City of Thorns Read online

  Maryam was a quiet, determined girl, with a round face and perfect skin. Like Guled, she had fled with her family to one of the settlements on the outskirts of Mogadishu in the Afgoye corridor. It was the first line removed from the fighting in the city and the first place people fleeing the drought in the countryside arrived. At the end of 2010, the corridor, heaving with over half a million of the displaced and the dispossessed, was a vast slum controlled by al-Shabaab. Maryam too had gone to school in the city and, like Guled, every day she caught the same bus in from El-Shabiye.

  Talking to a boy in public is a risky endeavour for a young Somali girl. In a densely populated refugee settlement that was little more than a giant campsite, privacy was non-existent. Their best chance to be together was the bus, with plenty of time to chat and, as Guled put it, ‘to allow the love to grow’. Guled didn’t know what it was he liked about her, ‘just a feeling’, he said. But for Maryam, it was ‘his slow-moving’, he was not rash, hot-headed. Among the boys she knew, he was possessed of a rare calm.

  According to the 1975 family code, enacted under the rule of the former dictator Siad Barre, the legal age of marriage in Somalia is eighteen. But whatever traction the law had had before the conflict, it had none now. Nearly half of girls in Somalia are married before the age of eighteen. In some parts of the country a girl is considered ready for marriage as soon as her breasts start to show. Forced marriage has become more common too – a way for the bride’s family to get money and to offload the responsibility of feeding another mouth. The love of a poor man will not feed his in-laws, and so youngsters in love, without the money to compete for a formal betrothal, often pre-empt the process and deliberately devalue themselves by eloping.

  Tradition has it that couples wishing to elope must travel at least ninety kilometres (sixty miles) from their home area before tying the knot. For this reason, the town of Woloweyne, at ninety-one kilometres from Mogadishu, has become the Las Vegas of Somalia, stuffed with rent-a-sheikhs. Four months before the kidnapping, certain that they’d never be able to raise the money for a formal engagement, Guled and Maryam had skipped school and taken the bus to Woloweyne. On the edge of the road, they joined a line of other couples waiting to see a ragged-looking Imam, his skin blackened from his outdoor business. The ceremony lasted ten minutes and cost 40,000 Somali shillings (about $2) during which the Imam raised a book and a handful of beads and muttered some words beneath a tree. And with that, they were married: he was sixteen, she seventeen.

  The newlyweds managed to keep their secret for three months, until the rumours reached her mother. After a respectable amount of hysterics, Guled succeeded in calming his mother-in-law enough to receive a delegation of uncles in the family tent. The uncles formalized his taking of Maryam without asking permission and everyone was satisfied with a compensatory dowry of two million Somali shillings (around $50). Guled agreed to pay in instalments, when he could. In addition, he had furnished his own tent with the equipment of matrimony: cooking utensils and a bed. They were adults now: the war caused a whole generation to grow up fast. Married bliss, though, was brief.

  At midday, more fighters came. The sun burned through the sparse shade of the trees from which the new recruits had not moved. The fighters lined the boys up and gave them soup and bread, and then uniforms – black trouser suits that the Somalis call futushari. Later, the light-skinned commander with the beard divided the volunteers from the conscripts and then divided them again according to age. The bigger ones were taken ‘to the battlefield’, the commander said, while the younger ones, like Guled, were given sticks and whips and ordered into a truck. The sun had gone over now and it was nearing the time for the Asad, afternoon, prayer. They were told to go to the market and make sure no shops were open during the prayer. Guled’s fate was now clear: he was to be an officer of the Hizbat – the al-Shabaab police. With the men needed at the front, al-Shabaab was backfilling the Hizbat with stolen children.

  For the willing recruits, being assigned to the Hizbat was a disappointment: they’d dreamed of joining the Amniyat – the feared al-Shabaab intelligence corps – or the Istishahadyin – the suicide bombing unit. To blow yourself up in the name of God, there was a waiting list of three years; only the best recruits were chosen. But for Guled, the assignment was a reprieve.

  The duties of the Hizbat were, by comparison, mundane. Across al-Shabaab areas they had a broad remit concerning law and order as well as religious observance and cultural or nationalist purity. Somali ways of doing things were championed, such as wearing trousers above the ankle and favouring sandals over shoes, what al-Shabaab considered the indigenous style. For men, Guled recalled, there were to be ‘no Balotelli haircuts’ (the flamboyant striker of, at that time, Manchester City), no mohawks, no flattops, no fringe and no perms. Conversely, women were encouraged to adopt al-Shabaab’s preferred sartorial choice of heavy dense polyester hijabs rather than the cooler colourful indigenous cotton that a century ago made the coast of Somalia rich and famous; the militants deemed it too transparent. Al-Shabaab had a troubled relationship with modernity that often resulted in hypocrisy. In 2014 it would ban the internet and force Somalia’s main telecoms providers to switch off the 3G signal in Mogadishu, while the militia’s media unit maintained an active Twitter account and al-Shabaab governors conducted press interviews on their iPads.

  After a short drive, the truck dropped the Hizbat patrol in the market of El-Shabiye, and Guled’s heart raced again. The al-Shabaab camp was ten minutes from his tent; ten minutes from Maryam. The patrol of fifteen boys fanned out down the street. As the businessmen of El-Shabiye saw the boy soldiers coming they started closing up their shops themselves; they knew the law, and the punishments for breaking it. Beating was routine. If you had music or inappropriate pictures on your phone you might be forced to swallow the SIM card. Smokers often had their faces burned with their own cigarettes. One man who had been beaten for smoking in El-Shabiye later broke down crying when he recounted the story – not for the physical pain he had suffered but for the heartbreak of being assaulted by children. Guled might well have been among them.

  Every day for two weeks the routine was the same. The patrol would move down the edge of the market, checking the expiry dates on the packaged food and tins and pulling over vehicles that were moving during the prayer time. They walked through the cardboard city where the displaced people, including Guled, had pitched their tents and thatched their makeshift huts. And one day on a corner, they came across two girls and a young boy, their faces turned towards the counter of a shop that was still open. In her hands, one of the girls held a bag of vegetables.

  ‘Stop!’ the leader of the patrol yelled. The children turned and froze.

  ‘Lie down!’ The patrol knew what to do. The two boys assigned the whips moved forward. The others hung back, watching. From the dusty ground, the terrified eyes of the young girls looked up at the patrol of their fellow children clad in black. Guled stared at the elder girl, kept staring, even after the surge of recognition warned him to look away.

  It was Maryam. Their eyes touched. He felt his black uniformed limbs burning with fear and shame. He saw her face detonate in silent shock before he turned away concentrating furiously on stemming his tears, hoping none of the others had noticed. Maryam knew that a single word could condemn them both so she kept mute as the slim boy, younger than her perhaps, brought the whip down across her back and those of her sister and her male relative. She had heard from friends that Guled had been among those taken. Now she knew what it meant.

  As the days went on, the conscripts waited for some terrible order. The camp was a place of suspicion. A glance was a weighty thing and conversations had multiple meanings. Guled made friends with one boy but after he absconded during a patrol one day, there was nobody else he could confide in. He found the neutral small talk exhausting while his mind smouldered, plotted.

  In the evenings after patrol, the Hizbat of Guled’s group would eat togethe
r and then sit around and tell stories; carefully balanced to be interesting enough, carefully pitched not to reveal too much about their real thoughts: you didn’t know which boy was reporting to the leaders but you could be sure one of them was. And at night, they slept together on mats under the trees.

  After a month, the commander with the big beard made a speech. It was a Friday. ‘Since we’ve trained you new recruits and since you’ve done well, today is a free day. After the prayer you may wear normal clothes and leave the base, but you must be back by the evening prayer.’ He couldn’t quite believe it, but al-Shabaab, full of its own hubris, was actually trusting the kidnapped boys to return. As Guled listened to the instructions, he knew he would try and escape.

  After the prayer, Guled took off his al-Shabaab uniform, put on his school one and walked into town. He dared not go to Maryam. He went instead to the tent of his aunt who was overcome with shock at the sight of him.

  ‘Mashallah, Mashallah,’ God be praised, she repeated over and over. ‘Why have you grown so thin?’

  He told her the story. By the time he had finished, the sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer was ringing out across the refugee city: he was late. How long would it be before they started looking for him? He didn’t know.

  ‘Shall I take you to your tent?’ asked the aunt.

  ‘No. They will come looking for me there.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Kenya,’ he said. ‘To the refugee camps.’ It was the only place Guled thought al-Shabaab would not find him. Knowledge about the camps in Mogadishu was, like most information in the war, patchy and replete with rumour. But with the keen instincts of someone who had spent sixteen years staying alive in an urban war zone, he knew in his bones that if he delayed he would be dead. The moment he had avoided for so long had arrived. Even saying goodbye to Maryam was a risk. His aunt gave him fifty dollars that she had been saving for an emergency and with the money gripped in his fist, he tried to walk calmly through the streets of El-Shabiye to the bus station.

  Avoiding conversation, he located a vehicle going direct to Dhobley, the border town hundreds of miles south of Mogadishu. To get there the bus would have to cross a dozen checkpoints, all manned by different units of al-Shabaab which, he could only hope, were not adept at communicating with each other. Even without the charge of ‘traitor’ hanging above his head, simply being a military-age male at that time of drought and gathering war was sufficient to get one conscripted again. Guled desperately needed an alibi.

  When the bus got a puncture just outside the city, it seemed like divine intervention. Guled helped the driver change the wheel and the man, keen to avoid the nightshift, gave him $20 back again and asked him to share the driving. The oil that was all over his yellow school shirt helped maintain Guled’s story that he was the assistant driver of the vehicle and thus not escaping but returning. This fiction carried Guled sweating but unquestioned through all the checkpoints he had been fearing. In Dhobley, though, another test awaited him.

  To get to the camps, you take a bus, if you have money. If you don’t, you walk. The camps lie seventy miles inside Kenya across the barren scrub of the border country and the crossing is dangerous. The police in Kenya jokingly refer to undocumented Somalis as ‘ATM machines’. Rape is routine. Bandits are the preferred attackers, for they simply take what you have and let you on your way. The police are evaluated on the number of people they arrest and so they fill the hot stinking concrete cells of the border towns with asylum seekers, charge them with being ‘illegally outside a designated area’, an offence under the Kenyan Refugee Act, and collect up to $250 in ransom before deporting the failed refugees back to Somalia with bruised legs and a warning: ‘Think again before coming back to Kenya.’ If you could make it to the camps and register with the UN without being stopped, then you were allowed to stay, but it didn’t pay to be caught trying.

  As Guled’s bus arrived in Dhobley, the roads were lined with long-wheeler trucks, what the Kenyans call miguu kumi – ten feet – taking contraband into Kenya. Mostly, they carry sugar. The sugar trade has a long history in this region; ever since Kenyan politicians discovered that an inefficient domestic sugar industry was a useful thing. It justified keeping import tariffs ridiculously high. Tariffs that, in a weak and corrupt state, could be easily circumvented for a huge profit. It had got to the point where slowing production and distribution inside Kenya became an economic strategy, creating strange bedfellows as cartels in the Kenyan government forged links with Somalis connected to al-Shabaab, all with a shared interest in keeping the trucks with their sweet cargo from Pakistan and Brazil running smoothly from the port of Kismayo and along the road to Dadaab. It was the darker side of globalization. People joked that sugar was ‘the cocaine of Kenya’ and it was reckoned that smuggled sugar accounts for a third of the Kenyan market. The illicit trade continued with the blessing of Kenya’s most senior politicians, so the sugar trucks were one of the safest rides across the border.

  With his fortuitous $20, Guled bought a spot on top of one and clambered up. There, he was struck by a curious sight: the bodies of dozens of other refugees lying flat on the sacks of sugar, staring at the evening sky where, burning above, high in the blue-pink of dusk, was a solitary white star. They were just some of the two thousand who would sneak across the border that November. In December, as the war and drought bit harder, the numbers would triple. In January, they would triple again.

  Guled shifted around on the hard sacks and talked to no one. This was what the war did: it stole the possibility of trust. He was tainted now with the militant brush, even if only in his own mind, condemned to study each encounter with forensic paranoia. The truck bounced through the night. It stopped once, briefly, and there were lights, murmurings; it was the driver paying off the police. Traffic hadn’t fallen since the border was officially closed in January 2007, the police had simply got richer. Guled breathed the cool clean air of the desert across which the 682 kilometre border is but a hopeful straight line on an inherited map. He twisted the ring with the red stone on his finger, looked at the cold brilliant stars, and thought of Maryam. When the truck eventually rumbled to a stop, the driver shouted at the travel-stiffened riders to get down. The new refugees looked about at the shadows of low buildings made of corrugated iron sheets and the high fence of thorns that encircled the garage and they settled to sleep on the foreign sand to wait for the day to break. The clear desert air was cut with the smells of the village: the sour scent of humans and the sweet odour of goat droppings. But even the night-time murmurings of the vast rural-urban slum hinted at the enormity of the city breathing beyond the garage wall.

  A few hours later, the cry of the muezzin crackled across the tin roofs of the refugee camp and around three hundred thousand people stirred under the pinking sky. Back in 1992, the camp originally held ninety thousand Somali refugees fleeing the civil war. They had reproduced. Then others had come: more waves of Somalis, as well as Sudanese, Congolese, Ethiopians, Ugandans and Rwandans seeking asylum whom the Kenyans had shipped out to the margins of their country. And they too had had children. Three generations now called this giant cosmopolitan city made of mud, tents and thorns, home. That morning, 1 December 2010, Guled was the newest arrival in the largest refugee camp in the world.

  4

  Ifo

  When he woke on the hard, oily sand in the garage just as it was getting light, Guled had two thoughts in his mind. He needed to find his friend, Noor, whom he had heard was here, somewhere, in a camp called ‘Ifo’; and he needed to call home to check that his wife and sister were okay, that al-Shabaab hadn’t traced them back in El-Shabiye. Both tasks required cash that he didn’t have. But first of all he needed to work out where he was.

  As the sun peeled back the night, behind the kamoor – the high fences made of thorn branches lashed together that define the camps – Guled got the first glimpse of his new world. The garage fronted on to a square patch o
f ground bordered by makeshift buildings made of shiny new iron sheets. From their shadowy insides, men emerged with crumpled dull trays and chipped cups of tea. Businessmen, their pockets bulging with phones and cash, bent their heads in talk. While already, at this early hour, throngs of young men squatted at the roadside and strutted about in their European soccer shirts, freshly laundered jeans, impossibly white sports shoes and cell phone headsets, taking in the passing show. The place was teeming with people.

  The sugar truck had brought Guled to Hagadera, the southernmost of the three camps there were then. Designed in 1991 to house 30,000, Hagadera, like the others, had now swollen to a medium-sized city of over 100,000. The other two: Dagahaley and Ifo, his fellow travellers told him, were fifteen miles to the north, on the other side of Dadaab town. The people gave him some coins and pointed at the minibuses in the road outside. He would need to take a bus to Dadaab and then on, north to Ifo. No one would offer him a phone to call Somalia; at nearly a dollar a minute that was a favour too far.

  Guled walked towards a bendy pole overloaded with home-made electricity wires that hovered perilously above the road. Opposite, vehicles had scored an arc in the deep fluffy sand around a limp Kenyan flag on a pole. It stood to attention before a low orange-mud building painted in stripes of black, yellow and red with the words ‘Hagadera Police Post’ in an ornate hand above the door. In the middle of the road trucks were lined up ready for dispatch across the region to Nairobi, Somalia, Ethiopia; around them crawled other, smaller, battered minibuses that plied the sandy road to the northern camps. Guled climbed into the first minibus in the line. When it was full, the vehicle bumped through the heavy dust for nine miles until it joined the main road from the south and rattled into Dadaab town, just ahead of the morning rush hour.