Somalia Special report: The rise of 'the African Taliban'

he plaque on the State House building in Hargeisa, capital of  Somaliland. somalia is an oblique commemoration to an event that never occurred. It was built in 1952 for a visit to the then British protectorate by the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen never came. These days the half-ruined structure is known for another reason than as the former seat of gin-sipping British colonial officials.

The grounds, including parkland once laid out as a golf course, have bred domed shelters – "bool" they are called – thatched with plastic and segments of scavenged cloth. In places, walls have been tiled with panels of flattened cooking oil cans, which in their repetitions resemble Warhol prints. The bools are low, windowless huts through which the harsh light bleeds messily at the sewn seams to illuminate the kicked up dust. The occupants of this camp sit at the far end of the planet's social spectrum from the State House's first intended guest. Not a monarch and her retinue but refugees from war.The huts are so densely packed together they block the State House from sight. It is barely visible when approaching the camp, but the monument marks the centre of a labyrinth of winding, narrow lanes where cockerels scrabble. When I reach it at last, I find the State House is not occupied itself save for a single wing of outbuildings. Its rooms are open to the sky, floors scattered with detritus. Glassless window frames swing in the wind.But it is far from empty. Children clamber over walls of square-cut honey-coloured stone, partly demolished by fighting in the city in 1988. They sit on the floor of what once was a grand reception room to play complex games with piles of pale round pebbles, tossed and snatched from the air by competing hands. Outside, a few young men sit on a veranda painted with graffiti, listening to music. They pull jackets over their heads to hide their faces at our approach and warn against photography.It is a clue to the identity of many living inside the State House camp: the still anxious victims of the war in the south, in Somalia proper, the country from which Somaliland – recognised by no other state – split in 1991. Victims of the world's worst humanitarian disaster. And conflict, even at a distance from the running gun battles on Mogadishu's streets, imposes its own hierarchies.The most recent refugees, the poorest, live at the periphery, farthest from the State House itself. Which is why it is surprising to find Sarida Nour Ahmed, aged 31, a recent arrival, occupying one of the building's few habitable rooms, a few metres square. Once used to house the British governor's staff, these days it is roofed with corrugated metal which leaks in the rain. A bool would be much better, she explains.Sarida fled from Somalia in March, abandoning three of her 10 children in the chaos of flight. "The situation was unbearable. Mortars were landing during the day. At night there was torture, rape and beatings. At first we thought it was because of the Ethiopian invasion. But things got worse. They came to our houses. Robbed and raped." I ask her who? The Shabaab, she says. The Shabaab. The word means literally "the youth". And it is the story of the victims of the Shabaab's continuing war that I have come to the camps of Somaliland to find...more..
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