The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [82]
Today, Eyl can boast of another prominent son, President Abdirahman Farole, who was born and grew up in the town. Along with Garowe, Eyl is one of the principal strongholds of President Farole’s Isse Mahamoud sub-clan, a fact that made the area a virtual no-go zone for the previous Osman Mahamoud–dominated administration and thereby allowed the town to flourish as an autonomous base of pirate operations.
Eyl is actually two distinct towns separated by several kilometres. The first, Eyl Dawad, meaning “lookout,” is the seat of local government. By far the more populous of the two settlements, Dawad contains roughly ten thousand people, living in a collection of box-like buildings grafted onto the sloping wall of a yawning gorge carved by the Nugaal River. Halfway up the slope a natural spring bubbles forth, creating a localized jungle of towering trees along the course of a canal running down to the riverbed below.
Moving quickly through Dawad, we proceeded along a craggy path hugging the northern wall of the defile, a track whose name in English translates as “rocks, wait until I pass before you fall.” At rare intervals the dirt and rubble gave way to ten-metre stretches of concrete, the beginnings of some abortive NGO project to pave the entire roadway. It was the onset of Puntland’s second dry season, the hagaa, and much of the river had dried to solitary pools of water, but a verdant belt of vegetation along the bank still marked its course. A single goat was drinking from one of these oases, not even bothering to look up as we passed.
If one parallel could be drawn between the pirates of Puntland and those of Western storybooks, it is the tales of buried booty. Omar pointed to the opposite side of the gorge, high above us. “The townspeople say that there is pirate money hidden in those hills,” he said.
After a quarter hour crawling up and down this roller coaster of a road, we sighted the Indian Ocean for the first time, a slice of brilliant blue framed by the gorge’s gaping mouth. After a final bumpy downhill stretch, we passed under an unmarked, dilapidated arch flanked by an empty guardhouse and into Eyl Badey, or “seaside.” Reggae-inspired Somali tunes blasting from our speakers, we sped past houses of thatched branches and grasses, orange tarp fused with the odd piece of cardboard or corrugated metal to provide skeletal support to the walls. Even the whitewashed cement of the more upscale buildings was chipped and faded. Dented oil drums, pieces of refuse, and loose building materials were strewn haphazardly in the streets. A few fishing nets were stretched to dry in the sun.
If Eyl was awash in pirate cash, its inhabitants were certainly hiding it well. As a pirate haven, it was a profound disappointment; conspicuously absent were the opulent mansions, wild parties, and drug-fuelled binges that the international media coverage had led me to expect. The town was a fraction of Dawad’s size and seemed even poorer—not much more than a shanty village on the edge of the water. Beyond the village lay an expansive beach of white sand running kilometres in either direction, onto which spilled a small settlement built by refugees from the south, their dwellings little more than pens cobbled together out of driftwood. Lining the edge of the beach for several hundred metres was Eyl’s most imposing structure, a Soviet-built fish processing centre now crumbling into disrepair. Five-metre fishing skiffs lay idle in the sand, rendered useless by the overpowering winds of the hagaa, while refrigerated trucks that had once transported