The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [80]
In the middle of June 2009, halfway through my second visit to Puntland, I finally found my way to where it had all begun: the infamous “pirate haven” of Eyl, the small fishing village that had launched a new breed of pirate into the modern world. We left Garowe at quarter past six in the morning, the sun hanging distorted and brilliant on the horizon. Colonel Omar, dressed in jungle combat fatigues, turned to me and locked my eyes in a menacing stare. “I am in command during this trip,” he said. “You take orders from me. Understand?” I nodded.
Our convoy consisted of two Land Cruisers, the first holding me, the two Omars, and Mahamoud, our driver. The second contained the cavalry: Said and Abdirashid (my two Special Police Unit guards) and three Puntland government soldiers (including Ombaali, the former pirate), led by a grizzled veteran named Yusuf, whose fingers on one hand had been partially shot off. A few kilometres outside of Garowe we stopped at a squalid roadside restaurant to stock up on water bottles and quickly eat a dubious breakfast of sukaar, a goat stew that I managed to hold down for only a few hours on the road.
After about a quarter hour of speeding along the deserted highway, our driver abruptly slowed and struck off-road, creeping down the steep embankment. I was uncertain what reference point on the uniform landscape had identified the turnoff, but after a few minutes across open terrain we joined the path running eastward to Eyl. There was nothing but empty land ahead and empty sky above, and a twin set of sandy tire tracks leading into the Wild West.
The constant passage of pirate vehicles over the last few years had worn multiple tracks into the ground that continually diverged from the main path, weaving around obstacles before rejoining it several hundred paces down the road. In spite of the frequent traffic, the behaviour of the local herd animals resembled that of wild-life on a game reserve. Herds of grazing sheep and goats, caught on their haunches with hooves tangled in the upper reaches of bushes, careened wildly into the bush as we passed. Even the camels were more vigilant, watching us from a distance with wary eyes, while their solitary human guardians, staffs in hand, waved friendly greetings. Occasionally the igloo-shaped dome of a mudul, the traditional bush hut of the Somali nomad, poked through the shrubbery.
Our two vehicles descended into valleys and mounted plateaus, the vegetation changing as quickly as the terrain. We passed under the outspread canopies of thick-trunked trees hanging over the desiccated beds of dry rivers, then onto powdery red sand cutting through a virtual desert of ground-hugging shrubs and acacia trees, our four-wheel drives fishtailing through every high-speed turn.
We stopped for lunch in Hasballe, a bush town situated at roughly the halfway point of our journey. The corridor running from Garowe to Eyl is almost exclusively populated by the Isse Mahamoud, and Hasballe is home to Nugaal region’s clan chief, or islaan. He had recently inherited this title from his father, who was rumoured to have lived over a hundred years and had been so influential that his standing threat to curse errant hunters had single-handedly rescued the threatened local population of dik-diks from extinction. It is said that two men who had insulted his name were swallowed up by the earth.
We were ushered into an amalgam of a mudul and a pavilion, constructed around a single living tree. It was covered with the traditional woven grass mats of the Somali nomads and lined with aluminum panels onto which rudimentary algebraic equations had been scratched. The gathering quickly turned into a family reunion, friends and relatives shaking hands and hugging over plates of spaghetti and cups of shah. My entire party was of the same