunts waited on him, how his male cousins shared a “cohesiveness of brotherhood,” Stevenson, his high-school girlfriend, recalled. In photos of the trip, Hammami had traded in his khakis and polo shirts for a long cotton tunic and a prayer cap. A family video shows him bowing to Mecca in prayer one evening.

When he got back to Daphne, Hammami remained conflicted. One night before he went to sleep, he turned to God for guidance. “Slowly I started to incline toward Islam,” he later wrote to his sister, “and my heart became tranquil.”

But Hammami’s conversion was neither smooth nor straightforward. He was the president of his sophomore class. He treasured his Friday-night routine — the football game, the meal at Waffle House and the marathon session of GoldenEye on Nintendo. He would smoke a cigarette and then feel guilty. He was smitten with Stevenson yet stopped holding her hand. Soon Hammami began taking off on Fridays to attend his father’s mosque. He finally got permission to pray at school, kneeling opposite a cinder-block wall in the library as students stole wide-eyed glances.

NO ONE WAS more struck by Hammami’s transformation than his mother.

On a recent morning, Debra skipped about her sun-filled kitchen fixing a plate of grits. A chatty woman with lively brown eyes, she was well into her third cup of coffee. In the next room, an oak table was permanently set for dinner, a nod to her Southern upbringing. The cranberry walls of her tidy neo-Colonial were free of Christian relics and family photographs, in keeping with Muslim tradition.

Debra learned to walk a fine line when it came to religion. But Christianity remained the compass of her life. She called Shafik’s mosque “his church” and the Koran “his bible.” She wasn’t going to let her son defect without a fight. “Where are the verses about love in your bible?” she prodded him. They “argued and argued and argued,” she recalled. “Then he said, ‘That’s enough.’ ”

Like his mother, Hammami was stubborn. When he became convinced of something, he turned to convincing others. At Daphne High, he managed to persuade a handful of students, including his girlfriend, to explore Islam — a striking development at a school where Christian teenagers routinely gathered at the flagpole for prayer.

“He would say, ‘So if Jesus is God, who does he pray to?’ ” recalled his friend Bernie Culveyhouse. “And if you said, ‘God,’ he’d say, ‘Doesn’t that make Jesus a narcissist?’ ”

Culveyhouse soon converted. Stevenson decided it was not for her, and Hammami broke it off. His other friendships were already strained when, one afternoon in 2000, the subject in class turned to Osama bin Laden. Then a relatively obscure terrorist, bin Laden had claimed responsibility for the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One boy in the class suggested that bin Laden should be shot dead.

“What if I said that about Billy Graham?” Hammami demanded.

“Billy Graham is a peaceable preacher,” the boy, a Christian, recalled saying. “Osama bin Laden is a terrorist.”

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” Hammami replied.

By his junior year, Hammami had become a spectacle. He made a point of praying by the flagpole outside school yet refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, friends recalled. In class, he swore at Hirsch, his longtime teacher, assailing her for being Jewish. That spring, in another class, Hammami tried to choke a student who interrupted him as he was reciting the Koran, students recalled. Hammami was promptly suspended. With high grades and an A.C.T. score in the 93rd percentile, he skipped his senior year and enrolled at the University of South Alabama. There, he no longer prayed alone. He could walk to the mosque from campus, and he soon took over as president of the fledgling Muslim Student Association.

Soon after, the hijackers struck on 9/11, and local reporters began calling Hammami for comment. Publicly, he struck a measured tone, telling the school paper, “It’s difficult to believe a Muslim could have done this.” But he was caught off guard by the attacks and felt insufficiently knowledgeable about Islam, friends recalled. He set out to deepen his study and soon fell under the influence of Tony Salvatore Sylvester, a 35-year-old convert and preacher who was new in town.

Sylvester wore a thin blond beard and was missing his two front teeth. Brought up Catholic in the rural town of Doylestown, Pa., he found Islam in his early 20s while working as a jazz-fusion guitarist in Philadelphia. He had come to Mobile with his wife and six children, hoping to land a job at the Islamic school. By then, he was considered a prominent voice in the American Salafi movement.

SALAF, IN ARABIC, means “ancestors.” Followers of the movement, who are sometimes likened to Calvinist Protestants, advocate a strict return to the fundamentals of Islam. To purge their practice of modern influences, they try to emulate the founders of the faith — the contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad and the two generations that came after his death in A.D. 632. Young Salafis, for example, often dress in sandals and robes like those thought to have been worn in seventh-century Arabia.

The Salafist interpretation of Islamic doctrine tends to be literal and originalist. “They remind me a lot of Scalia in their approach to texts,” says Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton University. The movement is most prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt and Jordan but has also won adherents in the West among second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants who are seeking a more authentic Islam than that of their assimilative parents.

In the United States, the trend can be traced to a handful of Middle Eastern scholars who began preaching in the 1980s, gaining a small but vocal following in places like Arlington, Tex., and Syracuse, N.Y. Their teachings spread among prison converts and found footholds in Philadelphia and Detroit, where in the 1990s Tony Sylvester managed what was then the headquarters of a leading Salafi organization, the Quran and Sunnah Society.

Several of Sylvester’s students said in interviews that he subscribed to a nonviolent school, one that represented the majority of American Salafis. They tend to believe that Muslims should remain politically disengaged and take up arms only when called to duty in a Muslim-governed country; anything else represents rebellion against the government, which violates Islamic law.

But the Salafi movement also has its share of revolutionaries — the so-called Salafi jihadis (including Osama bin Laden), who argue that rebellion is permissible. Some members of Sylvester’s original circle broke with the group over the issue of rebellion, including Ali Al-Timimi, who was convicted in 2005 on terrorism-related charges in what is sometimes known as the Virginia paintball case.

Hammami plunged headlong into Salafism, mastering its nuances and lexicon. The movement gave him a new sense of brotherhood and discipline. But it was, above all, “an excuse to disobey his father,” recalls Joseph Stewart, a Muslim convert who became close to Hammami.

Shafik Hammami was by then the president of the Mobile mosque. In many ways, he embodied the Muslim-American mainstream. He held a comfortable job and wore a suit and tie to work. His son, meanwhile, began striding around campus in a scarlet red turban and a thobe, the ankle-length gown used by gulf Arabs. He spent his free time with a group of white Salafi converts whom immigrant Muslims at the mosque dismissed as “the Dixies.” The circle included Stewart, a burly 29-year-old who had started a carpet-cleaning business, and Bernie Culveyhouse, Omar’s friend from Daphne High.

A towering, lanky boy with sky blue eyes, Culveyhouse met Hammami playing basketball in fourth grade. He was brought up by a single mother who drank heavily and fashioned herself a “Harley honey,” disappearing into the night dressed head to toe in black leather. By the time Culveyhouse came to Islam, he was fighting marijuana and Ecstasy habits and failing out of school.

Everyone in the group took a new name. Culveyhouse chose Suhayb. Stewart called himself Yusuf. Hammami sometimes went by Abu Hafs, one of the venerated companions of the prophet. They distanced themselves from the mosque, meeting weekly with Sylvester to parse theology and questions of moral conduct.

Hammami soon began denouncing the militant Islamists he once defended. He came to believe that Muslims were suffering because they had lost their religion, Culveyhouse and Stewart recall. The solution, Hammami now argued, was not to take up arms but to engage in a spiritual jihad, practicing the faith with greater devotion. He and his friends ordered their lives around a strict code: they could not look at women, listen to music, be photographed or sleep with their backsides facing Mecca.

No one in the group was more dogmatic than Hammami. He insisted on eating with his bare right hand, as the prophet had, and wearing his pants above the ankle, a popular look among Salafis. Shafik found some of his son’s new convictions theologically debatable. The conflict between them, which had been simmering for some time, blew open when Omar refused to pose for a family photograph in April 2002. Shafik ordered him to move out.

In a town where 9/11 had prompted a thick canopy of American flags, Omar devoted himself to da’wah, the practice of spreading the Islamic faith. His style was to provoke inquiry. He strolled through Wal-Mart and Arby’s in his robe, hoping to attract questions from strangers. He drove a red Honda Civic with a sign on the back that read: “As Muslims we believe in one God. We don’t worship rocks, trees or men.”

More often than not, he and his fellow converts were met with disbelief.

“Everybody looked at us as if we were Satan,” Culveyhouse recalls.

One afternoon, a group of young men in a pickup truck approached Hammami and Culveyhouse near a pier south of Daphne, where they sometimes read the Koran.

“This is the stick I have for boys who wear dresses,” one of the men warned them, waving a miniature baseball bat.

In a flash, Hammami reached into his car and grabbed the broken-off handle of a wooden shovel, Culveyhouse recalls.

“And this is the stick I have for faggots,” he shot back.

Throughout his religious transformation, Hammami kept much of his former self intact. Some nights, he and Culveyhouse darted around the mosque in their robes, sparring with invisible light sabers in homage to “Star Wars.” He continued to run red lights and rack up speeding tickets, refusing to rise for a judge in traffic court.

Above all, he remained close to his sister, Dena, who was dating a dreadlocked Deadhead (she later married him barefoot, wearing a crown of daisies). When Dena and Omar spent time together — he in his tunic, she in her “Jesus sandals” — they seemed blind to their differences, reverting to their sibling code of inside jokes and silly songs. “I wanted to keep how we always were,” she says.

But aside from his sister and mother, Hammami had nothing to do with women. Much of the time, he and his friends were tormented by sexual frustrations, two of them recall. Hammami would stare at a woman on the street and then chastise himself for hours, Stewart says. He surfed Islamic Internet forums in search of a wife. His father promised to help him marry a Syrian woman provided that Hammami completed his degree in computer studies. But in December 2002, he dropped out of college, saying that he could no longer bear to be in the company of women.

Over the next few years, Hammami, Culveyhouse and the other Mobile Salafis traveled around the country attending Islamic conferences. With Sylvester, they opened a small Muslim bookstore in Mobile, opposite a storage lot. Hammami worked to master Arabic and talked of becoming an Islamic scholar. In the meantime, he had to earn a living, and few jobs meshed with his piety. He loaded trucks, cleaned carpets and sold light bulbs.

For a time, Hammami and Culveyhouse took inventory at Wal-Mart. Their boss, an ex-Marine, tolerated their odd look (they tucked their pants into their socks), but he was frustrated by their demands: they refused to touch alcohol, pork, Christmas cards and even dolls. The boss finally assigned them to the women’s clothing section.

“I looked at Omar and said, ‘Man, we can’t do anything in life, can we?’ ” Culveyhouse recalls. They quit that day. Soon after, Culveyhouse left for the bustling Muslim crossroads of Toronto, where he had found a wife. The following year, Hammami joined him, hoping to do the same.

HAMMAMI FOUND TORONTO — with its labyrinth of mosques, Islamic bookstores and halal grocers — enthralling. He took an apartment near Culveyhouse in the western part of the city and found a job delivering milk to Somali housewives. Living in Canada, Hammami began to see his country through a new lens. The war in Iraq was deeply unpopular at the mosques and coffee shops he frequented. Being an American invited a stream of questions and commentary for which Hammami felt unprepared, Culveyhouse recalled.

For years, Hammami had tuned out current events, dismissing politics as dunya — a worldly distraction from his Islamic practice. One afternoon in April, he and Culveyhouse dropped by an Islamic bookstore. The owner, an Afghan, told them to “pray for the people of Fallujah.” Months earlier, the U.S. military had invaded the Iraqi city, an insurgency stronghold, for the second time.

“What’s going on?” Hammami said.

Over the next few months, Hammami became consumed with events in Iraq and Afghanistan. He began subscribing to conspiracy theories about 9/11, Dena and Culveyhouse recall. He soon found himself rethinking his nonmilitant Salafi stance.

“I was finding it difficult to reconcile between having Americans attacking my brothers, at home and abroad, while I was supposed to remain completely neutral, without getting involved,” he wrote in the December e-mail message responding to questions posed to him through an intermediary.

Hammami concluded that his Salafi mentors had been “hiding many parts of the religion that have a direct relationship to jihad and politics,” he wrote. He began searching for guidance on the Internet, Culveyhouse says, discovering a documentary about the life of Amir Khattab, a legendary jihadist who fought in Chechnya. The documentary traces Khattab’s evolution as a promising Saudi student who gave up a life that “any young man would desire” to embrace a higher purpose. Hammami was mesmerized, Culveyhouse recalls.

“Once you’ve made that step, it’s a gateway,” Culveyhouse says. “Once you’ve legitimized the jihad in Chechnya, you’re compelled to legitimize the jihad in other places as well.”

Back then, Hammami and Culveyhouse talked about jihad in the way that star football players at Daphne High School dreamed about the N.F.L. The idea remained romantic and hypothetical. Hammami assured friends, for instance, that he would go to Syria to fight if the United States ever invaded.

But action required the right set of circumstances. Hammami remained unimpressed by most of the militant Islamist groups he studied: he still disapproved of how Al Qaeda attacked civilians, and he saw the insurgency in Iraq as too secular, Culveyhouse said. Only a “pure jihad” ­— one that was carried out in defense of Muslim land with the purpose of creating an Islamic state — met Hammami’s standard.

Besides, Hammami had more pressing matters at hand. He was desperate to marry. Culveyhouse arranged an introduction to his Somali sister-in-law, Sadiyo Mohamed Abdille. A tall, wisecracking 19-year-old who wore skinny jeans and played basketball, Sadiyo grew up in Toronto with Culveyhouse’s wife, Ayan, after their family fled Somalia’s internecine violence. Hammami found her amusing and eager to learn more about Islam, Ayan recalled. Within a matter of weeks, he persuaded her to socialize with only women and to wear the abaya, a cloaklike garment. In March 2005, just two months after their first meeting, they married in a small, spartan ceremony.

With limited prospects in Toronto, Hammami and Culveyhouse talked quixotically of making hijra — migration — to a Muslim land. Culveyhouse proposed Egypt, where they could study Islam at the revered Al-Azhar University in Cairo. In September, Hammami and his pregnant wife boarded an airplane with Culveyhouse’s family, including his formerly Harley-riding mother, who had also converted to Islam.

The two families settled in Alexandria, Egypt, which they found disappointingly secular. When the applications to Al-Azhar fell through, Culveyhouse and his family returned to the United States. “I didn’t want to continue down this fool’s path,” he says. Hammami felt betrayed, Culveyhouse recalls, and they drifted apart.

Alone with his young wife and newborn daughter, Hammami seemed overwhelmed, Dena recalls. He found freelance work translating Islamic texts into English but had trouble supporting his family. In the December e-mail message, he wrote that he was yearning to live in a country “where Shariah was being implemented completely.”

In April 2006, Hammami joined an online discussion forum called Islamic Networking. Using the alias “al-Mizzi,” a relative recalls, Hammami began communicating with the administrator of the forum, an American convert who also happened to live in Egypt. The convert, Daniel Maldonado, was a 27-year-old from New Hampshire who moved there with his wife and children the previous year.

Hammami and Maldonado soon met in person, relatives recall, and began venturing into poor neighborhoods to attend underground mosques. That summer, Hammami wrote to two Muslim friends, saying he had met “a pious brother” and was planning “a trip.” He seemed to be communicating in code.

“Our family members to the south need doctors,” he told the friends, who described the exchanges only on the condition of anonymity.

When Hammami discussed Chechnya with them years earlier, “doctor” was their word for “those who make jihad,” one friend says. By the “south,” Hammami seemed to be referring to Somalia; he had been sending them news articles about the remarkable events unfolding there.

A BOOMERANG-SHAPED country on the Horn of Africa, Somalia had been consumed by a catastrophic civil war since 1991. What was not destroyed by famine and drought was plundered by warlords and pirates. Amid the chaos, an Islamist movement gave rise to an insurgency that took control of Mogadishu in June 2006. The insurgents — known as the Islamic Courts Union — promised a new unity under the banner of Islam and brought an unfamiliar peace to the streets of the capital.

Officials in Washington found the developments troubling. The group’s military wing — the Shabab, which means “youth” in Arabic — was said to be sheltering foreign Al Qaeda operatives. They were calling for a jihad against neighboring Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian country and longtime enemy. Ethiopian troops gathered at the border, threatening an invasion with backing from the United States. News of the conflict quickly spread in jihadist chat rooms, as bin Laden called upon Muslims to join in Somalia’s fight.

From Egypt, Hammami followed the events closely. He was convinced that “jihad had become an obligation upon me,” he wrote in his December e-mail message. He wanted to help his “captive brothers and sisters” while helping himself “obtain the highest rank available” as a Muslim. (Jihadists believe that the greatest rewards in the afterlife are granted to them.) On their Internet forum, Hammami and Maldonado made impassioned pleas for action without directly referring to Somalia.

“Where is the desire to do something amazing?” Hammami wrote on Aug. 7, 2006. “Where is the urge to get up and change yourself — not to mention the world and other issues further off?”

“Stop sticking to the earth,” he continued, “and let your soul fly!”

Secretly, Maldonado and Hammami began planning to leave for Somalia, according to a written statement Maldonado later provided to U.S. investigators. On the morning of Nov. 6, Hammami woke his mother, who was visiting from Alabama, and kissed her on the cheek. He told her that he was going to Dubai for a few days to look for a job. “I love you,” he said.

Several days later, he called his apartment in Alexandria and told his wife, Sadiyo, that he was in fact in Somalia. Sadiyo, who agreed to answer my questions through her sister Ayan, found the story odd. Hammami told her that he traveled to Somalia because he wanted to meet her relatives. Indeed he was staying with Sadiyo’s grandmother in Mogadishu. Yet he seemed in no rush to leave. In other phone calls, he told Sadiyo and his parents that he was stranded because someone stole his passport.

Shafik and Debra scrambled to help their son, contacting the F.B.I. in Mobile, a local congressman and the State Department. They were told nothing could be done because the United States did not have diplomatic relations with Somalia. They tried to arrange for Hammami to cross the border, into Kenya or Djibouti, where a new passport could be issued.

Soon after, thousands of Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia and swiftly gained control of Mogadishu. Leaders of the Islamic Courts Union fled the country, while their military wing, the Shabab, retreated to the south and mounted a new rebellion aimed at driving the Ethiopians out. Without a word to his family, Hammami vanished. It is not clear who connected him to the Shabab, but in the December e-mail message, he wrote, “I made it my goal to find those guys should I make it to Somalia,” adding that he “signed up for training.” Meanwhile, his friend Maldonado, who had also enlisted with the Shabab, was picked up by a multinational counterterrorism team along the Somalia-Kenya border. He has since been convicted in the United States for receiving training from a foreign terrorist organization and is serving a 10-year sentence.

Over the next few months, Mogadishu descended into a hellish war zone. That May, Hammami suddenly reappeared at the grandmother’s apartment, asking for a phone number to reach his wife, who had moved back to Toronto. Over the phone, Hammami told Sadiyo that he was still trying to leave Somalia, Ayan said. A month later, he called with a different story. He wanted his wife and daughter to join him.

“He was saying: ‘It’s so wonderful. There’s going to be an Islamic state,’ ” Ayan recalled Sadiyo telling her. “He was making it this utopia of happiness.”

THE PROMISE OF an Islamic state, and by extension a caliphate, or Islamic world order, has long been the anthem of the global jihadist movement. It is central to the ideology of Al Qaeda, which has allied itself with smaller militant groups as its financing and core leadership have come under assault.

Al Qaeda offers these groups a powerful brand; the groups offer Al Qaeda an expanded platform. Yet the exact nature and significance of Al Qaeda’s connection to the Shabab remain unclear. The majority of the Shabab’s fighters are Somalis, many of whom were drawn to the movement by nationalist fervor (including some of the first Somali-American recruits). A smaller contingent of foreign fighters — young men like Hammami — joined as part of the global jihad. Rookie recruits from the United States and Europe would seem to offer little but cannon fodder to their battle-hardened Somali counterparts. But Westerners bring the Shabab prestige and possible financing from abroad. They also bring their passports — with which they could conceivably return to cities like Sydney, New York or London to carry out attacks.

When Hammami joined the Shabab in late 2006, he had no known military training. Like other foreign fighters, he quickly fell ill, probably with malaria, he told Dena in e-mail messages and phone calls. He started reaching out to her the following summer, after his wife in Toronto asked for a divorce. He never disclosed what he was doing, but he seemed to have little power: he had to ask permission to make phone calls, he told Dena.

But over time, Hammami caught the attention of his superiors. He brought an unusual skill set: he was articulate, computer savvy, well organized and fluent in Arabic. “He has that charisma,” says an American law-enforcement official. Hammami came to be seen as an asset by two Qaeda-linked militants, the official said: Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan.

Mohammed, who is also known as Haroun Fazul, is believed to be Al Qaeda’s longtime chief in East Africa. A native of the Comoros Islands off Mozambique, he is accused of organizing the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that left more than 200 dead. He also is wanted for the bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel and the unsuccessful attempt to shoot down an Israeli charter jet in Mombasa, Kenya. Nabhan, a Kenyan of Yemeni descent, was also suspected in both attacks. He was killed in Somalia last September in a daylight raid by a helicopter-borne team of American Special Operations troops.

In October 2007 — less than a year after Hammami landed in Somalia — he made his public debut as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki. In an interview with Al Jazeera, he stared confidently into the camera, a thin, green scarf concealing half of his face. “Oh, Muslims of America, take into consideration the situation in Somalia,” he began in English. “After 15 years of chaos and oppressive rule by the American-backed warlords, your brothers stood up and established peace and justice in this land.”

Over the next two years, Hammami’s stature in the Shabab continued to rise as the group launched suicide attacks and ruled in fear. Where its rebels held sway, they carried out public floggings, amputations and beheadings in the name of Shariah, alienating many. Hammami gave no indication that he was troubled by such punishments. “Human rights,” he said in an audio recording released by the Shabab last July, is “the Western form of democracy which cannot be reconciled with Islam.”

By the summer of 2008, Hammami was leading military strikes in the field — including a deadly ambush on Ethiopian troops that the Shabab captured on the video now popular on YouTube, American law-enforcement officials say. Among the fighters in the ambush were several of the Somali-Americans from Minneapolis, officials said, including Shirwa Ahmed, an aloof 26-year-old college dropout. Three months after the ambush, on Oct. 28, Ahmed blew himself up in northern Somalia, becoming the first known American suicide bomber. Senior American and Somali intelligence officials say that Hammami helped organize that attack — along with four others the same day that together left more than 20 dead.

The Shabab continued to lose support after Ethiopia withdrew from Somalia last January, and a new president — Sheik Sharif Ahmed, a former leader of the Islamist insurgency — began paving the way for a democratic Islamic state. Around that time, Hammami called Dena with a stunning announcement. “In the next video, I’m going to show my face,” he said. “It makes more of a statement if my face is uncovered.”

The 31-minute video, released by the Shabab last March, is a veritable homage to Hammami. He is shown running in slow motion, a line of fighters behind him, as a jihadist rap song plays in the background. He reads to them from the Koran, moving in and out of Arabic while stroking his beard. He then lectures them in English, with what struck his old friend Bernie Culveyhouse as an “E.S.L. accent.”

“The only reason we’re staying here,” Hammami tells the recruits, “away from our families, away from the cities, away from — you know — ice, candy bars, all these other things, is because we’re waiting to meet with the enemy.”

BACK IN DAPHNE, Debra Hammami stared at the video in shock.

She had long known that her son was “in the wrong hands.” Since Shafik first went to the F.B.I. in 2006, he had spent countless hours answering their questions.

But it was something else to see Omar on her laptop. She studied his face, replaying the same images again and again, trying to decode his mental and physical state. His cheeks were gaunt; his eyes, glassy. “He looks like a homeless person,” said Debra, whose husband first spotted the video while searching a Somali Web site for news of his son.

Emotions in the Hammami house had run like a fickle stream, from anger to grief to dread. Shafik talked about his son the way a parent talks about a child lost to a cult. Terrorism, he says, “goes against everything I taught him.”

Bernie Culveyhouse was also at a loss. He said he could understand the logic of defending Muslim land from invaders. But it was beyond him how Hammami had come to align himself with a group that attacks civilians and supports Al Qaeda. Both he and Joseph Stewart remained Muslim but not Salafi. They had “grown up,” as they put it. They were back in school, pursuing professional degrees. Like the Hammamis, they kept quiet about the F.B.I.’s investigation, but they assumed it was only a matter of time before the case became public.

The new Shabab video generated a burst of public speculation about the identity of the mysterious American. Hammami’s high-school girlfriend, Lauren Stevenson, caught a glimpse of the video on the news in April and instantly recognized him, watching aghast. He seemed like a shell of the guy who took her to homecoming, a boutonniere pinned to his lapel. “When you look in his eyes, it’s just dead,” she says.

The story finally broke on Sept. 4, with Fox News reporting that Hammami had been charged with terrorism offenses in a sealed federal indictment. Reporters descended on the Hammamis’ home and Shafik’s mosque. The local newspaper swiftly identified Shafik as a government employee. “Waterboard him!” one reader demanded on the paper’s Web site.

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Shafik and Debra did their best to keep a low profile. One afternoon in October, they sat opposite each other in their living room, picking at a silver tray of dates and baklava. Their two religions, the ocean between them, had offered the same salve: the belief in God’s preordained plan. “You take solace in knowing that it’s in God’s hands,” said Shafik, sunken in his armchair, as Debra nodded. “And there is nothing you could have done to change it.”

DENA SEES OMAR in her dreams.

“Sometimes he is emaciated and about to die,” she said one recent afternoon, as her 19-month-old daughter toddled about the house. “Sometimes he is coming back to hang out with me.”

The last three years have also been something of a surreal dream. Dena has come to expect the sudden rap of F.B.I. agents at her door. She suspects that her phone is tapped. She is used to feeling exposed and, at the same time, walled off. “The fact that my brother is a terrorist — it’s not something you can talk to anyone about,” she said.

Ultimately, she said, “you can either accept him or disown him. Those are the choices.” Dena chose to stay in touch, as much as she abhors violence. She found news accounts of the Shabab deeply disturbing. On Oct. 27, 2008, Shabab militiamen dragged Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13-year-old rape victim accused of adultery, into a stadium filled with spectators and stoned her to death, according to Amnesty International.

Sometimes months would pass with no word from Hammami. When he reached out through Facebook in early September, he told Dena that he hoped his infamy would prompt people to ask, “How did this guy become that?”
They can’t blame it on poverty or any of that stuff,” he continued. “They will have to realize that it’s an ideology and it’s a way of life that makes people change. They will also have to realize that their political agendas need to be fixed.”

Dena tried to temper her reply.

“I think it’s admirable to stand up for what you believe in, but it gets hairy when you affect the lives of others,” she wrote.

Hammami responded that he understood how strange it might seem to “fight for beliefs,” especially as he had once been a liberal (under the influence, he wrote, of the teacher he still referred to as “Mrs. Hirsch”). But he had come to the realization that “we don’t live in a utopian society.”

“When I came here I saw that firsthand,” he wrote. “There are villages that live in a constant state of war between rival tribes. There are roads that people cannot pass except with fear of being robbed or raped.”

He and his fellow fighters, he wrote, are helping those people. “Regardless of what the media says,” he added, “we do not kill innocents.”

Throughout the exchange, Hammami seemed to slide back and forth between the boy from Daphne and the jihadi propagandist. He asked his sister for news about his grandmother in Perdido (“Maw Maw,” he called her) and signed off “later tater” and “I love you.”

They soon lost contact again. These days, his family and friends wonder what will become of him.

“There is no out,” Dena said. “He’s in too deep.”

On Dec. 3, a suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up at a graduation ceremony for medical students in Mogadishu, killing nearly two dozen people, including three Somali government officials. Somali and American authorities said the attack was carried out by the Shabab. That same month, Hammami seemed more taken by his cause than ever. “I have become a Somali you could say,” he wrote in the December e-mail message. “I hear bullets, I dodge mortars, I hear nasheeds” — Islamic songs — “and play soccer. Sometimes I live in the bush with camels, sometimes I live the five-star life. Sometimes I walk for miles in the terrible heat with no water, sometimes I ride in extremely slick cars. Sometimes I’m chased by the enemy, sometimes I chase him!”

“I have hatred, I have love,” he went on. “It’s the best life on earth!”

Andrea Elliott is a reporter for The New York Times. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for a series of articles about an imam in Brooklyn.

Abdi Aynte contributed reporting to this story from Washington D.C.

Source: New York Times

Direct Flights to Somaliland Launched

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HARGEISA, 1 February 2010 (Somalilandpress) – Travelling to Somaliland is now easier with the launch of direct flights to the city of Hargeisa in the country by East African Safari Air Express.

This follows the signing of a bilateral trade agreement between the airline and the Government of Somaliland last year.

However, no bilateral agreements have been put in place between the Kenyan government and the country

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The firm will be operating scheduled flights twice a week, on Tuesday and Saturday’s.

Mr Hussein Ali Duale, minister of Finance of Somaliland, said this is bound to open the country to trade from the East African Community.

The two-hour flight from JKIA cuts down on a tedious 12-hour journey of connecting flights.

Source: Daily Nation

Special report: The rise of 'the African Taliban'.

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The plaque on the State House building in Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, is an oblique commemoration to an event that never occurred. It was built in 1952 for a visit to the then British protectorate by the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen never came. These days the half-ruined structure is known for another reason than as the former seat of gin-sipping British colonial officials.

The grounds, including parkland once laid out as a golf course, have bred domed shelters – “bool” they are called – thatched with plastic and segments of scavenged cloth. In places, walls have been tiled with panels of flattened cooking oil cans, which in their repetitions resemble Warhol prints. The bools are low, windowless huts through which the harsh light bleeds messily at the sewn seams to illuminate the kicked up dust. The occupants of this camp sit at the far end of the planet’s social spectrum from the State House’s first intended guest. Not a monarch and her retinue but refugees from war.

The huts are so densely packed together they block the State House from sight. It is barely visible when approaching the camp, but the monument marks the centre of a labyrinth of winding, narrow lanes where cockerels scrabble. When I reach it at last, I find the State House is not occupied itself save for a single wing of outbuildings. Its rooms are open to the sky, floors scattered with detritus. Glassless window frames swing in the wind.

But it is far from empty. Children clamber over walls of square-cut honey-coloured stone, partly demolished by fighting in the city in 1988. They sit on the floor of what once was a grand reception room to play complex games with piles of pale round pebbles, tossed and snatched from the air by competing hands. Outside, a few young men sit on a veranda painted with graffiti, listening to music. They pull jackets over their heads to hide their faces at our approach and warn against photography.

It is a clue to the identity of many living inside the State House camp: the still anxious victims of the war in the south, in Somalia proper, the country from which Somaliland – recognised by no other state – split in 1991. Victims of the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. And conflict, even at a distance from the running gun battles on Mogadishu’s streets, imposes its own hierarchies.

The most recent refugees, the poorest, live at the periphery, farthest from the State House itself. Which is why it is surprising to find Sarida Nour Ahmed, aged 31, a recent arrival, occupying one of the building’s few habitable rooms, a few metres square. Once used to house the British governor’s staff, these days it is roofed with corrugated metal which leaks in the rain. A bool would be much better, she explains.

Sarida fled from Somalia in March, abandoning three of her 10 children in the chaos of flight. “The situation was unbearable. Mortars were landing during the day. At night there was torture, rape and beatings. At first we thought it was because of the Ethiopian invasion. But things got worse. They came to our houses. Robbed and raped.” I ask her who? The Shabaab, she says. The Shabaab. The word means literally “the youth”. And it is the story of the victims of the Shabaab’s continuing war that I have come to the camps of Somaliland to find.

Once comprising the northernmost part of Somalia’s failed state, for the past two decades Somaliland has proclaimed itself an independent republic. Stable, if not prosperous, it has become a refuge for Somalis from the south, most making their way up north from Mogadishu. For those from Somalia’s southernmost towns it is a dangerous journey that can take several months, with long stretches on foot.

The Shabaab was once one of the Islamist militias attached to the Islamic Courts Union, which, in 2006, brought a semblance of peace to a country that had been wracked by years of internecine violence and warlordism. The Courts were routed after a few months by a western-supported Ethiopian invasion. Now the Ethiopians have gone, too, and a fundamentalist hardcore of the Shabaab is resurgent, Somalia’s most bitter tormentor – Africa’s own Taliban.

Its masked men, accused by America of being proxies for al-Qaeda, enforce their own notions of justice, seizing suspected collaborators with the feeble new government from their houses and murdering those it regards as opponents, including dozens of local journalists and aid workers. Its feared and secret sharia courts have sentenced women to be buried and stoned to death for adultery or publicly beaten for infringing strict Islamic dress codes. Somalis say that, beyond the facade of harsh and rigid piety, the group robs and kills and sexually assaults with impunity.

Arriving at the State House camp, accompanied by Oxfam, which is helping to support its residents, I ask to talk to the most recent arrivals from Mogadishu and the south. A group of women lead me through a ruined stone doorframe and across a little yard. It is here, in a dark, bare room smelling of smoke from her cooking fire, that I first meet Sarida. In Mogadishu, she tells me, she and her husband had a “proper house” with five rooms. They owned a little shop and sold cold juices and vegetables in the market. These days she washes clothes and skivvies, when she can, to feed her children. She cannot remember the last time they ate meat.

She describes the violence in fragmented snatches that reflect the chaos in a city where all sides – government, African Union peacekeepers, Ethiopians and the Shabaab – fight their pitched battles over civilian neighbourhoods, not caring who is killed.

“First the Shabaab fought with the Ethiopians. When the Ethiopians left,” recalls Sarida, “we thought then that Somalis would come together. But it didn’t happen.” What happened instead, she explains, is that the Shabaab moved to impose its values on Somalis in the large areas it controls, bringing more violence as it did. “Women get 90 lashes even for wearing ‘light’ clothes,” says Sarida. “And for not wearing the veil. But the veil costs money. I didn’t have money for a veil…” It is a complaint I hear from many women.

Sarida describes the worst day of her life. She does not cry. Not quite. It was a day that began with mortars falling on her neighbour Amina’s house and ended with the loss of three of her children. “To see her in pieces…” she loses her train of thought for a moment. “Mogadishu is a big city. You used to be able to run to another neighbourhood [to escape the fighting], but the fighting was all over the city. I grabbed the children that were close to me and fled with the clothes I was wearing.” Her eldest children, aged 12, 11 and 10 – nowhere in sight in the family’s panicked impulse to flee – were left behind. So too was Sarida’s husband, Abdi Khader. I ask the children’s names. She says quietly: “Mohammed, Abdi and Hussein. I cheat myself thinking my husband might have got to the children and rescued them.”

But Abdi Khader does not know where Sarida ran to. Or where she is living now. Since that day, she hasn’t heard from him. “If I could turn back the clock I would have my husband and my children here with me. But I can’t go back.”

I had first heard about the brutality of the methods of the Shabaab from Zam Zam Abdi, a courageous 28-year-old Somali women’s rights campaigner forced out of Mogadishu by the group. We had met in London almost a year before. Then, Abdi had told me of the note the group posted on her office door: “Stop what you are doing or we will act. Yes or no?” Abdi knew what it meant. It was a phrase gaining notoriety in Mogadishu even then. She had heard the same message delivered on the radio by a pro-Shabaab Imam, received it in emails and in anonymous calls. The same words had been pinned to the body of one of Abdi’s friends, murdered by the Shabaab.

It was Abdi’s words that had impelled me to Somaliland to search for the group’s victims. And it was to Burao that I was heading – Somaliland’s second city, and home to the worst of the camps.

The road to Burao takes a sweeping dog leg from Hargeisa down to the coast, before cutting back inland again, crossing an arid plain punctuated by long mesas, hazy in the distance. Visible, too, in places are the remains of Somalia’s other wars: wrecked Russian armoured vehicles, rusted and buried to their axles in the sand. Somaliland’s camps, however, are a reminder of a more recent conflict: America’s war on terror. Far from weakening the Shabaab, the US intervention only appears to have made it stronger.

Beyond the Soviet-built port at Berbera we overtake the Hargeisa bus bound for Mogadishu. It is empty on this leg, but will return full of those fleeing the south. My driver tells me it is good business for those willing to take the risk and drive a truck to Elasha Biyaha, 11 miles from Somalia’s capital, at the heart of the Afgoye Corridor, and take on a human cargo desperate to escape.

The Afgoye Corridor. A place synonymous with misery and degradation, hunger and disease. A 20-mile long stretch of road heading west out of Mogadishu, it is home to the world’s largest concentration of displaced persons, over half a million living beside the road, many subsisting on boiled leaves. Yet faced with the choice of Mogadishu’s gunmen and the horrors of Afgoye, it is Afgoye that many are forced to choose. According to Oxfam, some who end up living there have been displaced three or four times before.

Arriving in Burao I meet one of the luckier ones, Liban Ali Ahmad, 21, who escaped through Elasha Biyaha and the Corridor on a crowded truck a year ago. Lucky, because in his extended family, Liban, a student, could count on two aunts born in Burao who paid for his family to escape and who housed them in the town. Lucky too because he did not have to live in the Corridor, only navigate one of the world’s most dangerous roads.

Liban is studying in his green-painted bedroom when I call to visit. He is tall and slim, with sideburns shaved into long slender blades that follow his cheekbones. There are English books stacked in one corner. He cannot afford the fees for the local university where he would like to do a course in business management, so he teaches himself in his room, furnished only with a mattress.

In Mogadishu, he tells me, his four-times widowed mother was a “khat lady” selling kilo “trees” of the narcotic stems imported from Ethiopia, where it is grown. Her business paid for a rented house in Wada Jir district, close to the airport. “It was bad there because the war was everywhere,” Liban remembers. He seems calm as he tells his story, until I notice his hands held in his lap, fingers weaving an invisible cat’s cradle of anxiety. After he finished secondary school Liban worked as a private tutor, teaching children at home who could not go to school – Arabic, maths and Somalian.

“I tried for two or three months,” he says. “It didn’t work out.” The families of the children Liban was teaching were fleeing the city, until most of his neighbourhood was empty. “There was supposed to be a ceasefire. But there was fighting and the schools were all closed. So my brother said he wanted to see if the school was open. It wasn’t. He climbed into a tree near to our house to play. That’s when he was shot.”

He calls out into the corridor for 14-year-old Ayanle, a shy and skinny teenager, blind in one white and pupil-less eye. Liban gently helps his brother out of his shirt and then a T-shirt, to show where the bullet went in, piercing Ayanle’s chest and bursting through his back. The wounds have healed and puckered to small, dark deformities. “Recently he became sick again,” Liban explains: “Because of the bullet.” Even after Ayanle’s shooting the family tried to stay in their home. “Those six months were terrifying. Even when the children came here they were still terrified. They would ask: ‘When are the bullets coming?'”

In Wada Jir they could not go to the marketplace for days. The residents within his neighbourhood were given a 10-minute warning by the Shabaab when the fighting would begin. Told not to move. Not to leave their houses.

“Finally we were trapped in our house for seven days. The smallest children were lying like they were dead. We couldn’t give them water. Not fit for humans to drink. In the end I risked my life to go out to get water and something for the kids to eat. We had been discussing it for ages, whether we should escape. That time – those seven days – were the final exam. We decided to leave.”

Almost the last to leave their neighbourhood, the family headed for Elasha Biyaha and the Afgoye Corridor with $300, donated by an uncle, to pay for their escape. It was left to Liban to arrange it. He hired a taxi first to take him through the fighting to the Corridor, to hire a truck to take the family out. “It was risky. We left while there was still fighting going on. Some of the vehicles hit mines and exploded. You either leave safely or end like this,” he adds bleakly.

The camps in Burao are ugly places. There are no schools or health facilities. Not even proper sanitation. Privately owned, the residents are charged to occupy their huts and draw water from the solitary well. The 15 May camp is the worst: its huts border a field covered with rubbish, where camels are herded beneath the trees. On one visit I hear the sound of drumming, and enter a hut to find it crowded with men and women at a Sufi ceremony to drive spirits from a woman kneeling on the floor, pungent incense wafting through the hut.

In her bool nearby, Quresh Ise Nour has a baby wrapped in a pink blanket in her arms, born a week before on the road to Burao, hair slicked wet with sweat. Tradition demands that Quresh stays indoors, confined, for 40 days. Without a husband to support her, she must rely on other women from the camp, who go to Burao to beg, to bring her food. When the pickings are slim, or non-existent, Quresh cannot eat, cannot produce enough breast milk and her baby goes hungry. Her hut is a new one; the older ones, with their multiple layers of fabric, are better, she explains, because they are cooler.

Quresh is the camp’s most recent arrival. Her husband was killed in the fighting in Mogadishu. “He was a casual worker. He left in the morning to go to work with his wheelbarrow. He was away for only four hours,” she says, not quite believing what could happen in so short a period of time. “Some friends he used to work with brought his body back in his own barrow. His name was Mohammad Hassan Ali.” Fleeing Mogadishu, she ran with her children to Afgoye.

“You would always hear the bullets. Then everyone would try to run. When you would get back to your home the mortar shells would land on the huts. It is because the Shabaab would use the bools for their defences. The government forces would come in vehicles and uniforms. The Shabaab would be in civilian clothes with rifles and RPGs. They controlled the area we were in. They would mine all the routes that they believed the government troops might enter by. You can’t tell anyone,” she explains, seriously. “They ask all the time: ‘Where are you going?’ Their faces are covered with scarves so you only see their eyes. Most of the time I stayed indoors.” Because of the mines, the African Union troops would not come into the camp. “They would come close and mortar where we lived, so the Shabaab would say: ‘These are bad people’. But with the Shabaab you never got kind words.”

I start to understand how the Shabaab work. Others tell me of masked young men with megaphones walking by the houses, shouting out the rules. I hear stories of men taken from their homes and later found shot. All blamed on the Shabaab. A woman called Busharo tells me how the men arrived in her hut at night asking for her husband. Not finding him, they burned down her home.
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Quresh says: “If you don’t have a hijab, the Shabaab come to you. They came to me. I told them my husband was dead and I had no money. They ran into my house. I thought there must have been fighting. They said: “Woman, why are you not wearing a veil?” There were two of them with a whip made from woven tyre rubber. They hit me on the back and buttocks. Even now you can see the marks. A month later I left.”

The stories of the Shabaab’s cruelties accumulate as I tour the camps. One man tells me how they stopped him returning from his work and stole the fruit he had bought intended for his children, warning him not to resist. They said his life was worth more than some fruit. I hear the story of how the Shabaab tried to drag a neighbour’s wife out of his house to rape her. How he was shot when he tried to stop them. Patterns emerge. Visits by day and night by armed men seeking friends and family, often accompanied by a press-ganged neighbour or passer-by, snatched from the street, and ordered to indicate the house they seek.

Even as they tell their tales, the fear of the Shabaab still clings to these people. I ask for names, descriptions of the perpetrators, even nicknames they might have given individual Shabaab fighters. But no one is comfortable to say “it was this person”. The reason, I am told at last, is that there are Shabaab sympathisers in the camps, perhaps even among those who gather to listen to the interviews in curious groups.

There is one man, in particular, who I am looking for, Abdi Abdullahi Jimale, a 38-year-old mechanic from Mogadishu and sometime farmer who came to Burao nine months before. I already know the bare bones of his awful story: how he lost four of his children to hunger and violence. These days he makes a living through odd jobs and a few days’ work at the local tannery when he can. Otherwise he sends his girls into Burao to beg. Abdi calls the Shabaab “al-Qaeda”. “The Shabaab are everywhere among the people. They take what you have and leave you empty except for sorrow. When they started appearing they would say, ‘You can’t watch videos at home. You can’t listen to music.’ When the fighting came I lost two of my children. I didn’t even have a chance to bury their bodies.” He tells me that their names were Osman, aged four, and Mohammed, five. “I was sitting in my house when I heard the bullets. A little later a shell fell on my house. I carried some of the children and my wife the others, then we ran away.” Their ordeal was not yet over. “I had two other children who died on the way to Baladweyne. They were small children. We walked a long way and they were very tired. They were one and three, and we were walking for eight days. We had put the children on a donkey cart at first, but some people took the donkey cart and the things we had in it.” The rest of the family was saved through the intervention of a group of nomadic pastoralists who killed a goat for them to eat.

I am in my hotel in Burao when a text message comes in. There has been a fire at the State House camp. The details change. Six huts destroyed, the message says at first, then later 12. A child has been killed. We head straight to Hargeisa and the State House. It is a girl of five who has been killed. The fire jumped from bool to bool in a matter of seconds, the flames enveloping the dry panels of fabric, collapsing it upon her. There is a clearing, now, among the huts.

Someone has handed those who have lost their homes brightly coloured plastic buckets, to collect what is left of their possessions. The women hunt among the ashes for pots and pans, but there is almost nothing left but an accumulation of flaking ash. The shelters have been reduced in places to nothing more than a stubby spine of charcoal nubs, all that is left of poles that once supported them. A few torn pages from school books are blowing among the ashes.★

Source: Guardian.co.uk

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