The Most Dangerous Place in the World When you land at Mogadishu’s international airport, the first form you fill out asks for name, address, and caliber of weapon. Believe it or not, this disaster of a city, the capital of Somalia, still gets a few commercial flights. Some haven’t fared so well. The wreckage of a Russian cargo plane shot down in 2. Mogadishu’s Italianate architecture, once a gem along the Indian Ocean, has been reduced to a pile of machine- gun- chewed bricks. Somalia has been ripped apart by violence since the central government imploded in 1. Eighteen years and 1. It’s the same violent free- for- all on the seas. Somalia’s pirates are threatening to choke off one of the most strategic waterways in the world, the Gulf of Aden, which 2. These heavily armed buccaneers hijacked more than 4. It’s the greatest piracy epidemic of modern times. I’ve felt the incandescent fury of the Iraqi insurgency raging in Fallujah. I’ve spent freezing- cold, eerily quiet nights in an Afghan cave. O, you thought you were pretty well informed by now about all of the main players on the 'conspiracy' playing field? You’ve maybe been hearing for years about (or bumped into on your own) the various elements of society who control our world from behind the. I disagree; I think it was a bit later that night, but more on that later. Meanwhile, I have to say that I did not burn the building. Nobody I know has ever told me they did it. I hear some people have bragged about doing it, but then disappeared from sight shortly after. The Most Dangerous Place in the World « . When you land at Mogadishu’s international airport, the first form you fill out asks for name, address, and caliber of weapon. Believe it or not, this disaster of a. The Most Dangerous Man in the Mid-South Who is Franklin Sanders, a.k.a. The following article was originally published in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, February 1997. You may also be interested in Gunnar Haid's June 2015. But nowhere was I more afraid than in today’s Somalia, where you can get kidnapped or shot in the head faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. From the thick, ambush- perfect swamps around Kismayo in the south to the lethal labyrinth of Mogadishu to the pirate den of Boosaaso on the Gulf of Aden, Somalia is quite simply the most dangerous place in the world. There is no Green Zone here, by the way — no fortified place of last resort to run to if, God forbid, you get hurt or in trouble. The local hospitals barely have enough gauze to treat all the wounds. Welcome Welcome to the Cassiopaean Website, the repository for the work of scientific mystic, Laura Knight-Jadczyk. Laura is married to theoretical/mathematical physicist Arkadiusz Jadczyk who introduces his wife’s work in the following extract: The name.The export of trouble may just be beginning. Islamist insurgents with al Qaeda connections are sweeping across the country, turning Somalia into an Afghanistan- like magnet for militant Islam and drawing in hard- core fighters from around the world. These men will eventually go home (if they survive) and spread the killer ethos. Somalia’s transitional government, a U. N.- santioned creation that was deathly ill from the moment it was born four years ago, is about to flatline, perhaps spawning yet another doomed international rescue mission. Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the old war horse of a president backed by the United States, finally resigned in December after a long, bitter dispute with the prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein. Ostensibly, their conflict was about a peace deal with the Islamists and a few cabinet posts. In truth, it may be purely academic. By early this year, the government’s zone of control was down to a couple of city blocks. The country is nearly as big as Texas. Beyond the political crisis, all the elements for a full- blown famine — war, displacement, drought, skyrocketing food prices, and an exodus of aid workers — are lining up again, just as they did in the early 1. Somalis starved to death. The United States is known to have possessed three types of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons. Classic Pictures From LIFE Magazine’s Archives. Dear TIME Reader, As a regular visitor to TIME.com, we are sure you enjoy all the great journalism created by our editors and reporters. Last May, I stood in the doorway of a hut in the bone- dry central part of the country watching a sick little boy curl up next to his dying mother. Her clothes were damp. Her breaths were shallow.
She hadn’t eaten for days. Past interventions have been so cursed that no one wants to get burned again. The United States has been among the worst of the meddlers: U. S. As a result, Somalia has become a graveyard of foreign- policy blunders that have radicalized the population, deepened insecurity, and pushed millions to the brink of starvation. It is one of the world’s most homogeneous nation- states, with nearly all of its estimated 9 to 1. Somali), the same religion (Sunni Islam), the same culture, and the same ethnicity. But in Somalia, it’s all about clan. Somalis divide themselves into a dizzying number of clans, subclans, sub- subclans, and so on, with shifting allegiances and knotty backstories that have bedeviled outsiders for years. Disputes tended to be resolved by clan elders. First it was the Soviets who pumped in weapons, then the United States. A poor, mostly illiterate, mainly nomadic country became a towering ammunition dump primed to explode. The central government was hardly able to hold the place together. Even in the 1. 98. Maj. Mohamed Siad Barre, the capricious dictator who ruled from 1. The warlords unleashed all that military- grade weaponry on each other, and every port, airstrip, fishing pier, telephone pole — anything that could turn a profit — was fought over. People were killed for a few pennies. Women were raped with impunity. The chaos gave rise to a new class of parasitic war profiteers — gunrunners, drug smugglers, importers of expired (and often sickening) baby formula — people with a vested interest in the chaos continuing. Somalia became the modern world’s closest approximation of Hobbes’s state of nature, where life was indeed nasty, brutish, and short. To call it even a failed state was generous. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a failed state. But those places at least have national armies and national bureaucracies, however corrupt. Since 1. 99. 1, Somalia has not been a state so much as a lawless, ungoverned space on the map between its neighbors and the sea. Bush tried to help, sending in thousands of Marines to protect shipments of food. It was the beginning of the post- Cold War . Somalia proved to be a very bad start. President Bush and his advisors misread the clan landscape and didn. Somali society often divides and subdivides when faced with internal disputes, but it quickly bands together when confronted by an external enemy. The United States learned this the hard way when its forces tried to apprehend the warlord of the day, Mohammed Farah Aidid. The result was the infamous . Thousands of Somali militiamen poured into the streets, carrying rocket- propelled grenades and wearing flip- flops. They shot down two American Black Hawk helicopters, killing 1. U. S. This would be Strike One for the United States in Somalia. For the next decade, the Western world mostly stayed away. But Arab organizations, many from Saudi Arabia and followers of the strict Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam, quietly stepped in. They built mosques, Koranic schools, and social service organizations, encouraging an Islamic revival. By the early 2. 00. Mogadishu’s clan elders set up a loose network of neighborhood- based courts to deliver a modicum of order in a city desperate for it. They rounded up thieves and killers, put them in iron cages, and held trials. Islamic law, or sharia, was the one set of principles that different clans could agree on; the Somali elders called their network the Islamic Courts Union. In Mogadishu, there are warlords and moneylords. While the warlords were ripping the country apart, the moneylords, Somalia’s big- business owners, were holding the place together, delivering many of the same services — for a tidy profit, of course — that a government usually provides, such as healthcare, schools, power plants, and even privatized mail. The moneylords went as far as helping to regulate Somalia’s monetary policy, and the Somali shilling was more stable in the 1. But with their profits came very high risks, such as chronic insecurity and extortion. The Islamists were a solution. They provided security without taxes, administration without a government. The moneylords began buying them guns. This ended up being Strike Two. The fear was that Somalia could blossom into a jihad factory like Afghanistan, where al Qaeda in the 1. West. Some Western military analysts told policymakers that Somalia was too chaotic for even al Qaeda, because it was impossible for anyone — including terrorists — to know whom to trust. Nonetheless, the administration of George W. Bush devised a strategy to stamp out the Islamists on the cheap. CIA agents deputized the warlords, the same thugs who had been preying upon Somalia’s population for years, to fight the Islamists. According to one Somali warlord I spoke with in March 2. American agent named James and another one named David showed up in Mogadishu with briefcases stuffed with cash. Use this to buy guns, the agents said. Drop us an e- mail if you have any questions. The warlord showed me the address: no. Somalis like to talk; the country, ironically, has some of the best and cheapest cellular phone service in Africa. Word quickly spread that the same warlords no one liked anymore were now doing the Americans’ bidding, which just made the Islamists even more popular. By June 2. 00. 6, the Islamists had run the last warlords out of Mogadishu. Then something unbelievable happened: The Islamists seemed to tame the place. I flew into Mogadishu in September 2. For the first time in years, no gunshots rang out at night. Under the banner of Islam, the Islamists had united rival clans and disarmed much of the populace, with clan support of course. They even cracked down on piracy by using their clan connections to dissuade coastal towns from supporting the pirates. When that didn’t work, the Islamists stormed hijacked ships. According to the International Maritime Bureau in London, there were 1. Somalia’s coast in 2. But it was one thing to rally together to overthrow the warlords and another to decide what to do next. A rift quickly opened between the moderate Islamists and the extremists, who were bent on waging jihad. One of the most radical factions has been the Shabab, a multiclan military wing with a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. The Shabab drove around Mogadishu in big, black pickup trucks and beat women whose ankles were showing. Even the other Islamist gunmen were scared of them. By December 2. 00. Shabab for taking away their beloved khat, the mildly stimulating leaf that Somalis chew like bubble gum. Shabab leaders were widely rumored to be working with foreign jihadists, including wanted al Qaeda terrorists, and the U. S. State Department later designated the Shabab a terrorist organization. American officials have said that the Shabab are sheltering men who masterminded the bombings of the U. S. In 2. 00. 6, there was a narrow window of opportunity to peel off the moderate Islamists from the likes of the Shabab, and some U.
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