The sun beat down on a pair of lorries carrying white-hulled speedboats through the dusty roads of Bosaso, in the Bari province of northern Somalia. The vehicles rocked and bobbed down street after street, turning in front of stores, squeezed by a fish-processing plant, snaked past mud-caked Land Rovers parked in a narrow alley, and bounded and jostled toward the coast with a couple of passersby giving the delivery truck a second look.
In the pirate capital of Puntland, it was an open secret that the crafts were being delivered not to fishermen, but to the local group of pirates run by Samatar’s brother, the Puntland warlord Korfa, who took over the pirate tribes of Somaliland to the northwest when NATO forces cracked down on piracy in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden around the Horn of Africa. This effectively put their trade of hijackings and hostages-for-ransom out of business.
The port city of Bosaso housed 500,000 people. Swaths of sun-bleached, low-rise, clay and brick buildings cut views of the horizon, except when one looked out to sea, where a mosque dome topped nearly every block. Bosaso was the gem of Somalia, rising above the war and poverty. The poor man’s Morocco, with a skyline absent of construction cranes, was sandwiched in a bowl of mountains to the south. Situated on the Gulf of Aden, Bosaso became the hub that received the UN food relief program deliveries; brought in caches of Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Pakistani, and North Korean weapons; smuggled desperate Somalia emigrants across the gulf to Yemen; and once hauled in a third of the annual take of pirate hostages during its peak.
It wasn’t only Mogadishu that had been scarred and held without the leadership of a true government for a generation. Somaliland, which fell under the swift and brutal control of Islamic law, fought several bloody clashes with the Somalis of Puntland beginning in 2003. Brothers Korfa and Samatar played both sides of the war, fueling skirmishes, and ending them in violence.
On the outskirts of the city, a Yemeni boy dismounted a donkey by a watering hole. He left the animal with local farmers, ran through a flock of sheep, and cut across the road in front of the tandem lorries carrying the skiffs. Over an arid hill, a seaside villa came into view. The boy raced the vehicles to the house, where a family of poor Somalis waited outside, their expressions browbeaten, their bodies slack.
At the door, an armed pirate stuck a rifle in the boy’s chest; the boy flashed a hand-sign.
Inside the cool stone and clay house, another pair of guards aimed AK-47 assault rifles at the boy. A third guard, standing in front of a Chinese dragon curtain, waved the child to enter the living room. The Yemeni boy took a seat on a straw mat and waited. He listened to the strange dialect of an African mother, her wide hips wrapped in a dark blue tunic, cradling her baby a few feet from a sinewy black man. He wore a sleeveless shirt that revealed the slight bulge of an oddly shaped hump on his left shoulder blade. Was the mass a fatty deposit? A birth defect? A cancerous growth? Or was it a battle-wound that didn’t heal properly?
With an angular face and leopard-like eyes, the man lounged in a wicker chair. He heard the mother’s pleas, the trembling of her voice as a pet snake slithered up his arm and across the buffalo hump to his good shoulder. He kept an eye on an HD TV on the wall with the screen showing nothing but static. The link to a satellite feed was broken. He pressed a remote, shutting off the TV.
Korfa, the warlord of the Dharoor Valley Clan, was pirate number one in Puntland. He was the micro-loan officer to the poor, the sheriff, the enforcer, the buyer of foreign spies and government officials. To the locals of Bosaso he was known as the “Ferryman” for transporting hundreds of Somali refugees across the gulf to Yemen year after year. And when the civil war broke out in Yemen, he ferried some Houthi tribesmen and Yemeni terrorists and their families back to Puntland.
“How am I going to take care of my baby here in Somalia?” the mother asked, while her baby clawed at her breast to feed on milk. Korfa nodded at the mother, staring at her plump, milk-swollen breasts. She pulled open the tunic, revealing a sand-dollar-size nipple the baby clutched and suckled. As the baby fed, the warlord felt the warm surge of blood fill his groin, fattening his cock against his thigh on its way to a hard erection, when hushed Arabic words were exchanged at the door.
A bodyguard stepped to Korfa telling him in Puntland code that the Sheikh’s men had arrived from Somaliland. Korfa signaled the visitors to wait. He took out a pair of mirrored sunglasses, stared at the mother, saying in Somali tongue: “You will be safe with my son and my sister. Remember they are refugees from the valley, like you. When the UN or Red Cross ask you about my boy and sister, what will you tell them?”
The mother held her baby tight, replying, “They are refugees of war and famine.”
“Say that and nothing more, and your voyage will be smooth.” Korfa stood up, handed her pictures of his son and sister. He motioned a guard, who picked up a backpack of food and handed it to the mother, then escorted her outside.
Korfa looked over at the Yemeni boy. He saw a tear stream down his face. The warlord put the snake on the floor. The boy jumped backed and hid behind a guard, who bent over and picked up the snake. Scared of the viper, the boy stepped back and bumped into a pair of AQAP recruits, who had entered the villa casing the rooms for cameras and weapons. Once the room was cleared, Yemeni General Mustafa walked inside. He was second in charge of Somaliland.
General “Muse,” as insiders knew him, reigned over the clerics, who preached Islamic Sharia Law, and managed his AQAP soldiers, who enforced its moral codes and gender limits.
Korfa gave General Mustafa a hard look, signaling with his eyes that he would need a moment with the boy. He eyed the child, asking in Arabic, “Why the long face?”
The Yemeni boy, now shaking, intimidated by the presence of the general and his AQAP henchmen, gulped, “We captured the whale…”
“Good. Then the tanker is heading to port.… Why the long face?”
“When Samatar took the captain to the skiffs, a sniper shot him.”
“Dead? Sama dead?” Korfa erupted and grabbed the boy by his skinny shoulders. “You say my brother Samatar is dead? My own flesh and blood?” Korfa bellowed in rising anger. He belted out a catcall to the ceiling, as if he could see God’s angry face from the unseen the sky. “Did Sama’s men stand like statues and watch him die? Did they catch the assassin?”
The boy froze unable to answer.
“Good God, what the fuck?” Korfa snatched a Kalashnikov from his bodyguard, swung it around and smashed a vase and glass bookcase with its butt. He ripped the shelf frame off the wall, smashing pots and pictures, stepped on the glass with his bare feet and whipped the assault rifle into the TV, shattering the flat screen in a crack of smoke. Shocked, bristling at the news, Korfa turned around, the veins in his temples throbbed with a rapid beating heart. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw AQAP soldiers chatting like birds in small talk.
General Mustafa, a man of mixed Egyptian and Yemeni blood, giving him bronze skin with Egyptian features, frowned at the boy, and then looked at Korfa: “Where are the Syrian satellite phones I gave you?”
The general was oblivious of his soldiers’ disrespect behind him.
“Gave me? I bought them from you, like I did the skiffs outside on the lorries,” Korfa replied, anger strained his face. He pointed at the boy — “This Yemeni is my runner. As for the Satcoms, they’re up in the mountains. If spies or Americans try to triangulate where I stand, all they’ll find are goats and a booby trap. Boom!” He bellowed, spreading his arms in a blast arc. Korfa stepped around the boy and drilled a cold stare at the soldiers. “What are you hyenas chatting about? My brother, Sama, is dead.”
The soldier shrugged, staring not in Korfa’s eyes, but at his shoulder hump. Korfa saw that as a second slight from an AQAP field grunt. Korfa drilled another stare into the soldier, who averted his eyes. Korfa put his arm around the boy, and said, “Call the mothership and tell the crew to bring the captain to port.” The Yemeni boy nodded and dashed out of the villa. Korfa turned to General Mustafa: “What would you do if you lost your right arm to a sniper?”