Mogadishu: the 'antidote' to boredom

Our plane swoops over the foam-flecked Indian ocean, the water almost lapping at the runway’s edge, and we land in Mogadishu, a city I have always wanted to visit but have never dared.

We taxi past the city’s latest landmark. Far from the arrivals terminal, there is a complex of pink buildings guarded by Somali soldiers. Constructed a few months ago, it is according to several accounts a counter-terrorism training camp run by the CIA.

We have only just arrived in Somalia, yet we can already see a CIA “facility” at the heart of America’s covert war against Islamist militants?  This quickly feels like a movie which hasn’t been made yet.  My cameraman, Graham, needs no further encouragement and is already filming the CIA watchtowers  through the porthole of our jet.

We clamber out of the jet to find a soldier greeting us on the tarmac. “Fifty dollars, fifty dollars!” he shouts. He is not Somali at all, but a cheerful Ugandan, and he wants our money and our passports. When a country has a CIA base at its main airport and also outsources its visa payment collection to somebody else’s soldiers, in this case African Union troops dressed in battle fatigues, you know that something in that country has gone very wrong.

So this is our welcome to Mogadishu, where an impish Somali boy in an Arsenal T-shirt who has appeared from nowhere is already scampering off with our luggage and we are struggling to keep up.

Sitting ducks

Five minutes after we have arrived, I can hear the rattle of gunfire in the distance. A security adviser, an American called Bill wearing desert boots and the customary khaki, is giving us newcomers the compulsory safety briefing on what to watch out for.

Things are generally quiet, Bill says, though guards loyal to the Somali President have engaged in shootouts with the Parliamentary speaker’s guards for the last two days running.  Oh yes, and hand grenades have been thrown along the route we will be travelling today.

An ambulance will be on call if we need it, Bill continues, adding generously that should anything fatal happen to him during our journey, we should feel free to make use of the walkie talkie in his pocket.

His final words of reassurance: “if it’s a matter of life, limb, or eyesight, we WILL get you back to Nairobi at all costs.”

I gulp, and we don our flak jackets and helmets and follow Bill into the back of a large metal container. It is an armoured car, manned by Burundian peacekeepers from the African Union force.

We have four vehicles in our convoy, lumbering giants mounted with machine guns fore and aft. And so we trundle out of the airport, feeling like sitting ducks, through the wrecked city of Mogadishu, failed capital of a notoriously failed state.

Through the dirty windows, I cannot see a building which isn’t pockmarked by shelling or bullets. Many are barely standing at all. There are sandbags and gun positions everywhere, until we reach the African bush and the teeming tent cities of refugees. Row upon row of them, huts covered in plastic sheeting which stretch astonishingly for miles on end.

The UN reckons there are 409,000 Somalis living like this, refugees first from war and now from famine and drought. “How did you count them all?” I ask the aid worker sitting next to me. “By satellite imagery,” he says. “It is too dangerous to go out there ourselves.”

Child soldier

We dismount at our destination, the Badaab camp, home to some 23,000  people, with over 70 new families arriving every day.

I look to my right, and there is a sulky boy sitting on the back of a pickup truck holding a Kalashnikov. He says he is a soldier in Somalia’s “government” and that he is aged 18.  He looks 13. His cousin says he is 13. A child soldier it seems, one of the latest recruits to Somalia’s never-ending cycle of civil war.

Amid the refugee huts there are men with guns everywhere. Clan militiamen laze under trees. Government troops wearing silly Italianate epaulettes are bossing people about; Burundian peacekeepers keep watch from the rooftops of shattered buildings in case we are attacked, or a food riot breaks out, or I don’t know what.

We are just four hundred metres from the front line with Islamist militants, a line that Bill had marked out on a map for us before we left the airport. And our guides are virtually certain that the militants or their sympathisers have infiltrated this refugee camp. Why wouldn’t they, if it was the only way you could be fed?

We film the desperately hungry children who have been carried here by their parents from the famine zone, perilously close to death. Listless bodies, distended stomachs, rib-cages on the verge of becoming carcasses. We hope the pictures will shock the world.

The mother of skeletal twins keeps smiling at the camera. This is not what I expected. She is happy to be here, happy to have made it this far. And as the women queue for “plumpy nut” nutritional sachets and for their sick babies to be weighed, I reflect that some must have had almost no time to grieve for the dead children they have left behind them.

For the UN’s estimate is that tens of thousands of Somalis have already died in this famine, and that most of them are children.

Avoiding sharks and shooting

We interview the Somalia director of UNICEF, a jovial Scotswoman a few months away from retirement. What a way to end your career, with the world’s worst humanitarian emergency on your hands, half the emergency supplies you need and your agency $95m dollars short.

We have passed the time limit judged safe to be out and so it is back into the armoured cars to the airport. The aid worker sitting next to me says she used to be a corporate lawyer, working in the shadow of St Paul’s cathedral in London, but then she got bored.

Mogadishu is the antidote to boredom. It is the craziest place I have ever been to. Back at the airport, the terminal is busy with diplomats and aid workers waiting for their planes out of this madness.

I thank Bill and the Burundians for keeping us safe and then we take off. The pilot warns us that he is going to veer sharply to the left after we are barely airborne. He doesn’t need to explain why: we are heading out over the shark-infested ocean to avoid the possibility of being shot at from the shore.

On board I find peanuts, crisps and sandwich rolls wrapped in cellophane and gold ribbons. I feel slightly sick, and then tuck in to this feast. Time for dinner, while some 3.7m Somalis below me are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.

Follow Jonathan Rugman on Twitter: @Jrug