Wild life

Aidan Hartley: How Muslim militants and Western jihadis wrecked enchanting Somalia

The beautiful port of Barawe became a base for the vicious foreign fighters known as the 'muhajireen'

19 October 2013

9:00 AM

19 October 2013

9:00 AM

Wizards inland from the little Somali port of Barawe bewitched a person to come to them by banging a nail into a tree and chanting his name. ‘He comes no matter how far away he may be,’ wrote Gerald Hanley in Warriors, his unrivalled classic about Somalia — for him a place of ‘swirling sandstorms, heat and billions and billions of flies’.

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