Mahamud Hassan Ali is like the proverbial air-conditioner salesman in the Arctic. His job, in fact, may be even harder: He is the mayor of Mogadishu. Imagine that.
Ali has no redevelopment plans or draft ordinances on his plate. All he really worries about is stopping the killing. That means he spends his days shuttling from one side of Mogadishu, the anarchic Somali capital, to the other, trying to get people to talk instead of shoot.
Mogadishu, already the epitome of lawlessness, has over the past few months had its fiercest fighting in more than 15 years. More than 300 people have been killed and nearly 2,000 wounded, the worst toll since the government collapsed in 1991 and the country slipped into its current state.
Ali, who became mayor in April, has seen the latest horrors up close. At night, combatants have been shelling the city, meaning every last resident goes to bed a potential victim. It is a crapshoot as to where the shells will come back to earth.
"Nobody knew if they'd get up in the morning," he said while sitting in a cafe in Nairobi, where he was briefing diplomats on the latest conditions in his capital.
What may help Ali more than anything else in his new job is his memory of what the city used to be.
The younger generation of Mogadishu residents knows only a city and country in decay. For them, it is normal to see every man with a gun slung over his shoulder. Retiring in the afternoon to chew khat, the highly addictive plant that is a must for militia fighters, is a normal pastime.
But Ali, who comes from the Abgal clan, which dominates Mogadishu, recalls a city in its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, a seaside paradise. It appeared in surveys as one of Africa's safest and most livable cities. As waves crashed ashore, Somalis sipped coffee in outdoor cafes.
"My dream is to bring back the Mogadishu of my youth," said Ali, who is 52 and wears a neatly trimmed, jet-black goatee with just a few gray hairs. "I want a peaceful Mogadishu, and then I can retire, have my own golf course and raise chickens."
Until a fateful job offer, Ali, who fled with his family after the government fell and moved to the US in 2000, was living comfortably in Minneapolis with his wife and seven children, running a janitorial business.
Somalia's transitional prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, a childhood friend, had other plans -- and had an aide call to try to lure Ali back.
The aide, Abdurahman Osman, remembers putting it this way in his recruiting pitch: "Would you prefer to clean up there or clean up Mogadishu?"
Even after Ali mulled the offer a while, decided to take the post, told his wife (who was furious) and boarded a plane for Africa, he did not actually have the job in hand. He was appointed to be part of the transitional government, for now based in the provincial town of Baidoa and not yet in control of Mogadishu. Ali went to the capital, but fighting broke out over his appointment.
The warlords who controlled the city, the ones who were recently forced out by Islamic militias, wanted someone else for the job. The Islamists, leaders of the Shariah court system that has grown in Mogadishu over the last 15 years, backed Ali.
As he goes about his role as peacemaker in a very different era, Ali declines the armed bodyguards that other politicians employ.
What really irritates him, however, is how little the residents he represents have.
"They are bleeding right now, and all they have is a rag to put on the wound," he said. "We need food. We need wheelchairs. Instead of ambulances, we use wheelbarrows."
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