Mogadishu’s best barometer of violence is the little blackboard on which Taher Mahmoud daily records the number of patients in his hospital. For the past 20 years the tall surgeon with huge hands has been operating on the victims of the city’s civil war.
“It’s good times now,” he told me when we met a few weeks ago. “We are only getting four to six gunshot casualties per day. That’s very good.” He pointed at the blackboard covered with his neat white handwriting: it recorded that 86 patients were undergoing treatment. “During the Ethiopian war [2007 to 2008] we had 300 in this hospital.”
Few respites in this most ravaged of cities lasts long and within days of our conversation the relative calm had given way to a more familiar story: running battles between the forces of Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the notional president, and the more radical Islamist al-Shabaab militia. More than 200 people have been killed in these skirmishes and as many as 60,000 people have fled.
Yet the chances are you won’t have heard about it: with the exception of the latest pirate drama, Somalia is the country the world forgot, a state so broken that scenes which would elsewhere dominate international news bulletins are barely noted on the foreign pages of major newspapers. Last year Foreign Policy magazine ranked Somalia as the state most at risk of total collapse, a verdict some might have considered flattering.
On Thursday I spoke to Mahmoud again. The hospital was full and around 40 patients were having to sleep under the trees outside. “We need tents to shelter the patients from rain, and medicine is running very low. If the fighting continues we will be without medicine.” The number on his blackboard was 167.
Even before the latest surge in violence you could get a sense of the precariousness of life in Mogadishu from a quick tour of the hospital. In the dark, bungalow-like emergency room, five men lay on soiled, torn beds. All had abdominal gunshot wounds; plastic drip bags lay between their legs or on the floor. A man sat on a plastic chair next to his wounded brother and waved a small paper fan over his head to chase away flies.
All the men had been injured a day earlier when a pro-government Islamist militia fought a unit of the government’s “proper” army for control of an intersection in the government-controlled area of the capital. “ I was standing when the fighting started, I tried to hide but they shot me,” one man wheezed. Across the yard in the intensive care unit, another dark bungalow packed with flies and the sick, a man waved a fan over the burned-to-white flesh of his small son, caught in the fire when a grenade had been tossed into their house during a clash between two rival gangs.
A mother looking after another burned child said: “We pray for peace — we have nothing but prayers. This is the best hospital in Mogadishu and we don’t have electricity or running water.”
Mahmoud, who was appointed director last month after the previous director was shot on the way to work, nodded, adding: “We get water from a well in the yard and we have a small generator for electricity, we get the fuel from a rich Somali businessman. Everyone has left us here in Mogadishu.”
Earlier this week the Shabaab shelled the presidential palace as they fought government forces for control of the city. A few weeks before, I sat next to Hassan Haila, the government’s media coordinator, as we drove towards the palace. Every Somali politician who is not an MP or minister is a coordinator of some sort, it seems. We drove past women queuing, clattering and shouting outside a shop, one of very few open in the streets. “Look at the Somalis,” he said. “After all these years of fighting, they have become like dead people walking. There is no life in their eyes.”
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