Welcome to Somalia

I just got off the Skype chat with Alex in Mogadishu. He reckons he’s one of just three foreign reporters in Mogadishu at the moment. I thought of him when I read Janine Di Giovanni’s piece on Comment is free today about arriving at Moghadishu airport,

A truckload of Kalashnikov wielding teenagers were waiting for me in a pickup truck, my own private militia. The American marines used to call them “skinnies”, which is kind of a mean joke. They were skinny, for sure, and also desperate, hungry, poor and stoned on khat.
I needed those guards, even though they were often more of a menace – firing off unnecessary rounds and starting worthless firefights. But they protected me because there were hardly any foreigners at all in Mogadishu. link