Richard Norton cited the Somali coastal city of Mogadishu as the only full-blown example of a feral city in existence when he was writing in 2003. Almost a decade later, my colleague Anna Prouse and I were fortunate enough to briefly visit Mogadishu, working on a field assessment for an NGO that provides reconstruction assistance in Somalia. By this time (in mid-2012) the country had been without a functioning government for more than twenty years, and the city was a byword for chaos, lawlessness, corruption, and violence.
But this wasn’t the Mogadishu we saw. Far from it: on the surface, the city was a picture of prosperity. Many shops and houses were freshly painted, and signs on many street corners advertised auto parts, courses in business and English, banks, money changers and remittance services, cellphones, processed food, powdered milk, cigarettes, drinks, clothes, and shoes. The Bakara market in the center of town had a monetary exchange, where the Somali shilling—a currency that has survived without a state or a central bank for more than twenty years—floated freely on market rates that were set and updated twice daily. There were restaurants, hotels, and a gelato shop, and many intersections had busy produce markets. The coffee shops were crowded with men watching soccer on satellite television and good-naturedly arguing about scores and penalties. Traffic flowed freely, with occasional blue-uniformed, unarmed Somali National Police officers (male and female) controlling intersections. Besides motorcycles, scooters, and cars, there were horse-drawn carts sharing the roads with trucks loaded above the gunwales with bananas, charcoal, or firewood. Offshore, fishing boats and coastal freighters moved about the harbor, and near the docks several flocks of goats and sheep were awaiting export to cities around the Red Sea and farther afield. Power lines festooned telegraph poles along the roads, many with complex nests of telephone wires connecting them to surrounding buildings. Most Somalis on the street seemed to prefer cellphones, though, and many traders kept up a constant chatter on their mobiles. Mogadishu was a fully functioning city.
To be sure, after much time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other garden spots, our standards of prosperity and order are somewhat elastic. (Anna, a civilian journalist by training, has eight years of continuous war zone experience in Iraq, working for the International Committee of the Red Cross, running a field hospital in Baghdad, then commanding the Italian provincial reconstruction team in Nasiriya; she tends to shrug off a little light mayhem as just part of an honest day’s work.) And there were admittedly many signs of war and chaos: in the old part of town many houses remained ruined or pitted by bullets and shrapnel, and you could see the distinctive splash marks of RPG hits on many buildings. Refugees were camped in clusters of round, tarpaulin-covered, wood-framed huts in several parts of town, and (especially on the city’s outskirts) civilians carried AK-47s casually slung over their shoulders or resting beside them as they worked. Weaving in and out of the traffic were “technicals” (pickup trucks that mount a heavy machine gun on the flatbed behind the driver’s cab) crammed with Somali National Army troops in camouflage fatigues, armed police, or green-uniformed militia, and there were Soviet-made tanks and armored fighting vehicles on the roads out of town. On the fringes of the city there were signs of more recent fighting, with destroyed houses, downed trees, and the occasional shot-out vehicle or dead animal. Much of the country was still recovering from a deadly drought and famine that affected all of East Africa in 2010–11, and Shabaab militants still controlled a sizeable chunk of Somalia’s territory and population, though they were fast losing ground.
Some government buildings in the central Villa Somalia compound were well maintained and luxuriously furnished, but others were much less salubrious: Anna and I sat in on a meeting between an NGO and a minister of the Transitional Federal Government in his well-furnished but darkened office, the only air-conditioned room in a large, mostly empty ministry building otherwise without water, furniture, or electrical power. This minister’s family had fled Somalia in the early 1990s, and he’d lived most of his life in the United States; still, he unabashedly sought a bribe in return for helping the NGO’s work by calling off members of his own ministry who were obstructing it. There was gunfire from time to time, Shabaab sent scouts and probing attacks into town on some nights, we moved mainly in South African–designed mine-resistant Casspir vehicles, and convoys belonging to AMISOM—the African Union Mission in Somalia, a peacekeeping force that had succeeded, against all expectations, in seizing Mogadishu from Shabaab over the past year—were occasionally ambushed. But it was nothing like the intensity of Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Pakistan: the conflict in Somalia in 2012 was a genuinely small war.
And Mogadishu was far from the dust-blown desert of popular imagination, with hopeless hordes of starving refugees, sinister gold-toothed warlords, and murderous militias battened like leeches onto the city’s fly-infested corpse. That image, the dominant picture of Mogadishu in much of the Western world, crystallized in Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden’s graphic and intimately observed account of the bloody battle of Mogadishu on October 3–4, 1993, and in the 2002 Hollywood movie based on his book. Bowden’s depiction of Mogadishu defined the city for a generation, creating a picture of the place in the public imagination (and in the minds of many military officers who read his book or studied accounts of the battle) that, in the rueful words of one Somali writer, would “inform all discourse on Mogadishu and Somalia from then on.”62
There has been a debate in both popular and academic circles about whether Mogadishu in 2012 was improving and recovering from conflict or whether in fact the progress made since 2010 remained fragile and reversible. Some pointed to the city’s growth and business activity as a sign of recovery. But many of the aspects I’ve described—functioning businesses, international connectedness, population growth, corruption, the presence of nonstate armed groups alongside state representatives, and so on—are accounted for in Richard Norton’s concept of the feral city, so the city’s vitality may have reflected not better governance or stability but rather just a robust and well-established ferality after two decades of conflict. Still, the city Anna and I saw in mid-2012 seemed to be very unlike the bleak, violent wasteland portrayed in Black Hawk Down.
Black Hawk Down, of course, is a work of narrative nonfiction. As such, the book describes Mogadishu through the eyes of the Rangers, SEALs, and Delta operators of Task Force (TF) Ranger as they flew into the heart of the city during the afternoon raid that triggered the battle. In the Rangers’ eyes, Mogadishu was indeed “the world capital of things-gone-completely-to-hell. It was as if the city had been ravaged by some fatal urban disease. The few paved avenues were crumbling and littered with mountains of trash, debris, and the rusted hulks of burned-out vehicles . . . everything of value had been looted, right down to metal window frames, doorknobs, and hinges. At night, campfires glowed from third- and fourth-story windows of the old Polytechnic Institute. Every open space was clotted with the dense makeshift villages of the disinherited, round stick huts covered with layers of rags and shacks made of scavenged scraps of wood and patches of rusted tin. From above they looked like an advanced stage of some festering urban rot.”63
The raid was intended as a quick, in-and-out snatch operation, lasting an hour at most. The mission was to seize two senior leaders of Mohammed Hassan Farah Aidid’s Somali National Alliance, including elders of the Habr Gidr, Aidid’s segment of the influential Hawiye clan. A security force from the 3rd Battalion, U.S. 75th Ranger Regiment would lead the air assault, fast-roping into urban intersections to create a four-corner cordon around the target building, while Delta operators and SEALs would land on its roof and clear the building downward, floor by floor, to secure their captives. A ground convoy from the task force base at the Mogadishu airport, on the coast just outside town, would pick up the assault team and the detainees and return them to the base for questioning, under air cover from MH-60L Black Hawks and AH-6J Little Bird attack helicopters. The plan was based on a standardized missio
n template that the task force planners had developed over dozens of raids, and it had worked before. But this afternoon, in the dense urban maze around the Bakara market, things quickly unraveled.
From the moment the Rangers fast-roped into the ocher dust cloud their helicopters kicked up on the streets of Mogadishu, it was clear that there would be much more resistance than on previous raids: the target house was smack in the middle of the district that was the main stronghold for Aidid’s Somali National Alliance militia, in one of the densest, busiest, and economically most important parts of the city, the so-called Black Sea. Though the assault force successfully cleared the house and seized the captives, both the assaulters and the ground convoy suffered many killed and wounded during the extraction, and they were forced to fight a series of running gun battles through the narrow streets of downtown Mogadishu that included several large ambushes and dozens of smaller ones. By 4:30 p.m., two Black Hawks of the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (160th SOAR) had been shot down in the city. TF Ranger became pinned down, unable to maneuver—“fixed,” in military parlance—because of its need to secure the helicopter crash sites and to protect and extract its wounded.
Attacked from all sides by a self-organizing swarm of Somali National Alliance fighters and local citizens, who seemed able to concentrate and disperse at will and to predict the task force’s moves faster than the Americans could react, TF Ranger was quickly surrounded. As night fell, the troops were trapped in a makeshift perimeter, bunkered in several houses near one of the Black Hawk crash sites, fighting for their lives. Just before dawn the next morning, an ad hoc relief column of Pakistani, Malaysian, and U.S. troops under United Nations command, riding in tanks and armored personnel carriers, shot its way in and rescued them, but not before the stranded unit lost eighteen soldiers killed, seventy-three wounded, and one pilot captured. The UN relief force suffered two killed and nine wounded.
Several of the American dead were later dragged through the streets and publicly mutilated by the mob. This was a stinging humiliation for the world’s most powerful military, the elite troops of a superpower that had just emerged victorious from the Cold War and the Gulf War, with expansive ambitions for what President George H. W. Bush had called a “new world order” defined by American primacy.64 American losses were far less than those of the Somalis, however: militia sources later estimated that Aidid’s militia lost 315 fighters killed and 812 wounded in the battle, while the International Committee of the Red Cross calculated that the battle cost somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 Somali casualties, including many civilians.65 Within weeks, President Clinton pulled American forces out, the United Nations drew down its involvement, and Somalia sank back into a pattern of chaotic violence that would last two more decades.
To the Americans, the dense coastal city of Mogadishu was an active, living participant in the battle: “It seemed like the whole city was shooting at them . . . Mogadishu was massing and closing in on them . . . the city was shredding them block by block . . . the whole fucking city was trying to kill them!”66 These words resonate with what I (to a very slight degree, and others far more intensely) experienced during the urban counterinsurgency in Iraq: a powerful dread that seemed to seep out of the very buildings, roads, and other structures of the urban landscape itself. I remember one war game back in the United States in March 2008 when Lieutenant Colonel Joe L’Etoile, one of the most successful Marine battalion commanders of the war, was giving a brief on the way his unit had crushed Al Q aeda in the Zaidon area, west of Baghdad, the year before. He began talking about what it felt like to patrol the Iraqi streets, and I found myself breaking out in a cold sweat from the sudden inrush of memories. I turned, embarrassed, to leave and compose myself, only to see that at least half of the two hundred combat-experienced officers in the briefing room were sweating the same cold sweat; I quietly resumed my seat. The writer David Morris captured this feeling in his description of the city of Ramadi:
Even now when I try to recall what the city looks like, what comes to me is nothing more than a pocked stretch of boulevard surrounded on both sides by heaps of rubbled concrete, iron palings, trash. Swirls of dust playing over the blacktop. The smell of cordite. Everything still but a grizzled dog patrolling the ruins. It can be like this—high noon, not a soul around, no threat imminent—but you can feel the sheer sinister energy of the joint. As if even the streets want you dead. Driving through downtown Ramadi for the first time gave me an unshakable vision of mystery and death. Just staring at the rubble set my heart pounding with the knowledge of the lives lost per yard.67
In the case of Mogadishu, the Rangers had poked a hornet’s nest in the Black Sea district: they had attacked the city itself, only to be chewed up and spat out, stunned and bloodied. In systems terms, this is pretty much exactly what happened on the day of the battle, which even today local civilians know as maalintii rangers, “the day of the Rangers,” marking it as an unusually intense episode—even for a city that had already become habituated to enormous bloodshed during the civil war and would see at least two more pitched battles, in 2006 and 2011. TF Ranger’s actions over the weeks before the battle had massively disrupted the city as a system: previous raids (in particular, an attack on a Mogadishu house by helicopters that fired Hellfire missiles, killing fifty-four people, including many noncombatants) had generated intense hatred of the Rangers and even greater hostility toward their helicopters. This contributed to the ferocity with which local fighters—Aidid’s militia and armed civilians alike—responded after the two aircraft went down on October 3. The Americans had thrust a large force, with heavy weapons, many vehicles, and more than a dozen helicopters, into the core of the city. When they pushed hard into a key pressure point in the political, economic, and material flow of the urban organism, they jabbed the system in a place that hurt, and that system pushed back even harder.
Several days after the battle, as former ambassador Robert Oakley negotiated with Habr Gidr elders for the release of Mike Durant (the 160th SOAR pilot captured by Aidid’s fighters), he made a revealing comment:
What will happen if a few weeks go by and Mr. Durant is not released? We’ll decide that we have to rescue him, and whether we have the right place or the wrong place, there’s going to be a fight with your people. The minute the guns start again, all restraint on the U.S. side goes. Just look at the stuff coming in here now. An aircraft carrier, tanks, gunships . . . the works. Once the fighting starts, all this pent-up anger is going to be released. This whole part of the city will be destroyed, men women, children, camels, cats, dogs, goats, donkeys, everything . . . That would be tragic for all of us, but that’s what will happen.68
Ambassador Oakley was, in effect, warning the clan elders that if they did not release their prisoner, the Americans would kill the city. This tendency of military forces to kill cities—something political geographers call “urbicide”—is something to which we’ll return at the end of this chapter. But first it’s important to understand how TF Ranger’s actions intersected with the metabolism of what clearly was already, by 1993, a feral city.
To understand this, it’s useful to compare what occurred in Mogadishu in 1993 with what happened in Mumbai in 2008. In both cases, an external actor conducted a raid on a preidentified target; in both cases the raid drew a strong response from the targeted city. In Mumbai the LeT raiders moved dispersed in small teams, outmaneuvering the ponderous Indian response, and using low-tech weaponry, combined with high-tech situational awareness tools and a remote command-and-control node, to maintain the initiative, inflict severe damage, and achieve their political goal. In Mogadishu, on the other hand, it was the raiders who—despite their high-tech weaponry and helicopters—were outmaneuvered, became pinned down in the city by a swarm of small groups of local fighters, and lost the initiative. Lacking heavy armored vehicles, which would have allowed them to move through the urban environment without having either
to leave the area or to shoot back and thus risk killing civilians, they were forced to apply heavy ground and airborne firepower in order to protect and extract themselves. Once they lost their mobility after the aircraft were downed, the raiders were forced to hold a static defensive position and to suffer and inflict very significant casualties. It was only the arrival of the armored relief column, with its hardened and protected mobility, that allowed TF Ranger to be safely extracted from the trap. In what was supposed to be a humanitarian operation to feed starving Somalis, such carnage was politically unacceptable at the strategic level, and the battle ultimately forced a U.S. withdrawal from Somalia. What was it that made the difference?
I’ve already mentioned how the LeT raiders at Mumbai nested within the urban metabolism of the two megacities—Karachi and Mumbai—that formed the launching pad and target for their raid. They slipped out of Karachi under cover of the harbor’s dense maritime traffic, blended into the flow of local cargo and fishing fleets, then slipped into Mumbai by nesting within the illicit networks of smuggling, trade flow, and movement of people, exploiting the presence of informal settlements with little government presence (in effect, feral subdistricts) close to the urban core of the giant coastal city. Once ashore, the teams dispersed and blended into the flow of the city’s densest area as they moved toward diversionary targets (taxis, the railway station, a café, a hospital) that had been carefully selected precisely to disrupt the city’s flow, draw off Indian counterterrorism forces, and hamper an effective response, before they hit main targets that had been chosen for sustained local and international media effect.
This type of attack relies on understanding in great detail the urban metabolism and the associated material and nonmaterial flows that make a city function. This is probably why the LeT raiders and their sponsors put so much effort and time into detailed reconnaissance, building a picture of the city’s physical and human terrain and of the urban metabolism of Mumbai and its surrounding coastal waters. In effect, the raiders had infested the city and were riding its internal systems, much as, say, a parasite infests and moves within the flow of a host’s bloodstream.
Out of the Mountains Page 10
