Free Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur Page B

to locate the rest of the crew, he was ambushed in the darkened engine room by the Alabama ’s chief engineer, Mike Perry, who, though armed only with a knife, managed to overpower him. After the leader was released in a bungled attempt to exchange him for Captain Phillips, all four hijackers fled in the Alabama’s cramped lifeboat, taking Phillips along with them.
    The destroyer USS Bainbridge was the first US warship to arrive at the scene, as if guided by the spirit of her namesake, Commodore William Bainbridge, a nineteenth-century naval officer who had played a pivotal role in the war against the Barbary pirates of northern Africa. A tense hostage standoff with the lifeboat ensued. Over the next three days, the increasingly jittery pirates—whom Phillips nicknamed “The Leader,” “Musso,” “Tall Guy,” and “Young Guy”—subjected him to sadistic psychological torture, the details of which Phillips related in a book about the incident, A Captain’s Duty:
“When we kill you, we’re going to put you in an unclean place,” the Leader said. “That’s where I’m taking you now.”
“What does that mean?”
They explained that they knew about this shallow reef where the water was stagnant. It wasn’t part of a tide pool that came in and washed the bay every twelve hours. Any body dropped there would rot and bloat and stink to high heaven.
“Very bad place,” Musso said.
I couldn’t hold it any longer. I felt a rush of wetness on my pant leg. They were letting me piss myself like a goddamn animal.
The rage just welled up in me. I felt degraded. I was screaming at the pirates, just cursing them and telling them they were going to die. 1
    For three of the four men, Phillips’s morbid prediction came true. On April 12, believing Phillips’s life to be in immediate danger, Commander Frank Castellano ordered the Bainbridge forces into action, upon which Navy SEAL snipers killed the three hijackers remaining on the lifeboat. The Leader, Abdiweli Muse (a Puntlander from Galkayo), who had been on board the Bainbridge conducting ransom negotiations when the rescue took place, suddenly found his bargaining position shot to bits. He was taken to New York to stand trial, and in February 2011 was sentenced to almost thirty-four years in prison.
    Following the Alabama attack, Garaad vowed revenge against the Americans, and ordered his organization to retaliate. Two days later, a boatload of Garaad’s men sighted the MV Liberty Sun , a US-flagged vessel carrying food aid destined for Somalia, which they proceeded to pursue and blast with rocket-propelled grenades; fortunately, neither the vessel nor her crew were harmed. In a subsequent phone interview with the Agence France-Presse, Garaad made it clear that the motive for the attack was anything but financial. “We were not after a ransom,” he said. “We … assigned a team with special equipment to chase and destroy any ship flying the American flag in retaliation for the brutal killing of our friends.” 2
    In February 2009, two months before the Alabama hijacking, I had sat across a table from Garaad on the patio of a Bossaso hotel, listening to him discuss his plans to join the Puntland Coast Guard.
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    I had been trying to get in touch with him for weeks, but Garaad had exhibited a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time once the initial contact was made. My interpreter Warsame and I had been supposed to meet him the previous day, but after preliminary discussions in the morning, Garaad turned off his phone and we didn’t hear back from him. “He’s off chewing khat somewhere,” Warsame suggested. The next day, Garaad called us with his explanation: “I was busy.”
    After agreeing to meet us at four o’clock, his phone was off again. It was twenty minutes past four, and I was starting to get worried. I had heard disturbing reports of Garaad’s lack of regard for conventional notions of politeness; one of my hosts, Abdirizak,