It is the 1992 when preparations are taking place at the Bandini barracks in Siena, a new mission awaits the parades of the Thunderbolt: Somalia. The young paratrooper Stefano is an integral part of this gear and leaves for Mogadishu.
It's the 2013 and history repeats itself. Same barracks, same company and same department but different generations.
Captain Valerio prepares to leave. Like Stefano twenty years before, he too leaves for Mogadishu.
Stefano and Valerio do not know each other but both have decided to tell me a little about their Somalia.
While Valerio was leaving, Stefano met me for the first time. Today the captain agrees to tell me about his experience and that of his men. Captain, when did your mission start in Somalia and what was the operational context?
The mission started in May 2013, but I left a few weeks earlier for service reasons. We were the first, after 20 years, to set foot in Somalia. For a para it's an important question.
Our task was to guarantee a safety hat in which the European personnel employed in the EUTM mission could operate.
In the 2013 the European mission of training of Somali security forces was in Uganda and not in Somalia. However, it was felt that the time was ripe to bring such training activities to the country for which they were intended.
Security became a priority. The infrastructures, the routes to be used to move were to be controlled and rearranged, and obviously it was essential to guarantee the safety of the political authorities who supported the fragile Somali government.
The task was not the easiest: the basic concepts of infrastructure in Somalia are very different from here and the city changes visibly. Mogadishu is an ever-changing entity and ensuring the security of something that is constantly changing is never easy.
We had to have a thousand eyes and a thousand attentions, we had to evaluate and reevaluate many things and for this reason the help that was given to us by the population and the Somali Army was invaluable and absolutely welcome.
Stefano leaves a city annihilated and Valerio finds a city in rebirth.
I reflect and I think that in the end the first mission in Somalia allowed Valerio and his men to work better. The IBIS of 1992 has left a relationship with the population that today guarantees Italy a privileged dialogue with the military and political institutions of the country. It was not wasted time.
Collaborate with the population, support their needs and understand their difficulties; that's how our Army works.
I ask the Captain how the relationship between the Somali population and our military is today.
We haven't had much contact with the population to be honest. We took some confidence with the shopkeepers present at the international airport of Mogadishu who as soon as they understood that we were Italians did not stop telling us about their family members scattered around our peninsula. Almost all had at least one uncle or a cousin - often with very distant family ties - who spoke Italian or lived in Italy or who had studied in Siena or Milan.
This distant relative seemed almost to be a justification for feeling Italian in turn, a sort of citizenship by hearsay. The link with us and our country is very strong and we feel a lot, we are considered as the cousins who visit them from time to time.
To me and to my men this made one smile, we liked the relationship that was being established and in the end we even liked to hear the stories they had to tell us. He made us feel at home a bit. The captain smiles and in his eyes I see some of the nostalgia I saw in Stefano's eyes as he told me about the IBIS of two decades before. For the Somalis we will always be first Italians and then soldiers.
The population understood that we felt very close to Italy, but you worked with the Army. Can you tell us what relationship you had with your Somali colleagues?
Our working relationships were linked above all to the officers. Many of those I met had studied in Italy at the Military Academy of Modena.
Someone called us "capellone", which is the term used to indicate the youngest official student. This joint past between myself - which is official and therefore in the Academy I started my journey - and they are an indissoluble knot and a starting point from which to build work collaboration.
It is a bond that somehow creates a bridge between two different worlds in which to do the same job. The pride of having attended such a prestigious place is evident, no one loses the opportunity to reiterate his studies and all tell continuously anecdotes about their experience in Italy.
Both Stefano and Valerio underline the importance of the Italian past in Somalia.
Italy has a prominent place in the life of the country, we have been recalled by the president himself who has appealed to the entire international community so that Italians and paratroopers return.
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I thought that after the events of the check-point Pasta something between the two parts had cracked or at least remained resentful, but no.
The captain confirms it and tells me that the Italians enjoy a special regime in Somalia as if they lived in a particular light. And not just in the eyes of Somalis.
They consider us a family and as for every member of a family the doors of their house are always wide open for those who arrive with the Italian shield on camouflage.
It is something unexpected and at the same time wonderful.
Italy and Somalia seem to surprise each other.
Some of my men - Valerio continues - do not speak English well and communications with other contingents and the local population were often difficult.
With the Somalis - military or civilian - the communication took place in Italian, a few stunted words and some grammatical errors but the Italian spoke calmly and willingly.
I and many colleagues have also linked with many other contingents present in the country. Italians are very welcome and friendships are born that have been carried on for years. Some military colleagues who are in Djibouti (East Africa) continue to stay in touch with me and my men despite the distance, beautiful!
Italians always first men over the uniform.
Twenty years ago, his colleagues left a 'year zero year'. What is the capital of Mogadishu today?
Somalia today is being reborn, literally. It is incredible to think that until a few years ago there was almost nothing, Somalia was a pile of smoking rubble. Today Mogadishu is reborn of a new life, with its architectural contradictions.
The city is a mixture of new houses, tin shacks and several decades old rubble. The resurfaced or reconstructed roads, churches (churches are destroyed), hotels and schools. Often from one week to the next when we passed by road junctions we did not recognize the places. Where today you find only a small house in seven days you risk finding a building.
This wave of construction is due above all to foreign investments for reconstruction. The leadership of European countries and especially African countries is essential to bring Somalia out of a whirlwind of massacres and destruction.
Life in Mogadishu is new and like every new thing it has a special charm.
The paratrooper Stefano and the captain Valerio have allowed me to tell a little of their Somalia lived by Italian soldiers with the Amaranth Basque.
Both of them carry in themselves the ills of Africa that Somalia embodies inside every paratrooper who gets dirty his boots with his dust.
That sickness of Africa that hides behind an impatient smile betrays them as soon as I ask them: "Would you go back to Somalia?" and that with a firm voice he will oblige them to always answer "When we start?".
Denise Serangelo
Read also "The other voice of IBIS" - History of a research project
(in the picture on the right a moment of commemoration in the 2013, twenty years later, of the fallen of the Pasta check point)
