Free The World's Most Dangerous Place by James Fergusson

to Tieglow, the family refused to go. Mogadishu offered a far better chance of survival than the drought-stricken region they had left behind.
    The city was kind to them at first. His parents opened a small shop on the edge of the Bakara Market, selling combs, mirrors, pens and other bric-a-brac. They made enough money to send the children to school, which Aden loved. His mates called him Ateera (‘Body Slam’), a typical Somali joke nickname, since his skinny build was the exact opposite of a wrestler’s. He recalled playing football as a young teenager inside the roofless wreck of the old parliament building, where he said a journalist from the New York Times had once interviewed him, a memory that I guessed had prompted him to ask to talk to me.
    These were years of genuine hope for many Somalis. A Transitional National Government was formed in 2000, ostensibly offering the country its best chance of peace in a decade. But ultimately neither the TNG, nor the Transitional Federal Government which succeeded it in 2004, was able to secure a lasting political settlement. Both were fatally weakened by corruption and the vested clan interests that had dragged the country into civil war in the first place.
    From their outset, the fledgling government institutions were challenged by the Islamic judiciary who thought, perhaps understandably, that they could do a better job of running the country. The collapse of Barre’s dictatorship had left a vacuum that had to be filled by something, and since 1991, starting in the south of the country, a system of government by judges had evolved – a historically rare example of a ‘krytocracy’ – under which localcourts offered not only Sharia justice but, eventually, police services, education and even healthcare. In April 1999 they took control of the Bakara Market, the commercial heart of Mogadishu. Five years later, in 2004, the courts had formally amalgamated into the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU.
    By Somali standards, the ICU’s administration was not a bad one. Civil society functioned without the corruption that plagued daily life in the areas supposedly controlled by the TFG. The streets were policed by officials wearing distinctly Arab-looking thobes and keffiyehs . Serious crimes such as rape and murder were sometimes punishable by stoning. The strict Salafist doctrine that the ICU judges imposed was in fact imported from Arabia, and was almost the antithesis, within Islam, of the liberal, hymn-singing Sufism traditionally practised in Somalia. The movement was not popular with everyone, therefore. Richard Burton wrote that ‘though superstitious, the Somal are not bigoted like the Arabs, with the exception of those who, wishing to become learned, visit Yemen or El Hejaz, and catch the complaint. Nominal Mohammedans, El Islam hangs so lightly upon them, that apparently they care little for making it binding upon others.’
    On the other hand, the ICU did bring security to the areas under their control – and to a people weary of war, that could easily overcome any ideological misgivings. In this respect, the ICU’s support was comparable to that enjoyed by the Taliban when they took over Kabul in 1997. Those Afghans’ brand of Islam (and the harshness with which they sometimes enforced it) was not always popular either. But they did restore order to a city that had suffered years of brutal civil war, and that, to Kabulis, was worth almost any sacrifice. For a while, Mogadishu’s Bakara Market became one of the safest places in the whole country, as well as theobvious choice of destination for a family of refugees like Aden’s.
    In 2005, however, a group of clan warlords, jealous of the ICU’s grip on the Bakara Market and its revenue-raising possibilities, stopped fighting each other and agreed to turn their guns on the Islamists. Crucially, the ‘Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism’ – some of whose members were also ministers in the TFG