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From a few thousand feet above the Indian Ocean, where I sat with my face pressed against a Perspex window, Mogadishu was resplendent. You couldn’t see the holes from that height, the gaping craters that had collected limbs like rainwater. You couldn’t see the rows of pre-dug graves patiently awaiting the bodies that would fill them, or the children who had been kidnapped and forced to fight by al Shabaab. There was a good chance it would be their frail adolescent frames that would wind up in those graves, but those graves would also be filled by shopkeepers, mothers, and elderly people. The crossfire didn’t discriminate, and neither did the suicide bombers.
