Somalia's Fresh Start? (Newsweek)
Published in Newsweek magazine - January 2012
Somalia is one of the last places you’d find most U.S. investors. The war-ravaged country hasn’t had a functioning central government in 21 years, since the fall of Mohamed Siad Barre’s dictatorship. Nearly every block in the capital, Mogadishu, stands in ruins, many of them so old that trees and thick vines have grown up through the wreckage, and the few houses that haven’t been entirely gutted by mortar fire are riddled with the bullet scars of past street battles. But that devastation is precisely what has brought Liban Egal back to the city of his birth. The Somali-American businessman wants to get in early.
