My life as a Somali pirate hostage

In 2008, the Sunday Telegraph’s Chief Foreign Correspondent was kidnapped in lawless Somalia. Luckily, he lived to tell the tale…

The cave must stretch about a hundred yards into the mountain. Its mouth, which catches the sun from mid-morning to late afternoon, is as wide as a house, while its innards taper into a narrow passageway that plunges downwards into pitch darkness – a meandering, cobwebbed tunnel that grows danker and gloomier with every step.

A few days ago, on a particularly idle afternoon, the man we call the Old Bastard and some of the other guards went exploring; they must be the only potholing team in the world to carry AK47s, but no helmets or ropes. They found an exit on the far side of the mountain and walked back up the valley, triumphant, hours later. I did not share their excitement. I’d hoped never to see them again.

Forgive my malice. Plotting unpleasant ends for my captors is one of the few ways to pass the time in this grim place, where every minute seems like an hour – except for those when I’m savouring one of my precious cigarettes. Since the Old Bastard began threatening me a few days ago, I’ve had him bitten by a poisonous scorpion, struck by lightning, murdered by his own men, and eaten alive by the baboon pack down in the valley. If a rescue mission was to shoot him dead, that would be good too.

Sadly, I don’t believe that armed rescue missions are on the agenda. We are being held in a mountain range on the pirate coast of northern Somalia, stashed away like buried treasure, but without the map where “X” marks the spot. Northern Somalia is one of the remotest, emptiest places on the planet. I’ve barely seen a village, road or other human landmark since the day we were kidnapped.

Besides, even if someone did know where we were, I don’t fancy the prospect of another shoot-out in the cave. As we learnt last week, solid stone walls are terribly prone to ricochets.

My stomach is feeling queasy. Probably the result of last night’s goat stew, or possibly our drinking water, which comes out of an old diesel can. Caveman’s Belly is one of the drawbacks of modern Stone Age life, not something they ever mentioned in The Flintstones. I can’t understand how they could have left it out: with so little else to do, answering the call of nature is one of the big events of the day around here.

So, the drill: first I grab my shoes, checking for spiders, scorpions or other poisonous vermin that might have climbed in. Then, stand up, with care. Lying on a thin mattress all day, you often get dizzy when you first get to your feet. Now, off to the bathroom, or at least the spot at the back of the cave that is reserved for that kind of thing. Thankfully, we still have a few tissues. The gang has told us that we will soon have to start using sticks and rocks.

On the way back, I pause halfway down the tunnel, where a section of the rock wall runs flat and smooth. If I were a caveman living here thousands of years ago, this is where I’d paint a picture of my clan out hunting an antelope. I pick up a shard of rock. I too am going to leave my mark here, something more permanent than a few cigarette butts. What shall I draw? A matchstick-men version of the kidnappers, with José and me as the quarry? Sadly, that will take a while, and if I linger here, the gang will think I have tried to flee down the pothole. Instead, I settle for some bog-standard graffiti: “CF was here, 18/12/2008”.

I stagger back to the mattress, and tell José what I have done.

A good move: we manage to squeeze at least 10 minutes’ worth of conversation out of it. This is the longest we’ve talked for a while.

Perhaps some archaeologist will discover my scrawl here in thousands of years’ time, I say. Or perhaps some other poor hostages will be dragged up here in years to come, and add their name to mine. Or, maybe, in 10 or 20 years’ time, if Somalia becomes a safe place to visit again, I will be able to come back, hire someone to help me find this cave, and see it for myself.

If I ever get free, that is.

A month earlier

One thing you notice when flying to Somalia is that no airline risks spending much on the plane that takes you there. Daallo Airlines, which flies in from neighbouring Djibouti, lays on a rusting propeller-driven Antonov, a Soviet-era relic custom-made for the world’s less accommodating airports. The Antonov’s rugged engines need no sophisticated ground maintenance staff, yet have sufficient lift to fleahop on and off very short airstrips, which made it ideal for ferrying arms and mercenaries around during the Cold War. Sure enough, our own craft was being piloted by an unshaven Russian in a white suit and sunglasses, who looked like the Man from Del Monte gone to seed. Inside, everything except the plywood toilet cubicle was upholstered in a leopard skin pattern. Combined with the pilot’s aviator shades, it felt like clambering into the airborne equivalent of a Ford Capri.

Even getting this far was something of a triumph. After being asked by The Sunday Telegraph to report on the increase in piracy along the coast of Somalia, I’d spent the last 36 hours booking a complex chain of last-minute flights to Bossaso via Islamabad, Karachi, Dubai and Djibouti, and touring various money wire offices to withdraw $6,000 in cash. The paper trail I left would have resembled that of some terrorist on a major suicide mission.

Sat alongside me was a Spanish freelance photographer called José Cendon. All I knew about him was that he was aged 34, had black hair and a beard, and travelled under a Spanish passport number 823345 – the details he’d supplied to the office in case he wound up dead or missing during our trip.

Geography has not done Somalia many favours – its harsh, sun-scorched scrubland offers precious few natural resources, animal, vegetable or mineral. What it does offer, however, is plenty of prime locations for piracy, its coastline of 1,900 miles being the longest in Africa. Particularly well-placed is the northern region known as Puntland, which forms the lower lip of the Gulf of Aden, the channel of water that leads to Egypt’s Suez Canal and links Asia with Europe.

More than 20,000 vessels push through the Gulf every year, carrying 80 per cent of the world’s trade. Seen from a plane, the sea is flecked with vessels: sleek Arab dhows; quarter-mile-long oil tankers; Chinese and Indian freighters; the odd luxury yacht.

Seen from a pirate skiff, crewed by men from one of the poorest and most desperate nations in the world, it must seem a rich and almost limitless hunting ground.

Piracy had been a problem in these waters ever since the early Nineties, when Somalia’s government had first collapsed and the country descended into almost complete anarchy, a mosaic of clan factions who fight and pillage each other with a ferocity that defies all attempts at mediation. But since 2005 it had become much more organised, and in autumn 2008, the number of attacks had rocketed.

There’d been 70 attempted hijacks between August and November, compared to 30 for the previous year. Nobody really had a good explanation as to why; it just seemed that word had spread that piracy was an easy game to get into. Apart from a couple of motor launches, all that you needed was a few Kalashnikovs, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a hand-held GPS system and maybe a heavy machine gun, and you were in business.

There was, however, one important difference between the pirates of old and the pirates of new. Whereas the storybook buccaneers of my childhood would steal a ship’s treasure and make its crew walk the plank, today it was the opposite way round. Somali pirates weren’t really interested in the ship’s cargo. They were after the ship’s crew, whom they would take as hostages for ransom. That effectively made the pirates professional kidnappers rather than robbers.

Our aim was to try to meet one, and tell the story from his point of view. That point of view, though, would prove to be that a pair of Western journalists would make far better hostages than a few Filipino deckhands.

Each day in the cave, the routine was identical. We’d wake up to the low hum of our kidnappers’ dawn prayers, followed by the crackle of firewood being lit and the murmured exchanges with those coming off night guard duty.

Around 8am we’d have tea and smoke the first of our daily cigarette ration. And then the rest of the day would start. If you could call it that. There was, frankly, nothing to do.

Early on in our kidnapping, when our spirits were still strong, I’d vowed that if we were stuck here for weeks or months, I would use the time constructively. Daylight hours would be one long round of self-improvement. As well as mastering the basics of Somali, I would ask the gang to help me with my Arabic, and José to drill me in Spanish. I would keep fit with press-ups, and devote allotted times to careful, structured discussion with José about the great issues of the world. Combined with the mental exercise of regular chess matches, such a routine would keep us occupied, focused and healthy.

When eventually freed, we would emerge fit, erudite and multilingual, modern-day Renaissance men who’d triumphed over our primitive circumstances. It wasn’t quite working out like that.

While José and I were bone idle, the rest of the camp hummed with activity. There were round the clock rotas of cooking, cleaning, tea-making, weapons maintenance and guard duty.

The gang brought a certain ingenuity to life in the cave. They powered up their mobile phone by cutting the wall plug off a charger, paring the flex down to its bare wires and attaching them to several HP2 batteries taped together. It took most of the day to charge a phone on, but it worked.

Flavour for the cooking pot came from crystals of rock salt sourced from the nearby mountain slopes, the sort of stuff people paid a fortune for in my neighbourhood deli back home.

Bread they would make by running up a dough of flour and water, fashioning it into large, flat pancakes, and then sticking it in the embers of a fire made from brushwood. Somehow, the fine ash did not stick to the dough, and half an hour later it would be served up like naan-bread from a curry house.

It was quite palatable – unlike the cloudy beverage they concocted from the fat that rose to the top of the goat stew, which they relished as some kind of health drink. A goat smoothie.

In those first couple of weeks of captivity, we found ourselves coping better than expected. At the same time, our world shrank rapidly, as did our expectations of it. It soon felt surprisingly natural to wake up each morning on the stone floor, nod good morning to José, and contemplate another long, empty day.

Even the gang seemed relaxed. On day 12 they held a party to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid Al-Ahda, marking the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. A goat was sacrificed and cooked up, guard duty kept to a minimum, and extra prayers said all round.

Then, during the afternoon, the gang had a kind of “Puntland’s Got Talent” contest, featuring Koranic recitals, a jumping-over-a-stick game, and a press-up contest. Noticing that they were all fairly useless at press-ups – even the super-fit Sherpa – I entered myself and won with 25 in a row. It wasn’t quite Paul Newman winning the egg-eating marathon in the prison movie Cool Hand Luke, but it drew a generous round of applause anyway.

It was mid-morning on day 15. José and I were sitting out in a small, rocky hollow that led down from one side of the cave.

It was our equivalent of a stroll in a prison exercise yard, in that it got us away from the gloom of our stony cell, while still reminding us there was no chance of escape. Steep slopes surrounded us on all sides, preventing us seeing or being seen by the outside world, and there would always be a row of guards watching us from a nearby ridge, staring down like a Somali version of Mount Rushmore. There was nowhere comfortable to sit, but it was a chance to bask in the sun, smoke, and get some distance from the noisy chatter of the gang, even if it was only 20 yards.

By this time, we were running low on things to talk about. We’d done work, politics and girlfriends past and present. And we’d held endless seminars on favourite books, films and music, to the point where we’d had to introduce rationing. If we hit on a movie that we both had plenty to say about, we’d save it for the evening and expand it into a discussion about the entire genre.

That morning we were interrupted by a group of the guards returning from an expedition into the surrounding valleys. They had their guns slung over their shoulders and carried small wicker baskets in their arms, chattering gaily among themselves like a team of armed Red Riding Hoods. The guard we called Skullface – due to his resemblance to a Jolly Roger – gestured at us to come and look. He and some of the other younger guards had begun to warm to us a little, especially after my triumph in the press-ups contest.

I peered inside Skullface’s basket. It was brimming with pieces of torn-up bark, clinging to a thick white resin. He pointed to a tree growing halfway up a nearby cliff. It had a curious, stumpy trunk, bulging and grey-brown like a massive hunk of ginger, with a few spiky branches sprouting out of it. He made a chopping gesture.

“Parr-foom,” he said.

Parr-foom?

He held a piece of the bark to my nose. It had a strong antiseptic odour, like eucalyptus. It was the first clean-smelling thing I’d come across in weeks. Then I realised what Skullface was saying. Parr-foom was perfume. Later, we would learn that it was probably either myrrh or frankincense, both of which came from trees found mainly in Somalia and Yemen.

Until the invention of modern detergents, they had been in huge demand as fragrances, and to this day, they were still popular in Chinese medicine. Our hosts were probably planning to sell the stuff next time they sent a party back to civilisation to buy supplies, probably the only kidnap gang in the world with a sideline in aromatherapy.

At the time, though, I knew nothing of this, and so stuck a piece into my mouth, thinking it was some kind of gum. The Somalis guffawed. I flashed a grin all round, like a comedian breaking a winning gag with a tough audience. I didn’t mind acting the fool. If it made us harder for them to kill, like a pair of cuddly rabbits, so be it.

But our attitude changed after a particularly fraught phone conversation with Ali, our intermediary between the gang and the office in London. Apparently the pirates were incredulous that nobody had yet met their demands. New death threats were being issued.

As we’d wandered back to the cave, the elder gang member we’d begun to call the Old Bastard had sniggered and chanted “Morto”. My grasp of Italian wasn’t much better than his, but from the way he drew a finger across his throat, I had a feeling it probably meant “dead”.

Throughout our time, we’d had a steady stream of visitors to the cave. They would drop past every few days, sometimes greybearded elders, sometimes kids in their mid-teens. We guessed they were either clan emissaries bringing in news from outside, or local herders who were being paid to turn a blind eye, and whose curiosity about the hostages had to be tolerated. Many would stare at José and me like a pair of zoo exhibits.

I’d barely registered our two latest guests that day. But as they got up to leave, voices were suddenly raised. José and I looked up to see an argument in progress, the visitors jostling with Skullface and the Mirror Man. Others joined in, shoving and shouting. Then a shot rang out, deafening in the confines of the cave.

Someone, I couldn’t tell who, had pulled a pistol and fired into the roof. José and I cowered on the floor as the pair were chased out of the cave at gunpoint. Other guards came running in. The bullet had hit the cave ceiling just above our mat and ricocheted several times, carving white bite marks in the beige rock. It was a miracle that the “assets” hadn’t been hit.

Outside the cave, there were shouts. Another shot rang out, echoing around the valley, followed by what sounded like return fire. The gang were grabbing their guns and rushing outside, leaving a few to guard us.

“My God, we are going to war,” José said, as one of the gang ushered us over to a bundle of boulders just to the left of the cave’s entrance.

He’d grabbed one of the belt-fed machine guns, the bullets coiled around his neck, Rambo-style. On a clifftop overlooking us, maybe 50 metres up, we could see the outline of a man with a gun. He fired a shot in our direction, kicking up dust right next to the mat where we had been sat seconds ago. José had said he liked Sam Peckinpah movies. Now he was in the middle of one.

We huddled down amid the boulders, which was also a spot we’d been using as a toilet, with coils of evil-smelling tissue littered everywhere. Further down the slope, the gang was fanning out, directed by the Old Bastard, who was sneaking along with his gun like a Somali John Wayne. He looked in his element.

Another shot rang out. I squatted down as low as I could, trying to avoid the filthy tissue. After a couple of minutes, it felt like one of those stress positions that CIA interrogators used. For the first time since we’d been grabbed, I began wondering if we might die here. I glanced at José, who looked – for the first time – as scared as I felt. Now, we were not only prisoners, we were being fought over.

The gunfire stopped, and the gang filtered back, yakking excitedly and tracing the various bullet grazes on the cave walls.

That afternoon, they convened what looked like some sort of council of war. They took turns to say their piece, the rest listening as each man spoke uninterrupted for 10 minutes or more. We listened in too, straining to hear some recognisable nugget that might give us a clue as to what was going on. Most often it just made us nervous. Hubud or bullet, came up a lot, as did mushkilleh (problem), and sajarra (car). Could the visitors be emissaries from the pirate clan that the gang had threatened to sell us to, arguing over the price? And if so, how many more were lurking in the mountains?

Whatever was being discussed, though, I was surprised by how calm the gang seemed. At no point did anyone raise their voice in any way, nor was there any sign of tension or argument.

José reckoned that what we were seeing was the clan system at work. It was the flip side, he theorised, of all the quarrelling and feuding that had torn Somalia apart as a nation. Just as members of different clans seemed born enemies, members of the same clan were predisposed to get along. It was true that we had no way of telling whether this particular bunch were all related. But it was hard to think of any other explanation as to how they all co-operated so well.

It wasn’t just about their behaviour when under fire. It was also evident in their everyday interaction around the camp. There were endless tedious jobs to be done: guarding, cooking, cleaning, fetching, yet there was never so much as a sharp word or raised voice between them.

That night, I suggested to José that we say prayers before bed. They were for the gang’s ear, rather than the Almighty’s. I wanted them to be aware that we knew we were now in potential danger, and remind them, in case we were to be sold to new owners, that we were God-fearing souls. We knelt ostentatiously at the foot of the mat, as I said what I could remember of the Lord’s Prayer and José mumbled some Catholic incantation. None of the gang paid the slightest attention, and we retired to bed feeling slightly foolish.

As I lay smoking a cigarette, though, I began to see why people might end up believing in God. It wasn’t so much about the spiritual side, the afterlife and so on. It was more the here and now, of yearning to see that there was someone, or something, who represented justice and decency in the world. Back in Britain, we had at least had a functioning system of law and human rights, however imperfect people might say it was. Here I was getting a taste, albeit a mild one, of the misery that millions of ordinary people in Africa and elsewhere had every day of their lives.

If you lived in a country with no decent government, where thugs ruled and evil deeds went unpunished, I could see why you might believe in some higher power, taking notes on who was behaving and who wasn’t, and making plans for some judgment day. Atheism, surely, was a luxury for the comfortably off, for that upper strata of the world where mankind did a reasonable job of standing in for God.

I didn’t think I’d ever become religious, no matter how long we spent here. My atheistic instincts were far too strong. But right now I wanted a vengeful, angry God, an Old Testament type who’d melt the Old Bastard with a blast of righteous hellfire in front of all his pathetic buddies. Just as well I wasn’t cooped up with Terry Waite.

‘Kidnapped: Life as a Somali Pirate Hostage’ is published by Monday Books.

Colin will be speaking at the Telegraph Hay Festival on May 30; http://www.hayfestival.co.uk/