Ninety-five percent of Somalia’s population belonged to one of the country’s six noble clans, and Afgooye had been Hawiye clan territory since the time of Samaale’s sons, so no one expected anything good to happen when two olive-drab pickup trucks filled with Darood gunmen arrived at midday. They were seated on plywood benches with their legs hanging over the sides and rifles held across their chests.

Mixing between most clans was strongly discouraged and intermarriage was absolutely forbidden, with conservative elements often bestowing beatings or death upon newlyweds in lieu of gifts.

Still, one of the men in the Hawiye camp had taken a Darood bride when they were living in Mogadishu, where anonymity came more easily and clan ties were easier to obscure, but the bride’s eldest brother, a disfigured Darood enforcer named Masaska, had always suspected that something was amiss with her new husband. When the building housing their ground-floor shop and second-story apartment was destroyed a few months earlier by an al-Shabaab truck bomb, their newfound poverty forced husband and wife to relocate to a camp.

The Hawiye camp.

Masaska and his Darood militiamen jumped down from their pickups, stripped the well’s two security officers of their weapons, and tore the facility apart—wrecking the shanties and terrorizing the refugees until they found his sister and her husband, cowering in their tent.

Made from bamboo stalks that had been lashed together, then covered with blankets and a tarp, the tent was little more than a sun shade. The brother knocked it down in less than a minute.

With his own sister begging for mercy at gunpoint, he forced the offending couple to lie in the wreckage of the tent. The gunmen wrapped them in the tarp and blankets and carried them on their shoulders, like a rolled-up carpet, toward the pickup trucks.

But the Darood did not go to the vehicles. They stopped at the well, and the brother fired a long burst from his rifle over the heads of those queued up for water.

The crowd scattered.

The henchman advanced toward the well with the screaming couple still wrapped in the blankets. A man ran to them and fell to his knees, pleading for mercy.

Masaska shot him in the face, as casually as he might check the time on a wristwatch, then pointed to the well.

The Darood goons dumped the couple into the well.

They fell thirty feet to the bottom, screaming as they tumbled against its rock walls.

The brother looked down the shaft and saw movement at the bottom—the couple thrashing in the waist-high water. His sister yelled to him in tears, begging for mercy.

He pointed his AK-47 down the well and squeezed the trigger. The rifle jerked wildly in his hands as he emptied the magazine.

The yelling stopped.