The drive from Mogadishu airport to the presidential home at Villa Somalia should take about 15 minutes. It rarely does. Every few hundred metres there is a police roadblock. Nothing can be left to chance: lethal explosions at checkpoints are commonplace.
To avoid security breaches, nobody except Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the recently re-elected president, and a few aides, know about the Observer’s visit. We arrive in a bulletproof Hilux behind a Jeep carrying seven soldiers and a mounted machine gun, along a road lined by shipping containers padded with sandbags and walls topped with razor wire. It is eerily quiet.
