Decade of Fear. Michelle Shephard

It was one of the few countries in the world where the Toronto Star carried as much clout as the New York Times—and in some cases more. Many Somalia-born Canadians held positions of great influence in their birth country and had homes about a thirty-minute drive northwest of my newsroom.

      For the first few years after 9/11, I concentrated on making contacts within Canada’s diasporas, prominent Muslim organizations, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, trying to build the Star’s first national security beat. The timing for this new direction was good. In 2002, I was part of a team of Star reporters headed by my husband that wrote a series about racial profiling and Toronto’s police force. Jimmie had spent two years fighting for access to a police database that would reveal patterns suggesting police in certain circumstances treated blacks more harshly than whites. The stories caused a major uproar. The police union sued our paper for $2.7 billion in a class action defamation suit. (We won the legal battle, with costs.) The series eventually resulted in important changes and was awarded the Governor General’s Michener Award for public service journalism. But needless to say, covering city cops got a little more challenging after that, and I welcomed the change in beat.

      One of the biggest Canadian national security stories when I started concerned Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen and Ottawa engineer who was detained in New York’s jfk Airport during a stopover in 2002 and was covertly flown to Damascus for interrogation as part of the CIA’s rendition program. In early 2004, after his release, I went to Syria to retrace his steps and learned more about another Canadian who had been held and tortured as a terrorism suspect. Later that summer, I spent almost every week in Ottawa covering a federal inquiry into Arar’s case, which concluded that the RCMP had passed erroneous information to the United States, which influenced the decision to render him. Arar was vindicated and awarded a $10.5 million settlement.

      By 2006, I was eager to do more foreign reporting and in particular to learn more about Somalia. I pitched a trip to Mogadishu. Somalis living all over the world were returning to the country’s capital. For some, it was the first time in fifteen years they had felt safe enough to visit, weeping as they saw the African coastline where they grew up, or felt the heat, or introduced their Western-raised children to their homeland.

      What had transformed the country’s previously anarchic capital was a group called the Islamic Courts Union, a union of small Sharia courts throughout the south. The ICU was doing what no one else had managed: they took weapons off the streets, shut down the gun markets and chased away the warlords and dismantled their checkpoints, which had once dotted every block. Soon couples ventured out after dark. The airport opened. Kids played soccer on the streets. The ICU brought civility to a city that had seen none in fifteen years. The Transitional Federal Government had the backing of the un but was led by unpopular warlord Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, and by 2006 most Somalis had given up hope that they could stabilize the country. When the ICU took over control of Mogadishu and much of the south, the TFG was pushed 250 kilometres west, to the town of Baidoa.

      The secret to the ICU’s success was that they had overcome sub-clan rivalry in Mogadishu. The majority of the ICU’s senior members belonged to the powerful Hawiye clan, and the unifying forces were religion and a hatred of warlord Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed (of rival Darod clan). Somalia had always been beholden to a complicated and fierce clan structure that was part of the reason past attempts at reconciliation had failed. But the ICU purported to have only Islam as the backbone of their organization, and in bringing all the sub-clans of Hawiye together, the ICU had done something no UN-backed, CIA-funded agreements (of which by this point there had been fourteen) could.

      Then there was the other side of the story: the worrying fact that the ICU adhered to a strict interpretation of Islamic law. There were reports that thieves had their hands amputated and adulterers were stoned to death, music and theatre were banned, the media faced “regulations,” and women were forced to cover their faces with the niqab or be penalized. There were also foreign ICU members with pedigrees earned in Afghanistan who appeared on the U.S. and un terrorism watch lists. Some Western analysts compared the ICU to Afghanistan’s Taliban. The conditions certainly looked similar. The Taliban had come to power in 1996 amid chaos as the world paid little attention.

      Many Somalis, the majority of whom were Sunni Muslims following the Sufi traditions infused with dancing, art and the honouring of saints, were just as concerned about the ICU’s Saudi-influenced doctrine that banned music and imposed harsh rules on women. The shooting death of two fans watching a World Cup soccer match made headlines around the world. A ban of the ubiquitous and much-loved leafy narcotic qat had many grumbling and in some cases mounting small protests. But even with these reservations, after years of bloodshed, most Somalis acquiesced since they were thankful for the stability.

      When my editor gave the trip to Somalia a green light, I tried to recall the lessons I had learned a few months earlier in my “Hostile Environment Training” course. British ex-marines offered these sessions for journalists heading into conflict zones. (A course certificate also lowered the insurance rate our papers paid to cover us when we travelled.) Basically, it was a week in a Virginian field where the tough Brits beat the snot and scared the shit out of us. The first morning began with a surprise hostage-taking as “kidnappers” in balaclavas ran from the woods, stopped our car and hauled us out of the vehicle (I went by my pony tail since I was awkwardly stuck in the back), threw burlap sacks over our heads and then had us march, kneel, lie motionless face down in the dirt in a drill that felt all too real. The entire exercise was videotaped and later analyzed so we could learn what made a “good hostage” and a few other tricks. Other lessons that week included how to negotiate checkpoints, cover riots (wear natural, not manmade fabrics that could melt and stick to your skin if burned), identify different types of explosions and negotiate a minefield, as well as general orienteering, which was by far my worst session—not surprising, as I cannot read a map in Toronto, either, and lasted only two days in Girl Guides as a kid.

      My favourite session was first aid, thanks partly to a background in lifeguarding, but also because I found our instructor endlessly amusing. Tall, lanky and right out of a Monty Python skit, his every sentence included the phrase “Happy with that?” As in “Your leg has been severed by a machete. Happy with that? What do you do now?” Or, “You’ve run out of water. Happy with that? Happy with that? Do you drink your piss?” The scenarios they set up for us were resplendent with fake blood and Oscar-worthy performances, and my hands shook every time I tended to the “victims” or used a Sharpie to write on someone’s forehead the exact time I had tied the tourniquet so the doctors would know if the limb could be saved or if it had to be amputated. The only time I saw one of our instructors break role was when I tried to stop a femoral artery bleed. “Lovie, that’s not working,” said the smirking instructor as he pushed my quaking hands south of his crotch to his inner thigh.

      I arrived at Washington’s National Airport after that week with fake blood still on my cargo pants and my dirty hair tamed in two braids, so exhausted that I fell asleep at the gate. I woke only as my name was called over the speaker and ran breathless onto the flight. Startled passengers looked up and I am sure more than one thought, Great, we’re about to be hijacked by a deranged Pippi Longstocking.

      How any of this would help me in Somalia if things got bad I had no idea, but I packed a big first aid kit anyway. There were two such different versions of what was taking place on the ground, it was hard to know what to expect. Was this the long-awaited chance for peace, or the startup of al Qaeda’s next franchise?

      I could never have imagined that over the years my tour guides into this part of the world would be a Toronto grocer, a wanted terrorist, a stubborn tortoise, a primary school teacher who would become president, a Somali-Canadian journalist and a teenage boy named Ismail who broke my heart.

      FLYING HIGH OVER Mogadishu’s chiselled coastline, looking at the soft haze beyond the airplane window, I could imagine what once was: the beachfront cafés, lively soccer games and vibrant markets that only Somali elders nostalgically recall. At the safety of ten thousand feet, all that was visible were the outlines of the bone-white Italian architecture, built by the capital’s former colonial rulers, and the turquoise Indian Ocean. Descend farther and see Mogadishu today: