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City of Thorns
City of Thorns
In the lands of the Somali, it had barely rained for two and a half
years. From the dagger point of Cape Guardafui, the very Horn
of Africa aimed at the belly of Yemen, to the hills of Ethiopia in
the west and the plains of Kenya in the south, the year 2010 was
dry. The nomads and the farmers saw the clouds scudding east
from the Indian Ocean over the red plains and the yellow hills, but
no rain fell. They saw their animals weaken and their crops strug-
gle to stand with the weight of the dust, and they began to worry.
There are three seasons here: the Hagar, Jiilaal and Gu. The
Hagar is the windy season, from May to September, when the
Indian Ocean monsoon blows clockwise taking the cool water
from the southern seas up the coast of East Africa, around the
curve of Arabia, Iran and Pakistan to Bombay, the ancient trade
route of the Swahilis. Since at least 1000 BC, the dhows have
sailed east in March returning in September, riding the anti-
clockwise currents that take the now warm water south again.
With the monsoon, India is only three weeks from the coast of
Somalia. Against it, the journey can take three months and is often
fatal. Thousands of miles from the coastal ports of Bossaso,
Mogadishu and Kismayo, trade in the interior of the Horn of
Africa still keeps time with these natural rhythms.
Once upon a time, when the climate was predictable, the Hagar
would come to an end with the short rains, Deyr, in October that
would give way to the steady accumulation of heat and dust that
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was the dry season, Jiilaal. If God willed it, the heat would build
and build and turn humid, eventually breaking into the blessed
rainy season from March to May: Gu. Then the thorn trees would
spring immediately into a luminous green. Overnight, the sand
would grow a light fuzz of grass. The camels and goats of the
nomads would turn fat.
Sometimes the Gu didn’t come. Then the heat that built and
built had nowhere to go. When the Hagar arrived again, it swirled
the desiccated sand into little twisters that had a life of their own,
getting into everything. The skin on the animals shrank and the
nomads watched the sky, full of fear of the abaar, drought.
Sometimes the Gu failed for more than one year and that usually
spelled trouble. In a part of the world where man’s struggle with
nature for survival is so finely balanced, famine and war have
always gone together. Now the Gu had failed for two years in a
row and the short rains were perilously late.
Under a hardening sky, the people grew uneasy. In the coun-
tryside, the land had nothing to give and so the inhabitants had
nothing to offer their rulers in tithes or taxes. Across most of
South-Central Somalia, the rulers were the Islamic extremist
group al-Shabaab. It needed all the taxes it could get to fund its
‘massive war’ to drive what it saw as an infidel government backed
by the United Nations out of Mogadishu and into the sea. Militias
press-ganged truckloads of men away from the farms and forced
them to the battlefield, and they took the meagre harvest as
‘Zakaht’ – a contribution to their holy war – and the people went
hungry.
To make matters worse, al-Shabaab had banned all food aid that
bore the US logo and ejected the World Food Programme from
its territory. At the same time, the US Office of Foreign Assets
Control put sanctions on al-Shabaab: this meant jail sentences for
aid agencies that paid the militants for humanitarian access which,
after twenty years of war, was the norm for delivering aid in
Somalia. And the few aid ships that did sail risked the infamous
pirates. So, in what agencies had been calling a ‘perfect storm’
since the drought began two years earlier, the people of Somalia
would face one of the most telegraphed emergencies the world
had ever seen largely without assistance.
In the city, the ‘Battle of Mogadishu’, as al-Shabaab’s offensive
was known, intensified street by street with trenches, snipers and
indiscriminate shelling. The militants’ war effort drew all the men,
resources and even children into the fight just as the twisters of the
eternal Jiilaal sucked the dust of the hard-baked plain into the air
and lent everything a brown tinge. The coming tragedy would be
played out in sepia.
After so much death, it was a wonder anyone remained in the
country at all. No one really knows the population of Somalia but,
during the past twenty years, somewhere between one third and
one half of the six-to-eight million inhabitants had fled their
homes. There were over one and a half million refugees abroad,
many of them in the camps of Dadaab. The people who still lived
in Somalia were the ones without the bus fare to flee, the ones
with property to guard or money to make, or the ones who had
simply lost their minds. Many were afraid to take the risk of run-
ning into the unknown and held to the adage, ‘better the devil you
know’. Many more were so inured to the roulette of war, it had
simply become the landscape of life. Guled was one of these.