The World's Most Dangerous Place by James Fergusson Read Free Book Online Page A

advice of AMISOM’s public relations department, Rouget broke cover when he gave an interview to the New York Times in which he gave a good flavour of the sort of advice he dispensed. ‘Urban fighting is a war of attrition. You nibble, nibble, nibble,’ he said. 5
    * The CIA World Factbook puts the proportion at 12 per cent, but that figure relies on the census of 2002, since when Uganda’s overall population has grown from 24 million to 34 million.
    * The rules governing the use of the honorific ‘Sheikh’, a title used in many parts of the Muslim world, are particularly loosely applied in Somalia. Taken from the Arabic word for ‘elder’, the term denotes political authority and/or religious scholarship. Many al-Shabaab ‘Sheikhs’, however, are not recognized as anything of the sort by Somalis outside the movement.
    * Even Hanley, however, might have been surprised at the rate of the rise of Islam. According to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, the Muslim population in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow by nearly 60 per cent in the next twenty years, from 242.5 million in 2010 to 385.9 million in 2030, almost double the projected rate of increase for the Muslim world as a whole.

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    The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people
    AMISOM HQ, March 2011
    There was almost no need, in the end, to leave the base to discover what the war had done to ordinary Somalis. AMISOM’s field hospital, barely a quarter of a mile along the edge of the runway from the Bancroft Hotel, turned out to be packed with wounded civilians.
    The hospital had opened in 2007 as a tented triage station for wounded AMISOM personnel; the decision to treat civilians alongside the soldiers had come later on. At first, senior UN officials in Nairobi noisily disapproved. Allowing civilians in for treatment, they argued, risked compromising the base’s security, and breached the terms of neutrality under which, as ‘peacekeepers’, AMISOM technically operated. But the commanders in the field had taken the view that since their mission was to help the people of Somalia, it would be absurd to deny them medical assistance on groundssuch as these. Enemy combatants were treated at the hospital too, after all. Winning over hearts and minds is a cornerstone of modern counter-insurgency theory – and what better way was there to achieve this when first-class trauma clinics were practically non-existent anywhere else?
    Nairobi had grudgingly conceded this point, since when AMISOM had taken the principle further, and dug into their own budgets to open a civilians-only outpatients department near by. The OPD, as it was then known, was an instant success. On three mornings each week, about eight GPs treated as many as six hundred patients who came not just from Mogadishu but in some cases from as far away as the Ethiopian border, a dangerous 500-kilometre journey that could easily take several days to complete. This said much about the availability of medical treatment in this ruined country. The clinic was yet another bombed-out seaside villa. Although it did not open until nine, a long queue had always formed before dawn at the entrance in the camp perimeter, a narrow chicane of razor wire and Hesco barriers that AMISOM’s enthusiastic press officers had dubbed ‘the Gate of Hope’.
    Medicine’s power to impress the locals was quickly demonstrated when al-Shabaab announced on the radio that anyone obtaining or even seeking treatment from the infidels would be considered ‘unclean’. When this admonition was ignored, an edict was passed warning that anyone found in possession of an AMISOM medical form risked having their tongue cut out. The militants also occasionally tried to mortar the OPD. And yet by ten o’clock on the morning I visited, the open-sided shed lined with crude wooden benches that served as a reception area was already full to bursting. Al-Shabaab’s threats, or the risk of a lucky mortar