Stranger still, Mr. Almuhajir’s skin was white (his plaid scarf popped open in a few places) and he spoke perfect English, with an American accent. He said that “brothers in Al Qaeda” had brought grain, powdered milk and dates for the famine victims and that Mr. Zawahri had sent him to Somalia with a message of greetings and sympathy.

“Though we are separated by thousands of kilometers, you are consistently in our thoughts and prayers,” he told the Somalis gathered around him on Friday, and witnesses said a similar scene unfolded on Saturday.

Somalia has lurched from crisis to crisis since the central government imploded in 1991, and the country is once again on the ropes. A famine is sweeping the southern regions, and the United Nations says that tens of thousands of people have died across the country and that as many as 750,000 could starve to death in the coming months.

The hardest-hit areas are mostly controlled by the ruthless militants called the Shabab who have pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda and banned music, soccer, bras and even Western aid groups at a time of drought and hunger. Somalia’s weak transitional government is marooned in the bullet-riddled capital, Mogadishu, and ringed by the Shabab on almost all sides.

The Shabab-run camp that Mr. Almuhajir visited is on Mogadishu’s outskirts, and it is where the Shabab have been essentially imprisoning thousands of starving people. Witnesses said Shabab fighters had plucked desperate people off buses and taken them to their camp at gunpoint, and recent pictures sneaked out by Somali aid workers revealed skeletal children, their skin cracking off and their entire rib cages visible.