A Sierra Leonean-Lebanese businessman and diamond and commodities trader named Jamil Sahid Mohammed fled Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, following the invasion of the city by a rebel army known as the Revolutionary United Front. He barely escaped to Lebanon with his life.

Freetown, like many ruinously down and out places, has an aspirational name completely at odds with reality. Never more so than on 6 January 1999 when the RUF Forces, which consisted largely of teenage soldiers sporting Tupac T-shirts and stylish haircuts, out of their minds on drugs, entered the city like a barbarian horde from the country’s bush interior. Among them were hired soldiers from Liberia and Burkina Faso and even a few white mercenaries from the Ukraine.

Named Operation No Living Thing, they rounded up entire neighbourhoods and machine-gunned the occupants or burnt them alive in their houses. With self-styled names like “Colonel Bloodshed,” “Commander Cut Hands”, “Superman”, and “Mr Die”¹ they tracked down anyone deemed to be an enemy – journalists, Nigerians, doctors treating wounded civilians – and tortured and killed them. They raped women, killed nuns, abducted priests and drugged other children to turn them into fighters. To some extent the killings and destruction were targeted at the wealthy, the politically aligned, the educated and police officers. Most though appeared to be arbitrary.

The attackers somehow had a sense that the violence they were inflicting was justified. The world had been grotesquely corrupt, unjust, and humiliating to them. From the confines of their brutalised jungle enclave far away from civilization, extreme violence was often rewarded and the dehumanisation of others routine. What the RUF did to Freetown was but an expression of this pent-up anger. Their violent conduct had no other more singular purpose.

Known more formally today as the ‘Third Battle of Freetown’ (this had happened before), the RUF started with attacks before dawn on the East End. Fighting their way west, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. They quickly advanced though the city’s Calaba Town, Wellington, and Kissy districts. In a period of four days, the RUF captured the city centre and most of the suburbs. With terrifying violence, they massacred some 6,000 civilians, amputating hands and feet at random, destroying hundreds of buildings and thousands of homes, and bringing the defending Nigerian ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) peacekeeping forces to the brink of defeat, almost overrunning their headquarters at Wilberforce Barracks before retreating and taking hundreds of captured children with them. Most would never see their families again.

Moving towards the city’s Pademba Road Prison, the RUF forces had hoped to free their incarcerated founding leader Foday Sankoh. An ex-army sergeant claiming to represent the peasantry and urban dispossessed with the promise of a greater share in the country’s mineral wealth. Sankoh had instead introduced brutal tactics of mutilation and amputation against them, enslaving others to enrich himself and his followers and expose the government’s inability to protect its citizens. Fortunately, Sankoh had been transferred away from the prison by the occupying Nigerians just before the invasion and would remain in captivity – at least for the time being.

As is often the case with the most intelligent of criminals, very little is known about Jamil Sahid Mohammed (who called himself “Jamil”). Despite the profoundly harmful impact his activities would have on Sierra Leone’s development into a modern nation, his circumspect movements wisp-like through the decades, have given the nation’s various biographers but a few clear glimpses to inform a line of narrative here or there before he disappeared from view again.

It is known that Jamil was in great danger during the RUF invasion and subsequent rampage of Freetown of January 1999, the Lebanese community being particularly hard-hit as well-off individuals. It is also known that Jamil attempted to flee the city but was stopped prior to leaving his house and that during this altercation, one of his sons was shot to death right in front of him. It is common knowledge that his old childhood friend, Nabih Berri, then as now Speaker of the Parliament of Lebanon hastily arranged for Jamil to somehow escape Sierra Leone to Lebanon on a diplomatic passport. This would also confer protection from the threat of any subsequent war crimes prosecution from the United Nations supported Special Court for Sierra Leone. Jamil repaid the favour by giving Berri a substantial cut of his shares in the Zahrani oil refinery, a Lebanese state-plundering racket.

In the aftermath of the RUF’s assault, both sides agreed to conduct ceasefire negotiations. Under pressure from both the US and UN, Sierra Leone’s elected president Ahmed Tejan Kabbah was unjustly compelled to offer Sankoh a power sharing deal, including a full amnesty for all war crimes. Incredibly, Sankoh was released from a death sentence and made Chairman of the country’s Strategic Mineral Resources Commission, a position that controlled most of Sierra Leone’s diamond exports. Yet even this wasn’t enough for the RUF, which revived its attacks on Freetown and Sierra Leone’s government the following year on 6 January 2000 despite its earlier promises to surrender its forces.

Sankoh was later arrested after his soldiers gunned down a number of protesters outside his Freetown home on 8 May 2000, killing 19 people. His arrest understandably led to massive celebrations throughout Sierra Leone. He died in hospital of complications arising from a stroke while awaiting trial on 29 July 2003. In a statement by the UN-backed war crimes court, Chief Prosecutor David Crane said that Sankoh’s death granted him “a peaceful end that he denied to so many others”².

Sierra Leone’s Civil War finally ended in 2002, killing at least 50,000 people in a nation of just seven million. By 2004 the disarmament of the RUF was finally complete.

Just a year after his escape from Sierra Leone in 2000, still in his mid-sixties, Jamil would also die of a stroke in Lebanon without facing justice or any need to atone for the crimes of his past. The precise date or location of his death remain unknown. He had once again managed to slip away into obscurity. To even die discretely.