LITERARY | Somali: Thorns of the Acacia
March 2011 | Written by Daniel J. Gerstle
Originally published under the title “Five Bombers” in Humanitarian Bazaar (aka HELO Magazine) in 2011.
Rocketing across the orange gravel desert of the African Horn region of Somaliland, my human rights advocate friends and I had an angel on our shoulders keeping us safe. To get a sense of whether the nomadic camel herders we sought to interview had recently been in the habit of kidnapping foreigners, whether a bloody feud had reached its boiling point in the town ahead or whether condors had ascended from Hell to feast on our flesh, we queried by cell phone a fortyish Somali UN security man based in Hargeisa named, Mohamed Elmi Gheele.
Over the years helping hundreds, if not thousands, of UN staff, aid workers, and rights advocates navigate the Somali moderns and wild lands, Gheele’s team created an operation of trust and care based in a modest office at the UN development program compound in Hargeisa. People throughout the region relied on this operation to keep drought relief, other lifesaving aid programs, and political development efforts proceeding safely.
We aid workers and rights researchers were so concerned about the unpredictable wilds of the Somali provinces that we often thought of Gheele’s security office at the UN development program compound as a sort of home, or safe house. When we got through those huge gates, it suddenly didn’t matter whether we were foreign or that some people misunderstood our reasons for being there when we were just trying to help.
Aid workers enjoyed the sanctuary because there they could uncover their hair, smoke in the open, sip from a flask, or curse about the day’s work. I used to take a break in the shade of a little acacia tree in front of the main UNDP building where Gheele worked with the security team and the radio room. There I watched a family of bright yellow birds create nests out of scrub and mud in the delicate branches of the acacia.
On October 29th, 2008, a year and some months later, the radical Islamic radical youth militia, known abroad as Al-Shabab, launched a five-point simultaneous suicide bombing attack in Hargeisa and the northeastern Somali town of Bossaso which killed a total of twenty-nine people. One of the bombers penetrated the UN compound in Hargeisa and detonated his device right beside the security office I’ve just described. When the smoke and pandemonium cleared, survivors found Gheele, as well as Sayid Hashi, one of the professional drivers, dead in the rubble.
Hargeisa Before the Attacks
Before de-constructing the attacks and their aftermath, I’ll first illustrate the complex context in which they occurred. When I arrived to Hargeisa, the capital of the northwest African Horn region of Somaliland, in 2007, I toured the sun-scorched town to see as much as I could. The market capitol of an impoverished and unstable region, Hargeisa offers both a loving embrace and an apoplectic shock. The people one meets are extremely warm and welcoming. It is a world of tea and wickedly dark humor. And the wildlife of the semi-arid moonscape often converges with the urban maze, everything from camels blocking traffic, to ostriches stealing the laundry, to baboons walking through tea houses.
But Hargeisa is also the home of an impoverished nomadic population which has lost much of its livestock in recurring droughts and epidemics. They live in scrub huts with tarp roofs, flood the streets in search of day labor, begging, or sometimes demanding something, anything, to help them survive the harsh climate. While some consider joining a fighting group, a gang, or even pirates, the vast majority nobly suffer years pacing in the scorching heat and choking dust anxiously seeking a few shillings worth of work.
There are the big hotels with their collections of curious animals—dik dik, emu, and stray cats—roaming freely in the outdoor café areas; the hotel’s coffees an intense Nescafe with cardamom flavor. There is Hargeisa University, impressive in form, yet surrounded by gravel lots polluted with tumbleweed and little blue plastic bags. Everywhere are tea spots, where men gather on little plastic chairs to slam sweet black cardamom tea, sometimes with a plate of boiled goat and spaghetti.
And most memorable about Hargeisa is the thriving main drag complete with a handful of shot-up carcasses of buildings, perhaps left as reminders of the horrors of the government’s aerial bombardment of the city two decades earlier. Twice I saw baboons walking down the street here, as if they were human, until a clique of street kids rushed them and they disappeared up to the rooftops.
There is a monument here one cannot miss, a shot-down government MiG jet mounted on a pedestal. Any Somalilander will tell you, the former Siad Barre regime in its efforts to root out rebellion in the northwest region now known as Somaliland actually ordered the bombing raids of the city to be launched from its own airport. To those who recall the attack, this point is made to underline the fact that the government did not need to bombard a city it already controlled.
Bitterness over these bombardments in the early days of the Somali Civil War is one of the chief reasons Somaliland political leaders will not participate in Somalia reunification talks or participate in the government based in Mogadishu and Nairobi. And it is also part of why many Somalilanders, for some time, believed they were immune to the violence and terrorism raging around Mogadishu.
Somalia, Somaliland, and the Civil Conflicts
Somalia, including the northwest region known as Somaliland, is a layered mosaic. The vast majority of the people are ethnic Somali joined only by a few Bantu, Oromo, and Arabs. The Somalis thrive in a complex system of clans originating from nomadic roots. Overlapping ethnicity and clan is Islam. While some clan leaders took up the moderate Shafii school others adhere to more conservative sides like the conservative Salihi order or the radical practices of the Salafists.
Early on, the Somali civil conflict had a great deal to do with clan. Somaliland’s clans—the Isaak, Samaron, and others based in the northwest—had strong relations with each other, enjoyed British-standard schools, and felt marginalized by the southern leaders. Clans of the south led by the Hawiye clan family faced opposition from the northeastern-based Darod clan families and others. But once the clan wars devolved into gang warfare in the ruins of Mogadishu by the late 1990’s, a new political division formed.
Many Somalis hoped that Islam could unite the country since leaders sometimes allowed Islamic law to over-rule traditional clan-based law. It was the radical Salihi order and Salafists who brought it to politics, creating the Union of Islamic Courts, a network of southern Islamic judges and their supporters, to clamp down on warlordism and crime in Mogadishu.
After 9/11, however, the US and Ethiopia were compelled to back moderate former warlords for a new government in opposition to the anti-crime Islamic Courts. Some Somalis saw this as the West siding with warlords against conservatives seeking rule of law. A radical militia formed, called The Youth, or Al-Shabab, and it quickly became the core of the insurgency against the transitional governments and their Western and Ethiopian backers. And Al-Shabab, unlike other Somali insurgent groups, was not afraid of using terror bombings against civilian targets to pursue its goals.
Through all of this havoc ravaging the south, the de facto independent entity of Somaliland in the northwest remained largely peaceful save for clan feuds and a fiercely disputed border with Somalia’s northeastern state of Puntland.
As the UN and aid agencies had spent most of the 1990s just trying to protect agriculture and markets, healthcare, and the supply of food and medicine, the new tides of war led advocates and donors to consider rule of law the pre-requisite for sustainable peace. The UN, decades in and exhausted by the Somali conundrum, decided to focus on safe issues like juvenile justice and human rights and gender sensitivity training for police.
International donors soon funded the building of new police training facilities in Hargeisa, nearby Mandhera, and Aarmo, just outside Bossaso. Unwittingly, the UN was offering the new police recruits fluffy love just as the Somali government prepared to deploy them to the frontline of the insurgency. The Shabab inevitably found this link and decided to sever it.
The Somaliland government had the opportunity to include the Shabab and its fellows in government, but instead it treated the Shabab as a cult. The UN—Gheele’s office by proxy—had been steadily training and enhancing the Somali police forces which had become instrumental in the Somali government’s fight against insurgents. By sacrificing its impartiality and siding with government not only on development but also on security, the UN had made itself along with its poverty alleviation and health sections a big target.
At the UNDP compound in Hargeisa, Gheele worked for a foreign UNDSS security officer. When I was there it was a Sri Lankan military man who brought a virtual playbook from dealing with conflict in his own country. He relied on Gheele, the radio room team of Yahye, Abdi, Mohamed Essa, Halima, and Khadija, and their vast network of colleagues, friends, and connections across the region to anticipate what axes might be hurled at any of the two hundred plus staff who worked for the agency in Somaliland.
Linking everyone was the fleet of drivers with vehicles. Hashi had been driving the UN for eleven years by that time. There were the smart and inquisitive drivers like Ismail, a father of five daughters; the patient ones like Hashi; and then there were the reckless who might run over five flip-flopped feet before realizing they had driven off a road. Above the security offices and the radio room, there was Adino and the finance team. Before the bombing, this was the coveted place to have an office, quaint with a view over the wall at the sprawling waddi valley that held Hargeisa.
The Rule of Law and Security team was based in the neighboring building. It helped to rebuild the Somali and Somaliland police forces. The team, led for some time by a well-connected Sahelian military officer, was most focused on reforming the justice ministries. Too many kids were rotting in prisons at the time and in huge victory the ROLS and ministries’ combined work ultimately won a presidential decree removing all under-aged kids from the adult prisons in 2008. Judges were juggling state, Islamic, and traditional law sets which often prescribed different courses of action, and in an unstable political environment it was vital for foreign governments to help ensure justice was carried out with the least side-effects.
Al Shabab Strikes
On October 29th, 2008, four of the bombers drove toward their targets in Hargeisa, Somaliland, while another bomber—American journalists suspect a Somali boy from Minnesota named, Shirwa Ahmed—drove toward his target in the port city of Bossaso, Somalia.
A Takar TV camera crew appears to have been the first on the scene of the attacks on the Ethiopian Embassy and Presidential Palace, as well as the hospital in the aftermath, in Hargeisa. While the Takar reporter narrates about the pedestrian pandemonium which erupted after the first explosion from his view from the back of a pick-up truck, we see another bomb blow.
BOMBING OF THE ETHIOPIAN EMBASSY AND PRESIDENTIAL PALACE
The Takar TV clip captures Somali passersby scurrying to and fro as they witness the second explosion. No one knows when and where the next bomb will hit. The third bomber would strike, the same place as the second, killing about a dozen people fleeing the first bomb at the Ethiopian embassy.
Eight hours away in Bossaso, the fourth bomber, allegedly Shirwa Ahmed of Minnesota, parked in front of a Somali state security office and blew himself up, killing several police and sending an already unstable urban maze into panic.
PROFILE OF ALLEGED AMERICAN BOMBER (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
The fifth bomber—I have not been able to confirm the order of the bombings, in fact most reports say they were simultaneous while the Takar video and other reports disprove this—drove through central Hargeisa to the UNDP compound. This drive is very familiar to me and it is hard not to re-construct this in my mind for a number of reasons.
The bomber must have been convinced that all the UN and foreign efforts to help Somalis had been misguided when applied to helping train police who would support former warlords in destroying the young radical movement they believed in, Al Shabab. To carry out the order, the bomber had to not only navigate central Hargeisa to the office without being stopped, but had to be sure while driving over one of the most bouncy potholed dirt tracks in town that the bomb wouldn’t go off early and screw up his chances of getting posh digs in either the fiery pits of Hell or floating mattresses of an incredibly austere and cold radical’s Heaven.
His car loaded with explosives, the bomber had to pass the Hargeisa Police Academy, Ministry of Interior, and special police forces compounds and their guards, then get through the front gate of the UN compound. Sadly, the police and their trainers were so concerned with street crime and provincial feuds at that time that they would have let fire-spewing baboons ravage their armory given they had foreign passports.
Reporters from Raad TV posted the footage below of the UNDP compound after the bombing. The Raad TV interviews one of the watchmen, then a special police officer who tries to explain on the road outside the new gate. Inside, the cameraman scans the ground, an aluminum roof sheet, another, debris, the adjacent house is crumbling, men step under wires as the power lines have fallen across the walkway, the main building looks partly okay, but the pandemonium makes it hard to see through the arms via a shaking camera. A woman and man pull a bloody man out of the debris: who is he? He cries out, they have to drag him across the broken bricks and bent metal to get him to flat ground. Several of the faces are familiar to me.
AFTERMATH OF THE BOMBING OF THE UNDP HARGEISA COMPOUND
For Spite or Strategy?
The five bombers killed about twenty-nine people in the blasts, all Somali or Ethiopian, forced dozens of foreign aid workers to flee the country, and dramatically slowed down the delivery of both genuinely humanitarian drought relief and health work as well as the enhancement of the Somali security forces trainings. Somaliland, Ethiopia, and the US are convinced they were directed, trained, and supplied by Al-Shabab to strike at symbols of the northern alliance which was training Somali government police to root out Al-Shabab in the civil war in southern Somalia.
Tragically, the UN had been caught in a painful conundrum, again—one it had already faced in Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—in which to provide truly lifesaving aid, as well as health, education, and family services, it needed greater security for its workers.
The most viable, least bad option was to create a rule of law and security program for Somalia which would work with existing government ministries to reform them by re-training judges, prison officials, police, and special guard units on human rights-compatible methods for keeping the rule of law, as well as providing some funds for training sites, etc.
With humanitarian aid and police training run out of the same office, the UN took on incredible-perhaps unavoidable-risk that opponents of the Somali government(s) would begin to see the UN as part of the war effort. The UN had taken the government’s side consistently in the Somali civil wars, as it often had to, given its mandate. And when (after Somali police trained at UN-funded sites dived into the fighting in Mogadishu and were accused of killing civilians) insurgents ultimately sought to strike the UN—Gheele’s security office and neighboring rule of law program office to be precise—the nearby counter-famine teams, the child rights team, and the education office, also housed there, as well as the broader efforts of those aid sectors, would be caught in the inevitable crossfire of risk.
If Al-Shabab had intended to slow the Somali government’s war effort with these strikes, it succeeded to a very small degree. But the cost of this five-bomb strike to the general welfare of Somalis, including those who support radical Islamic politics a la Shabab, is huge. Al-Shabab has taken the risk of losing political support in order to launch this bloody attack for its symbolic value.
“There are a number of funny security trainings going on,” a UN aid worker currently serving in Hargeisa told me, “yet we can be easily targeted while moving in our vehicles so they are buying armored vehicles. They just recently compensated the surviving families who suffered a lot losing their only break-earners. In general, we UN staff have the feeling that people in headquarters do not care about our security and lives. Locals say Al Shabab are quite well integrated in Somaliland.” The UN aid worker believes the UN will have to do much more to secure its staff members and operations.
Gheele’s death, as well as Sayid’s, was noble but of an uncanny irony. I remember how he would wave to all, pray, was very busy, but always ready to meet with me, spread out the map and discuss which route was the safest.
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