“They’re tough guys,” said Muhammad Warsame, 22. “And they’re protecting our coast.”
The pirates have made the same argument, saying they hijack ships in response to illegal fishing and dumping.
“They’re our marines,” said Jaemali Argaga, a militia leader.
Somalia has not had any marines, or national army or navy of any significance, since the central government imploded in 1991. Clan-based warlords carved the country into fiefs, preying upon the population. People eventually got fed up, and in the summer of 2006, a grass-roots Islamist movement drove away the warlords.
Ethiopia and the US accused the Islamists of sheltering terrorists, and in the winter of 2006, Ethiopian and US forces ousted the Islamists. But the Islamists are back. Supported by businessmen and war profiteers, Islamist guerrilla fighters are viciously battling the weak government forces and Ethiopian soldiers. Civilians are often caught in between. Thousands have been killed in the past year and a half.
Many aid workers have fled. The UN World Food Program is one of the last organizations with a large staff inside Somalia. Denise Brown, the deputy country director, said the environment was increasingly hostile. And desperate.
Thousands of hungry people besieged a convoy of 35 UN-chartered food trucks moving through Mogadishu two weeks ago. They stripped the trucks clean, looting more than 1 million kilograms of food.
“It’s unprecedented,” Brown said “Things just went haywire.”
That has taken food out of the mouths of people like Zenab, whose daughter was one of the 20 street sweepers in Mogadishu killed by a bomb in August that was buried in a pile of garbage.
She is now helping raise several grandchildren. Amina, 13 months old, will not eat. The two sat the other day on a cot covered with flies. All around them were babies looking up at the ceiling with round wet eyes, some with faces covered in tape because they were too sick to swallow and were being fed milk through their noses.
Whom does she blame? “Those with guns,” Zenab said. “Whoever they are.”
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