MOGADISHU: Children run in turquoise water, hawkers tout wares on white sands, and families laugh as tourists disembark from small boats — but it’s not some tropical island, it’s Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.

“I didn’t really tell my family where I was going,” said Sheryl, from the United States, after walking along Lido Beach in the city.

“But... from the moment we got off the aeroplane, I’ve been feeling totally comfortable,” she said.

“It’s nothing like what you hear.” To say that Somalia does not have a good reputation would be an understatement.

It has endured decades of conflict — first a brutal civil war in the 1990s, and now against the Al-Qaeda-linked insurgent group Al-Shabaab — and its capital, Mogadishu, is a byword for bombs and armoured cars.

But the East African country is trying to change that narrative, trumpeting an 86 percent reduction of attacks in the city since 2023 thanks to more surveillance cameras, roadblocks, and plainclothes police. However, incidents do still occur, including a major assault on a prison last month by the militants.

And while Mogadishu is comparatively secure, the rest of the country is not — Al-Shabaab’s major territorial gains earlier this year provoked warnings that the capital itself could be at risk.

Still, despite the perils, tourism minister Daud Aweis Jama said that roughly 10,000 people visited last year and the number for 2025 could be twice that — mostly from China, the US, and Turkey.

Sheryl and her husband Richard — both in their fifties — move around the city, accompanied by one armed soldier, they provoked only a passing curiosity.

“We’re freely walking around, and people are lovely, as people tend to be, and it’s a really interesting place to visit,” she said.

Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2025