Darra had been labeled off-limits for the tourist crowd for some time, though a few intrepid backpacking types had managed to find themselves there through strokes of random luck - and the Pakistani police would single them out at one of the checkpoints on either end of the town, arrest them, extort a pile of cash from them, then call their hotel and demand they send a driver to pick them up. It’s a town most indicative of the wild frontier attitude in the Northwest Frontier Province, a real smuggler’s bazaar for the twenty-first century rather than simply the fake one just west of Peshawar that only sells Chinese made appliances at duty-free prices.

So, we decided to head elsewhere and see if another hotel/tour company could assist us in our mission to visit the famed and secret town of Darra. We were bent on a private driver, though guidebooks stated it was not entirely necessary: one simply needed to find a public bus heading south and say they were going onward to the town of Kohat, then get off at Darra. However this plan was not foolproof, as the tribal police inside of Darra did not take kindly to those who arrived without first paying them off.

We found an eager group of gentlemen at another hotel in the old town, call the Rose, where the hotelier spoke English fast and furiously - chastising our countries’ governments, going on about Canada and England and Iraq, we sat and drank the sweetened green tea of the region while waiting for their fixer to arrive. He was a younger fellow, in his mid-twenties, attending university during the day normally and running off on occasion to assist stupid tourists in their mission to visit the sealed smuggling town of Darra. This was his home town, he said, and his tribe of origin - what the Afghan lacked was local connections that one who has grown up in Darra can offer. The price was not cheap for the region, at sixty US dollars - but he insisted it could not be negotiated, as the police needed to be paid off, both in the government regions and the tribal regions. Soon enough, away we went - and I was implored to take off my bright green western looking coat and look a little more….. local.

Darra is only twenty kilometers south of Peshawar, but the distance does not do justice to the complicated politics of the Northwest Frontier Province: made up of twenty-four tribal areas, crossing the internal border is like crossing a real border. Police have their checkpoints set up, and if they see tourists in a private car, you’re bound to get stopped. “Just tell them you were heading to Kohat, and never stopped at Darra,” he said. We nodded. I checked that I had a spare memory card for my camera, in case I needed to hand one over for confiscation - the blank one would go, naturally.

Rolling farmlands lined a well-paved road south of Peshawar, and soon we left the policed confines of the city limits and our guide/driver began putting his foot to the floor. The space in between the Peshawar canton and the tribal region five kilometres south was mostly lawless, a place unprotected by either tribal or state officials. Banditry was rife, he said, as the muddled administrative issues of who should follow up on a robbery in the area paralyzed most departments while emboldening criminals. It was rally racing all over again, though soon enough we passed through another checkpoint - the beginning of the Darra Adam Khel tribal region in Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan.

We had arrived in Darra, though our guide was hesitant to take us deeper into town. And aside from hash and guns and other exciting products for purchase, what made Darra such an attractive place? Well, it dates back to a hundred years ago - tribesmen in the area have a special proven talent for being shown the schematics for a firearm, and duplicating it exactly within five days. Their skills are widely renowned, and the quality of their weapons - at least for firing a few hundred rounds - is astounding. We were here to witness some of the last handmade, blacksmithed, guns on the planet.

I had expected some rustic black-powder weapons, but walking into the blacksmith’s shop proved that they were not interested in anything so ancient. No, they were busy replicating a Heckler & Koch nine millimeter pistol, complete with rifled barrel, full metal frame, beautifully manufactured wood grips and even a laser sighting device under the barrel! The quality was immaculate, and the smiths worked away at these things with just the most basic of tools - an electric buffer, a vice, and several tinker’s hammers. They were also busy replicating an MP5 submachine gun, with plastic frame and all. They offered to let us fire it - “just point it into the hills over there,” they said, and it fired immaculately.

I tried to press them on who, in fact, was buying such large numbers of submachine guns and pistols in this region. Who are their buyers? Who needs so many MP5s? They said that it was the local tribesmen, who supported the blacksmiths and their trade. Suspected Taliban insurgents? Not likely, they said - the range of these weapons is short, and Taliban need long range weapons to be effective against NATO Forces. Or do they?

Our guide showed us another workshop where the beloved AK-47 was being replicated, as well as a Beretta semi-automatic shotgun. The original Italian model would run you around five thousand US dollars, but here, they were selling this model for only three hundred and fifty. As well, there are more troubling weapons to be had in Darra - including pen guns, cell phone guns, knife guns - all of the reasons why it takes so long to get through airport screening these days. Rumour has it that when tourists visit Darra, the Pakistani police revel in catching them - they inevitably come back with a pen gun or two, a few ounces of hash, and are way up shit creek if they get caught with these things. Foreigners need permits to have firearms within Peshawar, though the laws are different in the tribal areas. They will let you buy one, no doubt, knowing that when the police confiscate it they will simply return it in the same condition as it was bought.

With our fun completed in Darra, and losing a bit of hearing firing off their guns, we headed back north - but first I swapped out my camera’s memory card with a blank one, remembered the story that we were in Kohat, and breezed past the police checkpoints. While Darra may be something of a taboo tourist spot that gets all the media attention, the insidious fact remains about Darra Adam Khel and the Northwest Frontier Province: all of Afghanistan’s major offensives originate near the border area with Pakistan. Are tribesmen simply buying these things for storage in their home? Who is buying so many automatic weapons?

The connection between Northwest Frontier Province and Afghanistan’s continuing insurgency with the Taliban is more than coincidental, and Darra, at the least, hints at a few answers for this.

Author - Sean Rorison

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I first traveled to Mogadishu, Somalia, in 2002. Back then it was all quite a new experience to me – having ten armed guards surrounding you at any given time outside of your hotel compound, garish amounts of weaponry on every street corner, a blazing sun and countless bombed-out buildings. It was a realm of active conflict the like of which I had never seen before and have not seen since. Nothing on this planet comes close to Mogadishu – in terms of volatility, level of civilian firepower, and total lack of resolution. Southern Somalia still ranks at the very top - beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, beyond Chechnya. Pity, then, that we’ve all forgotten about it.

Three and a half years later I returned and learned more about the town. The shock of seeing how the city worked had worn off, my eyes had adjusted so to speak, and I could focus my attention more on the details of how life goes on… And it does: The city is divided into numerous areas controlled by warlords, and those warlords in turn protect their own populace and even seek to mitigate crime and chaos in their own little areas. Private ownership of weapons is high, but no higher than any other city where guns are legal. Militias roam the streets, and just like any other place that experiences gang warfare, people should expect to be hunted down if they start stirring things up.

Whilst other parts of Somalia have begun to sort themselves out - Somaliland in the north, and Puntland in the northeast, both sport their own democratically elected governments – southern Somalia still rules strictly by clan and guns, and the larger of either that you have behind you, the better off you’ll be. Across the arid shrublands of the south the entire region is divided amongst Somali clans, and then divided further between local leaders. Each leader needs their own protection to maintain influence over their respective territories. Mad Max indeed, but these people are far less unreasonable than one may think – they are interested in maintaining business ties and improving the lives of their own people as much as any other community leader. Indeed, no one inside their area of protection would call them a “warlord” per se, but instead would refer to them as the “Local Businessman” or “Community Representative” – a leader of sorts, no doubt leading by force of arms, but rarely if ever seen as something to be feared by the normal person. Unfortunately, no foreigner can be seen as ‘normal’ inside Mogadishu.

White people, or anyone not Somali for that matter, are exceedingly rare inside the city. Only one other fellow who departed with us on the flight to Mogadishu from Nairobi even stopped there – the others, four aid workers, continued north to the safer environs of Hargeisa, in Somaliland. The guy that disembarked at Mogadishu only appeared inside the city briefly to interview a parliamentarian at the same hotel I was staying at. The cost of arriving, and doing business, in the city, is astronomical: Ten men with machine guns guard you at every moment once you are outside of your compound, tailing your truck while your guide and driver navigate Mogadishu’s various routes to and from the hotel. Always changing routes, talking on mobile phones to confirm if one route is open or closed, or if daily fighting has shifted territories, once again necessitating a diversion to avoid checkpoints.

Conversely, going from one warlord’s territory to another requires phoning ahead with them so their militiamen can accompany your vehicles through their territory (requiring a fee of course), then doing the same thing again once you move into another territory. Handed off time after time between militias; paying each one as you go; observing tell-tale lines of debris on shattered roads as indications of where one territory ends and another begins; all of this is daily life in Mogadishu, and it is expensive, extortionate even, which may give an insight into why so few people even bother reporting on the Somali situation at all.

…And also why so few aid groups, charity organizations, and even the UN prefer to establish their missions in Somalia to somewhere else – mainly Nairobi. Out in the Gigiri district of Nairobi’s suburbs with the towering building that is the new American Embassy, past the lavish mansion with heated pool that is the Canadian Embassy, is a small town unto itself called UNOSOM (UN Operations Somalia). Over a dozen various agencies have taken over the shady terraces and walled mansions of this upscale neighbourhood; hung their signs out front, and continually wax poetic of how things ebb and flow in the Somali region. Random field reports arrive from the outer limits of Somali territory, or from Jowhar, the new capital of Somalia’s parliament that refuses to enter Mogadishu - because they believe it is too dangerous.

Too dangerous for some, but not for all. A rift in the recently appointed parliament meant that half of them were staying at our same hotel, several dozen of them, debating on where to move next - or what to do at all. Their philosophy was that if this newly arranged government did not establish itself in Mogadishu, then it was another hopeless cause already. Being in the capital would be critical to proving that they could exert control over the wider southern region and should be seen as its most important first mission. About two weeks following our departure, we heard they’d left for the countryside – to Baidoa, not Jowhar. So now this new government has split into two and has no presence whatsoever in the capital city.

This is a step backward from September of 2002, when a small government had at least established control of central Mogadishu. The TNG as it was called, Transitional National Government, was assembling various innocuous infrastructural changes such as license plates, traffic police, and had begun to draw up forms for various civilian institutions such as police stations. But once the TNG dissolved this went with it, and Mogadishu slipped back into its familiar anarchy. The new government was supposed to come in and fill this vacuum with a stronger parliamentary system, but that didn’t happen and, instead, the warlords quickly moved in and divided up the empty territory between themselves and shut the new government out entirely.

Which is not to say the warlords do not believe that a government should come into Mogadishu and establish control. One that we spoke to was even a minister in the new government, called the TFG - Transitional Federal Government. However, there is continuous disagreement on the makeup of the parliament and even after things have been decided, it only takes a few minor squabbles to bring the house of cards down again. For all the talk we heard of Somalis tiring from a lack of government and willingness to allow the new parliament to come in, their actions speak otherwise.

Islamic Courts, one of the largest institutions relied upon by people for some establishment of order, have been receiving funding from outside sources and have also been fighting with other warlords as of late. To those uninitiated in the world of Somali affairs this might look like the road to something akin to the Taliban in southern Somalia, but I wouldn’t count on it – Somalia’s problems stem from their fervent individualism and devotion to clan above all. And conversely, it is these things that ensure the conflict has not deteriorated even further down the spiral into absolute disarray. For all that doesn’t work in Mogadishu, there are vast ad-hoc networks that regulate business, crime, shipping, and even traffic. The more time you spend in the city, the deeper the whole mess gets – but the more order you see amid the chaos.

-Sean Rorison, April 2006