The Mayor of Hell

MICHAELOBERTREPORTAGEN

Until recently, Mohamoud Ahmed Noor ran an internet café in London. Now he’s trying to save one of the most dangerous cities in the world. As the mayor of Mogadishu, the war-torn capital of Somalia.

The Mayor of Hell Bullets have eaten away the walls, grenades ripped open the facade. The

roof is blown to pieces. In front of the gaping openings of the three-story ruin in

the city center of Mogadishu, soldiers walk with automatic rifles at the ready.

They are supposed to protect the man who stands in a dark, African suit between

shell holes in the courtyard, smiling. The former capital building is being rebuilt,

he says. In the new offices, employees of the city will soon perform their duties

again.

Then shots are fired. Have assassins hidden in the ruins? Insurgent

Islamists? The soldiers yank their rifles from their shoulders, form a protective

circle around the man and push him into a black SUV. Pickups with rear-mounted

machine guns race up, soldiers with combat gear in their beds, readying AK-47s,

bazookas and grenade throwers. Tires spin. Gravel flies. The convoy roars off in

a cloud of dust.

“Death comes when it comes,” says Mohamoud Ahmed Noor just a few

minutes later in his office, falling into his leather chair. “If you’re afraid, you can do

nothing in Mogadishu. You cannot change this society with fear.” Not too long

ago, the 57 year-old with the silver-gray goatee, brilliant white smile and the

bright, curious eyes of a child was running an internet café on Seven Sisters

Road in Northern London. Now he runs one of the most dangerous cities in the

world. He is the mayor of Mogadishu, the war-torn capital of Somalia.

After over 20 years of civil war and house-to-house fighting, the

“Stalingrad of Africa” reminds one of an enormous archeological dig. Two and a

half million people eke out an existence in the ruins. Without electricity or clean

drinking water, without waste disposal or adequate medical facilities. In a city

where you can buy a bazooka for a few hundred dollars from the vegetable

michael obert reportagen +49 (0) 175 52 88 699 wrangelstr. 5 d - 10997 berlin [email protected] www.obert.de


dealer around the corner, and black craters in the streets mark the latest

bombings. Every few minutes shots ring out.

As mayor, Noor belongs to a transitional government that, although

internationally recognized, controls barely 20 percent of the country. And that is

only with the help of the African peace support mission Amisom. Its 12,000

soldiers from Uganda and Burundi, armed to the teeth, get into bloody skirmishes

with Al Shabaab, who have recently formed an alliance with the terrorist group Al

Qaeda and control large swathes of Somalia.

If somebody has a problem with the fact that Al Shabaab sets bombs

under market stands, blows up cinemas, stones women and saws off the right

hands and left feet of thieves, musicians or soccer players, he ends up on the

killer commandos’ hit list. And at the top of that list: Mayor Noor. With two dozen

bodyguards, a budget of $150,000 per month, a couple of computers and three

Olivetti typewriters, he wants to save Mogadishu, the hellhole on the Horn of

Africa. Or die trying.

When the Somalian president, an old fellow traveler from his youth,

offered him the job a year and a half ago, Noor got his wife, his six children and

eight grand children together in his small rented apartment in London where he

had fled in 1993 from the war in Somalia. He explained to them that he might not

come back from his mission: “You might hear in the news soon that the mayor of

Mogadishu was killed.”

His wife did not want to let him go. His friends thought he was crazy. Still,

here he sits, at his woodworm-infested desk, working through piles of written

pleas for help from his citizens. Outside, beyond the walls of sandbags and

barbed wire, the bodyguards are removing weapons arsenals from the pickups.

At the entrance of the building, a machine gun is mounted. A uniformed soldier

with battle gear and an AK-47 guards the office door, and yet the mayor reacts

allergically to visitors in bulletproof vests. “Mogadishu is safe,” he says, his face

reflected in the polished wood, “safer than Bagdad or Kabul.” He believes that

Mogadishu unfairly gets a lot of bad press.



Since the rebels toppled the authoritarian General Siad Barre in 1991,

there is no longer a functioning central government in East African Somalia. After

the fall of the dictator, the militias and warlords tore each other to pieces and

turned Mogadishu, a formerly prosperous trading center on the Indian Ocean, into

a wasteland. The war has claimed as many as a million lives. Mostly women,

children and the elderly--those who were not able to get out of the line of fire

quickly enough. Almost two and a half million Somalis were driven from their

homes, nearly a third of the entire population. A million people have fled the

country.

Today, Somalia is considered a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism, a

failed state, where the world’s most wanted keep cropping up, and international

terror networks plan their next attacks. The threat to the West posed by Somalia,

experts warn, has taken on dangerous proportions. The last rescue attempt that

the West undertook in 1993 resulted in what was, at that time, America’s biggest

fiasco since the Vietnam War. Two US combat helicopters were shot down over

the center of Mogadishu, the bodies of American soldiers dragged through the

streets by the mob. The failed mission, which was made into the Hollywood war

drama Black Hawk Down, led to the withdrawal of American troops out of

Somalia. Since then, the world has given up on Mogadishu.

Not Mayor Noor. During his first few months in office, he fired one corrupt

employee after another, had the waste collected, the sewers at least provisionally

cleaned and the wildly proliferating trees in the bombed-out buildings processed

into firewood. A stone’s throw away from the front line between Amisom and Al

Shabaab, he had two public gardens built and a row of streetlights installed, re-

illuminating the first street in the ravaged city center.

“Have you ever been to an African prison? In one of those black, concrete

cells?” asks Noor, on his way to his next appointment. Before he fled to England,

he himself had sat behind bars in Mogadishu as a dissident. “At first you struggle

to maintain your dignity, clinging to the hope that the door could open at any

second. Then you just slowly get tired. You sink further and further down until, at

some point, you find yourself sleeping in your own excrement. By the end,” he

says, “you don't hope for anything anymore.”



“And that’s exactly what it’s like for the people here,” he says as he

hurries through the halls, out to his SUV. “After 20 years of imprisonment in their

own city, people have come to accept a life without joy, a life where you always

have a gun to your head. Hungry, dirty, destitute--a life in darkness.” Self-defeat,

that’s the toughest nut to crack. “I have to change the mentality of the people, the

way they think, the way they experience the world!” How is he is he supposed to

do that? In a collectively traumatized city. Where not even ten minutes go by

without shots being fired, and the windows rattle at night to the sound of artillery

fire. Where mothers chain war-addled children to their beds, so they don’t get lost

in the labyrinth of ruins. One out of five children here dies from drinking

contaminated water. There are no public schools. Or jobs. And behind every

broken wall, in every skeleton of a building, refugees crouch in hovels made of

acacia branches and scraps of plastic, trapped between war and hunger.

How on earth is the mayor supposed to change the “mentality” of these

people? “With a transfusion, you don’t force blood into the veins of the patient,”

he says as the ruins of the city pass by beyond the tinted windows of his SUV.

“You give it to him drop by drop.”

That is why Mohamoud Ahmed Noor has not jogged through the Park of

London’s Parliament Hill in over a year and a half. That is why he has not sat

down after work to watch an Arsenal game on TV but has been out in the rubble

of his city from morning to night, tirelessly shaking hands, mediating clan

disagreements, advising business people, raising funds, and giving words of

encouragement to the wounded, disabled or orphaned.

“You are the future of Somalia,” he tells the street kids participating in one

of the programs he has initiated. “Each of you can become a technician, a

teacher, even a minister.” They sit on wobbly chairs in a circle. Their clothes are

torn, their bodies emaciated. They eat scraps of food they find in the waste and

fight feral dogs for places to sleep. At night, the thugs from Al Shabaab come and

gather them up at gun point, give them rifles, a little training and use them as

cannon fodder.



And the mayor tells them, “Keep your bodies clean. Wash your shirts,”

which seems somewhat fanciful and naive. What about a roof over their heads

instead, Mr. Mayor? Or regular meals? He would like to do more, but the coffers

are empty. And so he trusts in the power of his words, and the people do in fact

hunger for them. For decades, people shot at them. Now someone is finally

reaching out a hand and speaking to them and giving them courage.

“Drop by drop,” the mayor repeats, stroking the hair of a disheveled street

kid. The boy beams up at him and walks out proudly, his head held high. “In a few

years, there will be enough fresh blood in the heads and hearts of the people.

Then they will feel better.”

Most of the citizens of Mogadishu harbor a deep mistrust of anyone who

is too close to the transitional government. They accuse its members of lining

their own pockets, while leaving Somalia, one of the most corrupt countries in the

world, to pirates and militias. Only the mayor, on that they all agree, is beyond

any suspicion. “A man of principle,” says Iman Icar. The mayor’s deputy was a

social worker in the Netherlands for sixteen years. “He is loyal to his country,

body and soul. He has a dream and is realizing that dream.”

“When he really wants something, he just does it,” says Shamis, the

mayor’s wife, as she puts food on the table in their modest home. For years, she

watched her husband as he sat in front of the television in their London apartment

until late at night, choking back tears when he saw all the people who were being

killed and mutilated in Mogadishu, the ruins of his city. When he became mayor,

she lost 20 kilos. Every time the phone rang, she thought: “That’s it. They’ve

killed him.”

After his inauguration, she visited him. “But I couldn’t sleep,” says the

small woman with the lively eyes and the fashionable glasses. “Because of the

gunshots and the bombs.” But back in London she felt cooped up. Her six

children are grown up and have long since moved out. Finally she gathered up

the courage to return, after 31 years of exile, to Mogadishu, to her husband’s

side. “Home is where the heart is,” she says, laughing suddenly. But just as

suddenly, the smile vanishes: “I just didn’t want him to die without me.”



A local appointment in the Mogadishu city center: a good 300 boys and

girls are waiting for the mayor in the 21st October Secondary School. Classes

have not been held here for years. All public schools have been closed. Hardly

anyone can pay the $15 a month for private school. Ninety-five percent of the

children do not receive formal education.

The mayor walks through the bombed-out classrooms, steps over the

debris of collapsed roofs. There is excrement and trash everywhere. The

bodyguards’ eyes comb over the dark corridors: perfect hiding places for

assassins. Noor’s desire to be close to the people makes him vulnerable. “This

school belongs to us again,” he says into the microphone, his voice cracked and

distorted through the portable speakers. “Soon our children will once again learn

to read and write here.”

Beyond the schoolyard wall, refugees had built an improvised camp. Until

recently, as many as 50,000 people had sought shelter in the mainly destroyed

government buildings until they were cleared out by the Somalian police and

army. “This is real progress,” says the mayor. Down below on the streets, shots

ring out.

Noor does not know where all the people went after they were removed.

They were not presented with any alternatives. Criticism has rained down on him

from aid organizations. “Mogadishu isn’t London,” says the director of a Somalian

NGO in one of the refugee camps that have been overrun by new arrivals from

the cleared out buildings. “The mayor is a dreamer,” she says. “He was in exile

too long and doesn’t have a clue what it’s like down here on the ground.” The

children in the schoolyard and their parents see things differently. They are happy

about the prospect of classes starting soon.

The mayor’s priorities are clear: schools, hospitals, electricity, clean

drinking water, sewers, waste disposal. But with a monthly budget of $150,000--

fifteen percent of the port of Mogadishu’s revenues--Noor’s options, in a

devastated city of millions, are limited. Foreign aid? “We need bricks, sand,

cement and tools so we can start to rebuild our homes ourselves.” With that, he



rolls up his sleeves, leaps into the back of his SUV and charges off to his next

appointment.

To mobilize the people. Without guns. The mayor’s exuberance and

optimism seem to be contagious. “Finally someone is doing something,” declares

the 24 year-old Farah, who collects waste in the streets as part of one of Noor’s

initiatives. “The mayor takes us seriously”, he says. “The mayor gives us

courage.”

“He shows us that we can change things ourselves,” says Aisha from the

Mogadishu City Volunteers--hundreds of unpaid workers that want to help put

their city back on its feet. “The mayor is our hero.” Aisha has drawn Noor’s

smiling face on her T-shirt. In a speech bubble above his head are the words in

Somali, “You can do it! Get going!” For some, Mayor Noor is something like the

Obama of Mogadishu, in whom they have invested all their hopes and whom they

worship like a pop star. The others want his head.

From the underground dungeon of a secret prison, a barefoot man is led

out to be interrogated. A few days ago, Idriz Sheikh Abdifatah, 23, a radio dealer

from the surrounding countryside, was arrested by the Somalian police with a car

full of TNT and an explosives vest strapped to his chest.

“I’m a member of Al Shabaab,” he says, his voice steady. With his neat,

close-cropped hair, his blue dress shirt, and his rolled-up jeans, Idriz does not

look anything like a suicide bomber. Where he was planning to detonate the

bomb he doesn’t say. But as far as the mayor is concerned, it doesn’t matter:

“Shoot him. Behead him. Allah cannot forgive this traitor.”

Don’t you also have children, Mr. Abdifatah? For a second, the prisoner

seems to waver. But it quickly passes. “A daughter,” he says. “Aisha. She is one

month old.” And you, her father, want to blow yourself up? His face lights up:

“Soon, we will ignite our bombs in America and Europe too.” At the top of the list

is Britain. “I’ll blow myself up in London and go directly to heaven. Aisha will be

happy and proud of her father.”

Back in Mogadishu, the mayor tops the list of Al Shabaab’s most-hated.

An insider claims that there is a $100,000 price on his head. Why, one wonders,



isn’t he dead already? The best bodyguards are useless against a sharpshooter,

and the transitional government cannot even protect their ministers from attacks.

Does Noor have special instincts? Are there those among the Islamists who

secretly sympathize with him? Or is he just really lucky? The mayor is still alive, it

is said in the streets of Mogadishu, because so many are praying for him.

His red cell phone beeps. There’s a text message on the display: “We see

you. You’re standing in front of your house. You’re wearing a khaki shirt and

sunglasses, and you’re speaking to a white journalist. In two minutes, you’ll be

dead.” Snipers on the roof across the street? A bomb in the SUV? An explosives

belt around the belly of the veiled woman coming around the corner?

The mayor answers the text message on Somalian TV. “Do not disguise

yourselves as women. Do not hide your weapons under your robes,” he says,

looking directly into the camera. “Come and face me. Look me in the eye. And

then kill me. If you can.”

Born in 1954 in De Martino Hospital in Mogadishu, Mohamoud Ahmed

Noor spent the first years of his life as a nomad in the interior of the country near

the Ethiopian border. His father possessed 300 goats and 10 camels. He died

when Ahmed was five. His mother gave the boy to an aunt in Mogadishu to be

raised, but she could not provide for him, so Ahmed ended up in an orphanage

and lived there for the next 12 years.

Basketball kept him alive. “I wasn’t tall but very fast,” he says. In 1972, his

team took first place in the Somalian championship and Noor, point guard,

number seven, became famous throughout Somalia. With his minimal salary, he

paid his way through high school. Meanwhile, the military, under the command of

General Siad Barre, had taken power. Somalia became socialist. “From the

beginning, I hated the idea that the state assumes responsibility for my life,” says

Noor today. “I wanted to achieve my goals on my own terms. I didn’t want the

government to feed me like a dog.”

He was seen as a reactionary and went to prison as a “friend of America.”

Before he was able to finish his studies in geology, he fled to Saudi Arabia. “In my



basketball bag were two pairs of pants and three shirts,” he recalls. “I left my

entire life behind in Mogadishu.”

In 1993, by this point married to Shamis and father of six children, he

came back to London. Times were not good. Shamis suggested he apply for

welfare. He refused: “I didn’t want to be a parasite on society. I would’ve been

disgusted with myself.” Instead, he graduated from the University of Westminster

with a degree in business management and founded the Somali Speakers

Association, which today still advises the diaspora in London on social issues. In

order to make ends meet, he opened the internet café on Seven Sisters Road,

not far from Finsbury Park. In back, telephone booths. In front, computers. The

sign on the wall reads: “No Pornography!”

In the morning, after issuing the challenge to the Islamists on television,

Noor has his driver stop at a deserted intersection in the Mogadishu city center.

The skeleton of a tower rises up from the rubble like a bony pointer finger: the

ruins of the old parliament building. Symbol of a city of death and an utterly failed

state.

Not too long ago, units from Amisom and the transitional government

fought at this very place against Al Shabaab. Street for street. House for house.

Man to man. For years, the Islamists controlled all of Mogadishu except for a tiny

government enclave. Then they lost some districts and in August made a “tactical

withdrawal” to the city limits. Since that time, they’ve been running an

underground operation. With snipers and Al-Qaeda-style bomb attacks.

At the intersection, the mayor’s bodyguards jump out of the pickups with

their AK-47s and fan out. Noor picks his way through the pile of rubble that was

once the parliament building as if following a path back to the city of his youth: the

“Pearl of Africa” with its marvelous boardwalk and magnificent beaches on the

Indian Ocean, with its broad boulevards, grand squares, spectacular gardens and

whitewashed, Italian colonial facades.

“Mogadishu was absolutely safe and peaceful back then, a zero-crime

city,” says Noor, wiping the sweat from his brow. “On Fridays, we would go

swimming at the beach. Evenings to the cinema.” Next door in the Casa d’Italia,



he had basketball practice. “Over there, that’s where the gym was. There, the

tennis court. The night club. The bar. That was the university. And that, the

Somali Bank. Behind that was the Somali Airlines building.” Rubble. Piles of

rubble. Bullet-pocked, art deco columns. Gaping sandbags on oriental balconies.

On a bullet-riddled wall are written the words, “Help me! I’m a child!” Next to it, a

crude drawing: men pointing rifles at each other. Like pearls on a chain, the

bullets hang in midair. On the ground lie human beings in a horrifying smear of

black blood.

“Mogadishu was beautiful back then,” says the mayor suddenly quiet, as

he loses his balance on the pile boulders he is standing on. It is as if two different

times were at war inside him, as if “back then” and “today” were tugging him in

two different directions. Tears well up in his eyes. Then he pulls himself together,

clenches his fists and says in a firm voice: “That is the city that I will rebuild.”

Since Al Shabaab has retreated, it is no longer simply a vision of utopia.

The car bombs still explode, shots are still fired, suicide bombers still blow

themselves up, but in Mogadishu, the first signs of normality are starting to creep

back in. Life is gradually returning to the no man’s lands throughout the city. Due

in no small part to Mayor Noor’s tireless efforts, people are now venturing out into

the streets, clearing the rubble from the courtyards, building houses, opening

small businesses.

A boy with a festering scar over his eye waters a tree on the side of the

road. “Planted it myself,” he says as the water runs out of a hole in a plastic bag

and is soaked up by the thirsty soil of Mogadishu. “My tree. I’m going to take care

of it. When it gets big, I’m going to sleep in its shade.”

Hope. For a peaceful future. But the front line is only a few kilometers

down the main road. At the last checkpoint, called X-Control, pools of blood dry

on the pavement. Soldiers often lay out the bodies of dead Shabaab fighters, so

that everyone can see what fate awaits insurgents. The caravans of refugees

from the Al-Shabaab-controlled areas are endless. Amisom and government

troops are moving in on them, pushing the Islamists farther back.



“We’re fleeing from the army’s rockets,” says Hawa Ibrahim, a young

woman in a violet veil, sitting in a completely overloaded minibus. Al Shabaab

often hides in residential areas in order to use women and children as human

shields. If the army attacks with its rockets and civilians die, it also fans the

flames of anger directed at the mayor. “Allah will punish him,” says Hawa.

Whether he likes it or not, he belongs to the transitional government and is,

therefore, automatically seen as being on their side.

On the front line, near the former animal market--these days an eery,

dangerous place--soldiers crouch in their ragged uniforms behind sandbags.

They wear mirrored sunglasses and ammo belts slung across their chests. Their

AK-47s and rocket launchers point at an empty street between burned-out

buildings that have been shot to pieces in the battles of the past few days.

“On the roofs over there. Sharpshooters,” whispers Ahmed Ali, the

commander of this section of the front, lighting a cigarette. “One false move, and

you’re dead.” Al Shabaab is by no means defeated, the war nowhere near

finished. It lurks at the edges of Mogadishu, waiting for its chance to move back

into the city.

The commander takes a long drag on his cigarette. He is 65 years old and

has spent more than half his life in the army. The mayor? “A very good man. A

real patriot,” he says. He clicks his heels, salutes: “Came back from London to

patch up Mogadishu.”

It’s not quite true what the commander claims--that the father of the city

sleeps with a gun under his pillow and an AK-47 at his bedside, Shamis explains.

But her husband does constantly wake up at night with a head full of ideas for the

next day. “After four in the morning, he can never sleep.” In London, he regularly

went jogging. These days he cannot really manage more than a couple of laps

around the house in the shadows of the high walls and barbed wire.

“You’re getting a bit of a belly,” Shamis tells him after breakfast, a loving

smile on her face. When he leaves in the morning, she never knows if he is going

to make it back. “You’ve got gray hair from all your worries.”



Does he miss London sometimes? “Arsenal matches and Question Time

with the British parliament on BBC1,” says Noor, getting into the black SUV.

Outside, the body guards jump into the pickups with their weapons. “And the park

at Parliament Hill. The grass, the hill, the kites in the sky--wonderful.”

Everything that Noor has achieved since he took office in Mogadishu is at

stake today. “Exactly one year ago, I organized an open air music festival,” he

explains in the half-light behind the black windows of his SUV. “An event like

nothing the people of Mogadishu had been able to experience in decades.” He

wanted to light a beacon, proclaim a new beginning. A life of dignity. A life without

fear. But then, men with guns stormed the square and started shooting into the

crowd under orders from the warlord Mohamed Dheere, the former mayor. He

wanted to intimidate his successor, knock him from his perch. Four people died.

Among them the director of the brass band. “That was the darkest day of my life,”

says Noor, struggling to keep his composure.

Exactly one year after the catastrophe, a music festival is scheduled to

take place. “If we let ourselves be intimidated, we will never change anything.”

Thousands have come. They have been waiting in the square, which is open on

all sides, since early morning. Dressed in their finest. Waiting for a message from

the mayor. Waiting for his vision. For two bloody decades, the inhabitants of the

sixteen city districts have fought each other. Now they hold hands, sing together

and dance. Their signs read Al Shabaab: Murderers. Al Shabaab will end up like

Osama bin Laden. Among them are posters that applaud the mayor.

Poets with white robes and henna-died beards recite poems and whirl like

dervishes in circles. The musicians in the brass band in their bright, green

uniforms blare out a march. And then the mayor comes--not in an armored

vehicle from Amisom, not in his black SUV. No. On foot. And without a bulletproof

vest. Waving, smiling, he walks into the square. His citizens cheer for him as if he

were a soccer star. “The future!” he calls into the microphone. “Freedom! Light!”

On the rooftops--almost imperceptible in the roar of the applause--

ammunition belts, moved merely by the breathing of the watchful guards, clink

against the barrels of their AK-47s. At any moment, someone in the crowd could



pull a gun, or detonate an explosives belt. But that does not seem to worry the

people now. They hang on the mayor’s every word. It is as if he could simply

keep swearing that normality has returned, and it would be so. And everything

would be good again in Mogadishu.

“We love our mayor!” shrieks a woman in the crowd, wild with joy. Others

yell out their agreement, waving Somalian flags. “He must go on! He deserves

more! President! He should become president!”

Mohamoud Ahmed Noor has other plans. After the festival at dinner, he

reveals them to his wife. “The Olympic games in Mogadishu!” he exclaims, taking

her hand. “In 2028 or 2035. At any rate, while I’m still alive.”

Copyright Michael Obert

Wrangelstr. 5, D – 10997 Berlin

Tel. +49 (0) 175 5288699, [email protected]

Translation Jason Nickels

Proskauer Str. 28, D – 10247 Berlin

Tel. +49 (0) 176 64130224, [email protected]


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The Mayor of Hell