Pirates of Somalia Read Free

lights, Garowe was reduced to a monochromatic grey. Partway through the city we pulled off the main road and struck out onto Garowe’s pitch-black streets. Our headlights began to reveal haphazard piles of stone littered around spacious plots of empty land, evidence of Garowe’s ongoing building boom. We hit another, miniature, checkpoint, nothing more than a log laid across the path, where a uniformed soldier shouted at us to extinguish our headlights, glanced inside the car, and waved us through.
    More soldiers were lounging around the entrance to Mohamad’s house. Our driver honked, causing a handful of them to jump to attention and rush to swing open the spiked iron gate. It was past nine o’clock, but multiple Land Cruisers were parked in the driveway and the courtyard was still bustling with activity. Until the last few days, the newly elected president of Puntland had lived here, before moving into the official residence inside the government compound.
    I was sleepily ushered through the house and into its only functioning office, where Mohamad sat behind a desk covered by stacks of paper and a laptop. His frame, short and stocky, was the antithesis of the lanky and imperious figure that typified most Somalis. In the pale-green hue cast by the room’s only light source, I could not make out the details of his face, not that it made a difference; I had never so much as seen a photograph of the man who was to protect me for the next month and a half. We shook hands and exchanged quick pleasantries.
    Soon Abdi and I were back in the dark meandering city corridors, twisting down nameless streets where I saw nothing and remembered nothing, and pulled to a stop in front of a modest-sized residence with a blue gate. We passed through a courtyard and past a set of swinging metal doors into the house. As the SPU set up camp in the courtyard, Abdi showed me down a hall to my room. I tossed down the sports bag carrying my computer, notebooks, and malaria medication next to the bed.
    I had scarcely pulled the mosquito netting over the bed before I was asleep.
* * *
    I was to spend the next six weeks living in Garowe, a rapidly expanding city at the very heart of the pirates’ tribal homeland. My local partner, Mohamad, was the son of the newly elected president, Abdirahman Farole, a fact that made me privy to backroom political dealings, stories, gossip, and daily impressions of life that went beyond the perceptions of reporters flying in to take snapshots of the gang behind the latest tanker hijacking. During this first trip to Puntland, I was shocked to encounter no other foreigners until my final day in the country, when, long-bearded and bedraggled, I briefly met with an Australian television crew hours before flying out of Bossaso. For an outsider, my access to the region was truly unique.
    Contrary to the oft-recycled one-liners found in most news reports, Somalia is not a country in anarchy. Indeed, to even speak of Somalia as a uniform entity is a mischaracterization, because in the wake of the civil war the country has broken down into a number of autonomous enclaves. Founded in 1998 as a tribal sanctuary for the hundreds of thousands of Darod clanspeople fleeing massacres in the south, Puntland State of Somalia comprises approximately 1.3 million people, one-quarter to one-third of Somalia’s total land mass (depending on whom you talk to), and almost half of its coastline. Straddling the shipping bottleneck of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, it was the natural candidate to become the epicentre of the recent outbreak of Somali piracy.
    In writing this book, I had the difficult task of bringing a fresh perspective to a topic that continues to inundate the pages of news publications around the world. Pirates make good copy: there is something about them that animates the romantic imagination. But reports of daring hijackings in the international section of the newspaper are the print equivalents of the talking