The World's Most Dangerous Place

by James Fergusson - review James

The outlaw state: Somali government soldiers in northern Mogadishu, 11 March 2010. Photograph: Mustafa Abdi/AFP/Getty Images

Fergusson's reports of life in conflict-ridden Somalia make for sobering reading

General quiz time: which country tops the global corruption table? Which country is the worst for piracy? Which country lost more than 29,000 children under five to famine in 2011? The answer is Somalia, a country of such horror that it has fallen from sight.

James Fergusson, freelance journalist and author of several books on the Taliban, has a talent for shedding light in dark places. None is darker, or more dangerous, in his view, than Somalia, the "outlaw state". While most reporters – and some two million Somalis – have opted to stay away, Fergusson has risked his life to cover the ground and, an even greater achievement, succeeded in making the Somali mess understandable and relevant.

Somalia was two countries during the colonial period and one of the more hopeful African states at independence in 1960. But a military coup at the end of the 60s led to two decades of misrule and corruption, and then to civil war. Much of the tension was caused by inter-clan rivalries. As if that wasn't bad enough, the country then became a happy hunting ground for radical Islamist groups. In southern Somalia, the Salafist Islamic Courts Union imposed a strict sharia. When they were expelled by a liberating Ethiopian force, much of the country then fell even further.

The al-Qaida-affiliated al-Shabaab organisation turned the country into "a zone of total grief", a place where life was short and brutal and where one's brightest hope was martyrdom, although even that prospect was tainted. Islamic martyrs die in the belief that they will be pleasured by 72 virgins in paradise. Fergusson reports that al-Shabaab manipulated this hope by showing recruits films that they claimed were recordings made by martyrs already in heaven, but which were shot in Bollywood. It is this sort of insight, alongside his harrowing account of life in the grief zone – a description of Mogadishu hospitals sticks in the mind – that gives Fergusson's book its power.

Even more troubling, in some ways, is the fact that the grief did not stay at home. Fergusson tracks the Somali diaspora across four continents in an attempt to understand their sense of identity and the ways in which they are led astray. The British ambassador in Somalia talked of "a kind of threat we haven't seen before", a threat beyond borders, with disaffected Somalis involved in many international terror attacks, including the July 2005 London Underground attempts. The more than two million Somalis in Kenya seem particularly vulnerable. As chaos spreads across Africa, from conflict in Mali to hostage-taking in Algeria, and as our prime minister talks of a "large and existential threat¦ a generational struggle" against jihadis, Fergusson's portraits seem all the more terrifying. But there is hope.

Fergusson's introduction, written as the book went to press last autumn, reports the unexpected retreat of al-Shabaab, whose units had pulled out of Mogadishu. Since then, they have lost their other stronghold of Kismayo to a combined force of Kenyan, Ethiopian and Ugandan-led African Union soldiers.

The threat of piracy has also reduced. And Somalia has a new president, elected by MPs and promising to broaden the country's democracy. Trouble continues – there was an assassination attempt on the new president even before he had been sworn in. And it remains to be seen whether the rump of al-Shabaab hardliners continue to fight in Somalia, or whether they unite with other al-Qaida affiliates, Boko Haram in Nigeria and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. But the one thing Fergusson's book makes very clear is that unless the country's – and the region's “ underlying problems of poverty and lack of education are addressed, David Cameron's prediction of a generational struggle might come to seem optimistic.