Mogadishu - A Violent Prone Poor People Zone
Mogadishu - A Violent Prone Poor People Zone
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In a place like Mogadishu, you become so accustomed to these apparent juxtapositions—a child playing with a food wrapper against a Toyota truck turned battlewagon—that they lose any kind of oppositional qualities they may have had.
I was surprised at how quick I got used to riding around in an armored vehicle, and how expected and ordinary the AMISOM soldiers manning the three machine guns of the CASSPIR came to seem.
They were skinny with bloodshot eyes, young, and not particularly threatening looking, though in the few hours I was with them, who could say? Three weeks later, after Kenya’s invasion of Somalia, when I saw Shabaab photos of dead AU soldiers, one with a panga jutting from his chest, I lost some of my sangfroid.
Excerpt from Virginia Quarterly Review A Violent Prone Poor People Zone words by Tom Sleigh / photographs by Jason Florio