The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [36]
“Very bad place,” Musso said.
I couldn’t hold it any longer. I felt a rush of wetness on my pant leg. They were letting me piss myself like a goddamn animal.
The rage just welled up in me. I felt degraded. I was screaming at the pirates, just cursing them and telling them they were going to die.1
For three of the four men, Phillips’s morbid prediction came true. On April 12, believing Phillips’s life to be in immediate danger, Commander Frank Castellano ordered the Bainbridge forces into action, upon which Navy SEAL snipers killed the three hijackers remaining on the lifeboat. The Leader, Abdiweli Muse (a Puntlander from Galkayo), who had been on board the Bainbridge conducting ransom negotiations when the rescue took place, suddenly found his bargaining position shot to bits. He was taken to New York to stand trial, and in February 2011 was sentenced to almost thirty-four years in prison.
Following the Alabama attack, Garaad vowed revenge against the Americans, and ordered his organization to retaliate. Two days later, a boatload of Garaad’s men sighted the MV Liberty Sun, a US-flagged vessel carrying food aid destined for Somalia, which they proceeded to pursue and blast with rocket-propelled grenades; fortunately, neither the vessel nor her crew were harmed. In a subsequent phone interview with the Agence France-Presse, Garaad made it clear that the motive for the attack was anything but financial. “We were not after a ransom,” he said. “We … assigned a team with special equipment to chase and destroy any ship flying the American flag in retaliation for the brutal killing of our friends.”2
In February 2009, two months before the Alabama hijacking, I had sat across a table from Garaad on the patio of a Bossaso hotel, listening to him discuss his plans to join the Puntland Coast Guard.
* * *
I had been trying to get in touch with him for weeks, but Garaad had exhibited a tendency to disappear for long stretches of time once the initial contact was made. My interpreter Warsame and I had been supposed to meet him the previous day, but after preliminary discussions in the morning, Garaad turned off his phone and we didn’t hear back from him. “He’s off chewing khat somewhere,” Warsame suggested. The next day, Garaad called us with his explanation: “I was busy.”
After agreeing to meet us at four o’clock, his phone was off again. It was twenty minutes past four, and I was starting to get worried. I had heard disturbing reports of Garaad’s lack of regard for conventional notions of politeness; one of my hosts, Abdirizak, recounted how Garaad had stood him up for a 10 a.m. meeting two days in a row. When one of our party informed Warsame and me that he had recently spotted Garaad near the khat market, chewing with some friends, it seemed that today’s rendezvous was destined to share a similar fate. “Forget it,” said Warsame, “he’s not coming. He won’t move for the rest of the afternoon.” Soon afterwards, we got a call; despite the hypnotic powers of the khat, Garaad was on his way to the hotel. “His phone must have been off to avoid the people calling him for money,” our friend suggested.
At about twenty-five minutes past four, Garaad showed up at the gated entrance to the hotel, and Warsame and I joined him on the restaurant patio. With his freshly ironed dress shirt, pressed slacks, and clean, cropped hair, Garaad blended right in with the crowd of Somali businessmen staying at the hotel. In contrast to his impeccable outfit, his face looked ragged and exhausted for someone in his mid-thirties, his eyes scratched raw by the constant rubbing of his fingers—a textbook case of khat withdrawal. Like Boyah, his face was slightly emaciated, and Warsame suggested afterwards that, like Boyah, he may have also been suffering from tuberculosis—perhaps indicative of a pirate-specific strain of the disease making the rounds. Also like Boyah, the indifference he showed towards me bordered on