Peter Greste is the first Western journalist to truly penetrate Somalia's badlands. Here he describes a country on the brink - and why he felt he had to return there, despite the fact his producer, Kate Peyton, was killed on his last visit.
It is dark in the corridors of the Somali Airlines Building; dark and crowded. More than a thousand people are here – not airline workers, but families sheltering from the withering gun battle tearing through the city a few blocks from where they huddle. The sound-track of bullets is so pervasive, locals call it the “Mogadishu music”.
All of them have fled here to escape the fighting - and they are constantly forced to run across the city whenever the frontlines shift or alliances change.
Maryam Ahmed is among them. She and her five children fled here a year ago, hunkering in a filthy, airless concrete room that airline bookings clerks might once have occupied. Her husband might be dead, but she’s not sure.
“We tried to stay in our home, but we had to flee when the fighting came,” she said with the dead expression that only the most traumatized wear. “My husband told me to take the children and promised to follow us. I haven’t seen him since.” That was a year ago.
I met Maryam and her neighbours during a trip to Mogadishu for Panorama, broadcast on BBC1 tonight. This was a journey beneath the skin of the city, through rubble-strewn alleyways, and squalid squatter camps to meet people caught in the middle of this largely forgotten branch of the War on Terror. Journalists have seen Mogadishu before, of course, but only from inside the African Union’s security bubble. Ours was the first Western team to escape the constraints of the armoured personnel carriers and talk to people without official oversight.
It wasn’t easy though. Mogadishu is arguably the most dangerous place in the world for outsiders - something I have experienced first hand. The last time I was in Mogadishu was in 2005 – a relatively peaceful period of Somalia’s recent history. Back then, a gunman shot and killed my producer Kate Peyton in a drive-by, while I stood on the opposite side of our car. Her killer has never been found, nor his motive identified.
Somalia has become so dangerous because, for the past five years, Al Shabaab – the Islamist rebel force with close ties to Al Qaeda – has waged a savage battle to seize control of the country. It now controls most of Southern Somalia and, up until a month ago, had driven the government, and the African Union force helping defend them, into a wedge of territory half a dozen blocks deep that backs onto the sea. In recent weeks, the government and its allied militias have managed to claw back some of those losses, but Al Shabaab remains dominant.
The rebels are deeply, almost pathologically anti-West. They have driven almost all foreign aid organisations out of areas they control, including UN departments such as the children’s agency UNICEF and the World Food Programme (the UN’s Somalia offices are all located in neighbouring Kenya). They have warned they will strike any government or its citizens who are seen to support the administration it is trying to topple, including journalists.
Last week, the Somali government announced a significant accidental victory – its troops had shot and killed one of the world's most wanted man – Fazul Abdallah Mohamed, who had a $5million bounty on his head. He was the mastermind behind Al Qaeda’s twin bomb attacks on the US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, which killed 200 people.
Fazul died when he took a wrong turn and found himself in front of a government checkpoint. The Somali troops only realised who they had killed when computer disks and mobile phones in his car suggested it belonged to someone important, and they dug up the freshly buried corpse for DNA tests. The Somali government has hailed his death as a turning point in the war, though other security analysts are more circumspect. Last year MI5 described the threat from the movement as so serious that it is only a matter of time before we see “Al Shabaab inspired terrorism” on Britain’s streets.
The connections are already there. In 2009, a suicide bomber from Ealing blew himself up on a Somali street in an attack that killed more than 20 soldiers. Security sources believe as many as 30 British passport holders are in the country training and fighting with Al Shabaab at any given moment, alongside perhaps hundreds of other foreign jihadis.
The irony is that it is this very danger posed by Al Shabaab which has led to Somalia being pushed off the front pages. Put simply, Somalia is just too dangerous for most journalists to properly investigate - hence the news blackout.
Indeed, our trip took weeks of planning so we could operate independently. We worked with a well-connected private militia willing to take us where we wanted, within tight security constraints.
It was impossible to travel freely. We moved in fast convoys with a phalanx of armed bodyguards, sometimes in vehicles, other times on foot. Locations for interviews were cleared in advance. There was a heavy veil of secrecy around our movements.
As I have mentioned, there was good reason for us to be concerned. In the subsequent inquest into Kate’s death, for a brief period, the story of just how dangerous it is to operate in Somalia made it into the newspapers. The coroner praised our security procedures, but said there were lessons to be learned.
On that first trip, I wanted to dig deep into the crisis that was, even then, largely ignored by the rest of the world. This latest visit was about finishing that story.
The Somali government and its Western supporters insist they are on the right track. They are slowly recovering lost ground through Mogadishu; and the government has survived longer than any of the other 14 administrations formed in the past 20 years.
But inside the city’s hidden alleyways, a different story emerged.
Most of the Somalis we met badly wanted to see Al Shabaab gone. The rebels’ extremist branch of Wahabi Islam is deeply alien to the far more moderate Sufism that traditionally dominates Somalia, and there is a growing resentment towards the foreign extremists who stiffen the ranks of the local fighters. But there is also little confidence in the ability of the government or its Western backers to win the war.
Take Mohammed Hassan Had. He is the chairman of the powerful Hawie Clan that dominates Mogadishu. A Hawie general, Mohamed Farah Aideed, led the militia that ultimately drove the US out of Somalia after the notorious Black Hawk Down incident in 1992.
I met Had in a darkened room in the back of a private hotel, along with his deputy and secretary. They were severe old men in dark glasses, and beards died orange with henna.
I expected to find anger at the government for opposing the Islamists; bitterness at the West for interfering once more; and support for the rebel’s aim of “liberating the country of foreign forces”.
Instead, with a vigorous shake of his head, Hassan Had said: “We don’t want Al Shabaab to take over. We cannot let the terrorists take over a country that has a seat at the United Nations.”
But they were angry too with the tactics deployed by the African Union troops. The Hawie elders accused them of using artillery and mortars in built-up areas, causing unnecessary civilian casualties and degrading popular support.
The African Union Force Commander, Major General Nathan Mugisha denies the charge. But he admits that a lack of international will to deal with the crisis is making his job all but impossible. He runs his force of 8,000 troops with an annual budget roughly equivalent to what the US spends in each day in Afghanistan.
“Nobody can pretend that this is an African problem, or this is a Somali problem. This is an international problem,” he said. “This mission is not as difficult as people think, but if we do not give it the attention it deserves we will regret it. It will backfire on all of us.”
And as the military crisis grows, so too does the humanitarian one.
One of the cruelest ironies of this conflict is that even as the city is torn apart by fighting, displaced families are flooding in.
The worst drought in living memory has decimated rural areas, and families are facing a stark choice: risk a slow death by starvation in the countryside, or a quick one amid the violence of the city. Thousands are opting to head for Mogadishu where there is at least an outside chance of reaching food aid. About a third of the entire population is in urgent need of help – more than a million people. The World Food Programme says it is delivering about 30 percent of what is needed.
Very little aid penetrates the interior, and the biggest donor – the US government – has drastically cut its contribution. Yet still they come. In abandoned government offices like the Somali Airlines building, on football fields, across rubbish tips and roadsides, desperate families have set up makeshift shelters of rags and plastic scraps stretched over flimsy thorn-bush frames.
At one camp, herders were burning the thorns off cactus leaves to feed to their starving animals. Cacti are the only things that seem to thrive here.
And so, while the West focusses on Afghanistan, the crisis in Somalia continues to run out of control, forgotten and ignored.
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