The clans resumed their roles as the primary administrative authorities in Somalia, enforcing justice, brokering deals, and taxing the population. Many clan leaders grew corrupt, using their clan’s cash flow to amass personal fortunes. Soon they were building armies and fighting one another.

They’d become warlords.

Nothing was off-limits in their quest for money and power: extortion, drug smuggling, human trafficking. The civilian population of Somalia was caught in the middle of the warlords’ frequent conflicts and routinely subject to brutality and deprivation.

The warlords fought in the streets of Mogadishu, and they fought in the countryside. The constant battles came at an enormous cost to the population. Those lacking the ruthlessness necessary to gain and retain power were eventually killed or relegated to administrative positions within their own clans.

It was a power struggle that raged for decades, claiming victim after victim, until the struggle to be the next dictator of Somalia had come down to two men.

—

THE ONE THEY called Badeed had been one of the earliest Somali pirates.

Hungry and made homeless by the civil war, he’d been thirteen years old when he rowed out to a pleasure yacht anchored off the beach. He climbed aboard at night, while the British couple who owned it were asleep, and robbed them in their berth at knifepoint—relieving them of three hundred pounds, a few radios, and a Swiss watch. By the time he hauled his boat back onto the beach, the victims had already raised anchor and begun to sail away.

It was a seminal moment for the young boy.

There would be no consequences.

He sold the swag and used the proceeds to buy an old pistol and a smoky outboard engine. He gathered friends and robbed more boats. The group soon acquired rifles and began boarding commercial ships. When the ships stopped anchoring near land, Badeed bought a second engine, slightly larger than the first, for his eighteen-foot wooden skiff. Soon he was attacking targets that were fifteen miles offshore and under way, steering the mismatched outboards by their tiller handles while his cohorts fired Kalashnikovs at the ships’ crews until they stopped their vessels.

It was during the eighth of these offshore boardings that he’d acquired his nickname. Most Somali men had them—unflattering monikers that highlighted some unfortunate physical characteristic. He’d been scrambling up a wooden extension ladder, halfway up the side of a ship with a rifle slung over his shoulder, when a wave rolled under the skiff and knocked the ladder out from under him.

He wasn’t in the water more than a minute when a shortfin mako shark took a bite out of his leg.

From then on, he was known as Libaax Badeed baa Cunay. It meant “The One the Shark Has Eaten,” but everyone called him Badeed.