Dead Centre - Andy McNab [76]
The Americans began to make headway. By 1993, the famine was winding down. George Bush Senior came to witness their success for himself. US forces were looking to leave, and undergoing a lengthy handover to the UN. The Pakistani Army and a handful of others flew in, ready to continue the good work. But there was a problem. Aidid was pissed off at being marginalized by the rest of the clan leaders. He decided he was going to show everyone who was boss. In June that year twenty-four Pakistani UN soldiers were ambushed and massacred. Some were disembowelled; others had their eyes gouged out.
Suddenly the Americans were no longer on a humanitarian mission. They were at war. The soldiers who’d come to feed the hungry were back in combat. The next few months became one long street battle. Casualties on both sides were high.
The US’s resolve weakened. They looked for an exit. On 3 October they thought they had the answer. They’d received information that Aidid was holed up in the Olympic Hotel. Delta Force – the D Boys – assaulted the building. It was an ambush. Two Black Hawks were taken down by RPGs in the middle of the city. Firefights kicked off as US forces tried to extricate the aircrew. Nineteen US soldiers were killed and eighty-four wounded, along with an unconfirmed number of clan fighters. The Americans said more than a thousand; the clans said 113.
The world didn’t see the street fighting and the casualties. They saw a Black Hawk pilot being dragged through the streets in his underpants with ropes round his ankles. It played for days on CNN and all the national outlets. Bill Clinton had taken over from Bush Senior. He couldn’t understand how a humanitarian operation had turned into a complete disaster. He ordered US forces out. And he was wary of helping anyone again. That was why the Rwanda genocide was allowed to happen in 1994, and the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. Nobody in the White House wanted another dead American dragged through the streets of a foreign city.
We bounced past the hotel and off the main drag, through a rotting labyrinth of muddy stone rag-covered huts. Hundreds of thousands of human beings existed here and mangy dogs skulked in the shadows. Kids with misshapen heads and contorted limbs haunted the irregular dirt streets and cactus-lined paths, massive growths hanging from their bodies.
High-voltage cables sagged dangerously low across the gaps between tin-roofed dwellings. The whole place was strewn with rubble, fetid rubbish and, of course, burning tyres.
Rubble, rubbish and yet more smoking tyres lay around a large man-made mound about two hundred metres away, on top of which stood a lone shack with a cart outside. The king must have lived there.
The locals melted away as soon as they saw the technicals screeching to a halt. Faces appeared at the grilles of old steel doors. A dog barked at the tailgate of the wagon in front of us and was soon kicked away by one of the lads in trainers.
Awaale leapt out. ‘Mr Nick, come.’ He motioned for me to follow. Kids screamed on either side. We walked down a narrow alley. The traffic noise became a distant hum. Birds twittered. It was almost like a Sunday stroll, until a distant burst of automatic fire broke the spell.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I want to show you what the tourists are missing.’
6
WE FOUND OURSELVES beside four single-storey houses that had been blasted and burnt out years ago. In their midst stood a copse of bright green cactuses about the size of a tennis court. They were just over head height, some with bright red flowers.
Awaale stood there proudly. ‘This place, my father made it famous.’
I knew I should have been admiring his dad’s cactus allotment,