Caught in the Crossfire

Caught in the crossfire

Amin was hit in the neck by a stray bullet in Mogadishu’s Waberi district, forty-three days ago. He hasn’t been able to eat since then, and so is taking fluids through a pipe in his nose. At nine years old, Amin has spent his whole youth surrounded by war.

Amin’s case is far from unique in Mogadishu’s Madina hospital. Nearly everyone I spoke to there had been injured by a stray bullet, as the Islamic militia group Al-Shabab battles the Transitional Federal Government forces and pro-government militia.

“Ninety-five percent of our patients are from combat” says Mohamed Yousef Hassan, the director of the hospital and chief surgeon. “Day by day, the situation in Mogadishu is worsening.”

The hospital is under-staffed and under-equipped. Patients line the corridors, attended to by family members. Just a few kilometres away, the front-line stands, breeding more casualties and dead.

The Displaced of Mogadishu

Thousands in Somalia’s war-torn capital, Mogadishu, live in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Many are displaced by the conflict, either within the city or from other parts of the country; but an increasing number of people are coming to the city as a result of the drought that is ravaging parts of the Horn of Africa.

Conditions in the camps are basic, with people living in metal shacks or in makeshift huts made of sticks, rags and plastic sheeting, lacking adequate sanitation. Many of the children I saw there were visibly malnourished. There is little opportunity for employment, denying mothers the means to buy food for their children.

The World Food Programme delivers a little food aid, but thousands go without. With Somalia being such a difficult environment in which to operate, there are few humanitarian organisations. This is exacerbated by the lack of a properly functioning government, and the zone that the government controls in the city is small.

Organisations such as Concern Worldwide do provide aid—food vouchers, sanitation, education and health facilities—for those most at need in the capital, but their resources are limited, and the challenge they face is great. In the meantime, a further generation of Somalis are growing up in a country without peace, ravaged by war for twenty years.

Mogadishu Militia

The honeymoon is over.

Six months ago, when I was in Somaliland, I thought I would never be able visit South Central Somalia, definitely not Mogadishu, any time soon. Particularly not outside of the confines of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).

So when the country director for an NGO I was working for asked me if I was prepared to go to Mogadishu, to explore the drought-displaced there, I immediately answered “yes”. He knew the situation there better than I, and I trusted his judgement.

Several days later, I was boarding a commercial flight out of Nairobi, bound for Mogadishu. And an hour after landing, I found myself separated by only a pane of glass from the freelance militia who would kidnap “a westerner”, hoping to get a couple of million dollars in ransom, at the first opportunity.

The immigration form at Mogadishu airport asks not only your passport number, but the serial number and calibre of any weapons you are carrying.

Leaving Libya

Leaving Libya

Today I will leave Libya. I will leave behind the revolution, for a couple of weeks of working in an office in Nairobi. I feel like I am letting people down here, the Libyans who have helped me, and befriended me along the way. Leaving the story that has defined the last two months of my life.

Sixteen hours of driving through desolate desert awaits me. I will arrive in Cairo, and from there I will board a plane back to East Africa, leaving behind the “Arab Spring”. I hope to come back. I feel an affinity to the region, and have done so long before Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself in Tunisia, sparking off a chain of revolutions that will mark history.

It has been exhilarating. It has been tragic. It has been painful. But I feel privileged to have witnessed a small part of it, and have played my own small part in relaying it to the rest of the world.

And I have had the luck to have met some incredible people along the way. So thank you to the new friends, and to the unknown rebels who helped me along the way, and to the editors who gave me the opportunity to work here.

Two photographers died here today

Two photographers died here today

I had first met Tim Hetherington in Ajdabiya, nine days previously. An incredibly respected photographer, that day in the desert he was affable and personable. He was set apart from the other photographers that day, who were there for “the news”; he was doing his own thing, and doing it well.

In Misrata that day, he was a league apart. As we rushed into a burning building, bullets hitting the wall behind me, unbeknownst to me, Tim was already a floor ahead.

As I ran out of the building with the scattering rebels into the street, I caught sight of Tim climbing out of a a shell hole in the wall of the first floor. He was at the front.

I had already committed to leaving Misrata that day, and so this day I clocked off early from the action. It was as I reached the port that I got word that a photographer had been killed in mortar fire in the city, and that photographer was Tim.

Chris Hondros was admitted to the hospital with a severe head wound at the same time. “He is alive, but he will die” a hysterical voice crackled over the satellite phone. As the boat was ready to sail that night, he passed away.

The head of mission from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) did a laudable job in holding the boat, ensuring that their bodies could make the first leg of a very difficult journey of repatriation.

Probably the two most experienced photographers in Misrata were killed that day, setting in motion a large amount of soul-searching amid the international journalistic community. For me, in the immediacy of it all, I was questioning whether I could do this again. Having been with those guys less than three hours previously, questions of “what if” ran through my head, and rather selfishly, “that could have been me”.

It was a solemn sail onboard the ship charted by IOM that night, carrying Tim & Chris’ bodies back to Benghazi, along with over a thousand people, stranded and injured in Misrata.

To those who knew Chris and Tim, and to their family, my sincerest condolences. But from what I witnessed that day, and from what I known of them, they were pursuing what impassioned them. They were at the forefront of it all, and at the top of their game.