Kiunga, on the Kenya–Somali border
He was a quiet American, and an oddity in Kiunga. For 20 hours I had rammed the Range Rover through tsetse fly-infested jungles teeming with buffalo. When earlier this month I limped into this Indian Ocean village, within earshot of US air strikes against Islamists across the frontier in Somalia, astonished Swahili fishermen said mine was the first vehicle to arrive for three months. Soon afterwards, the American — let’s call him ‘Carter’ — appeared out of nowhere.
Two US Navy warships bobbed on the horizon and we could hear fighter jets hunting for Islamic militants a few miles to the north. Carter said he worked for US Civil Affairs. He had the awkward manner of a stage actor who doesn’t know what to do with his hands. His skin was pallid beneath the equatorial sun and for hours he sat alone, watching children play among fish bones in the dust. When we went to eat with the locals, Carter refused to join us. He had brought his own food. He was unable to speak Swahili and said he was no good at languages, having failed in his attempts to learn Arabic.
If young Carter seems out of his depth, then so is the United States, which is helping to transform a backwater tribal conflict in Africa’s Horn into what could turn out to be the worst Islamist insurgency in the world after Iraq and Afghanistan.
For almost a decade, Washington’s policy in Somalia has hinged on the hunt for al-Qa’eda terrorists, and particularly the men wanted for killing 225 people in the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam US embassy bombings of 1998, and the 2002 attacks on Israelis in Mombasa. The US air strikes earlier this month were specifically aimed at these men — Fazul Abdallah Mohamed, Abu Taha al-Sudani, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan.
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