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By Root 879 0

the SomCan ship responded to an American naval communiqué requesting the Puntland government’s help in transporting a shipload of stranded Somali fishermen to shore. SomCan found the marooned sailors adrift in an inoperative speedboat off the coastal town of Bargaal. The fishermen had been forced, at gunpoint, to exchange vessels with a gang of pirates who were experiencing technical problems with their attack craft’s engine. The fishermen had been adrift for two days in the pirates’ discarded boat before being spotted by a US warship. For all the pirates’ talk about their solemn duty to cleanse Somali waters of illegal fishing ships, their own countrymen were apparently not immune to being targeted when the greater good demanded it.

11. Roger Middleton, Piracy in Somalia: Threatening Global Trade, Feeding Local Wars (London: Chatham House, October 2008), http://www.chathamhouse.org. uk, 7.

12. Katharine Houreld, “Blackwater Founder Trains Somalis,” Associated Press, January 20, 2011; “Puntland Signed an Agreement with Saracen Company to train its Marine Forces,” Garowe Online, November 18, 2010, http://www.garoweonline.com.

13. Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, “Blackwater Founder Said to Back Mercenaries,” New York Times, January 20, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com.

14. Katharine Houreld, “1,000-Man Militia Being Trained in North Somalia,” Associated Press, December 1, 2010.

CHAPTER 5: GARAAD

1. Richard Phillips, A Captain’s Duty (New York: Hyperion, 2010), 247–48. Phillips, apparently, did not consider it within the ambit of a captain’s duty to heed maritime safety bulletins concerning pirate activity. Following the Alabama incident, several of his crewmates, including the ship’s navigator and chief engineer, publicly attacked Phillips for his negligence in ignoring warnings to stay at least 950 kilometres from the Somali coast. A map of the attack location shows that Phillips had put the Alabama at unacceptable risk; she was only about 550 kilometres east of Harardheere when she was hijacked—right at the pirates’ doorstep. See John Curran, “Crew Blames Capt. for Pirate Attack,” Associated Press, December 2, 2009.

2. “French Warship Detains Pirates, US Call for Action,” Agence France-Presse, April 15, 2009.

CHAPTER 6: FLOWER OF PARADISE

1. Despite its historical use in Koranic study, khat was declared un-Islamic and banned after the Islamic Courts Union assumed control over southern Somalis in 2006, provoking widespread street protests.

2. David Anderson, Susan Beckerleg, Dagol Hailu, and Axel Klein, The Khat Controversy: Stimulating the Debate on Drugs (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 1.

3. Anderson et al., Khat Controversy, 61.

4. This may be an optimistic assessment; during my trip to Bossaso in President Farole’s entourage, we stopped for a night in the city of Qardho, where the president’s good offices were sought to mediate a dispute over two young men who had been killed by Puntland police while attempting to rob a khat truck. The boys’ clan elders were demanding that the police officers be executed in retribution for their actions.

5. For an interesting discussion of khat use amongst Somali militants, see Michael Odenwald, Harald Hinkel, Elisabeth Schauer, Frank Neuner, Maggie Schauer, Thomas R. Elbert, and Brigitte Rockstroh, “The Consumption of Khat and Other Drugs in Somali Combatants: A Cross-Sectional Study,” PLoS Medicine 4, no. 12 (2007), http://www.plosmedicine.org.

6. United Nations World Food Programme, Puntland: Food Security and Vulnerability Assessment (Nairobi: WFP Somalia, April 2007), http://documents.wfp.org; Danish Refugee Council, CDRD M&E Specialist Field Trip to Puntland, 2009, http://www.somcdrd.org.

7. Puntland Ministry of Planning and Statistics, Puntland Facts and Figures 2003 (Garowe: 2003), http://siteresources.worldbank.org.

8. Of the population, 43 per cent is aged fifteen or over. If the population distribution for men and women is identical, which cannot be the case, then 21.5 per cent of the men are at least fifteen. As a rough estimate it is adequate.

9. I have not used these