The World's Most Dangerous Place - Plot & Excerpts
In 2008 when a populist, al-Qaida-linked Islamist movement called al-Shabaab took over the southern half of Somalia, including the country’s capital, Mogadishu, the parallels with the Taliban were immediately obvious. It wasn’t just that Mullah Omar’s militants had also emerged from the poor, neglected south of their country to take over Kabul in 1996. Al-Shabaab explicitly modelled themselves on the Taliban. Indeed, many of the new movement’s leaders had fought alongside them against US-led forces in the early 2000s; and just as the Taliban had once sheltered Osama bin Laden, so al-Shabaab welcomed senior members of al-Qaida into their fold.In early 2010, as America’s drone war in the mountainous borderlands of north-west Pakistan began to heat up, al-Qaida fighters were reported to be ‘streaming’ out of that region towards Yemen and Somalia, which were said to offer the terrorists many more hiding places than ‘Af-Pak’ was now able to. It was these reports that finally prompted me to come to Somalia.
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