One of the camp's leaders, sporting a loose, purple tunic and an orange-dyed beard, explained why his community was unable to return to their homes. "We are pastoralists, but even the farmers' fields have trees growing in the middle of them, because they haven't been maintained. They'd have to start again, too."

He said he walked for four days to get to Mogadishu from his home in the south. "We can go back if we had a source of livelihood, but we don't have it. We don't have any livestock anymore. There's no way we can even intend to go back." Adding to the problem is the ongoing conflict in the famine-affected areas, where the Kenyan army, the powerful Kenyan Ras Kamboni militia, Sufi militants and Al Shabaab are all fighting for control.

The government is only barely present in Mogadishu's IDP belt: Even the safer camps are under the control of small militia groups that don't necessarily draw an official salary. These "gatekeepers" are typically government-empowered and militia-backed "district commissioners" whose control over an individual camp has been given an official sanction. At the Badbaado camp, the commissioner was a tall, middle-aged man named Abdullahi Ibrahim. He commanded a small unit of uniformed police--in Somalia, the security sector largely consists of underpaid or even un-paid clan militias who are in an (often temporarily) alliance with the government.

On its surface, the gatekeeper system is deeply exploitative: pseudo-warlords rule IDP camps as a kind of personal fiefdom, skimming money and aid items from NGOs and demanding kickbacks on necessities like the purchase of local water rights. At the same time, gatekeepers provide a measure of organization to a camp that the government cannot. They might take kickbacks on the purchase of water--but water might not flow without them. We likely could not have visited Badbaado without the permission of the district commissioner. At its best, the gatekeeper system is just one way Somalis have coped with the absence of a central authority. Now that there is such an authority in place (at least in theory), there's talk of phasing them out: The government is discussing the possibility of locally electing the camps' district commissioners. But for now, at least, the old system is firmly in place.

The gatekeepers are there to keep outsiders out, and to protect their own privileges inside of the IDP camps. But at Badbaado, they want to keep the IDPs in, as well. "We ask and request [local NGOs] to just maintain the flow of water until the IDPs will be evicted from here to another place," said Ibrahim. "If the water runs out, they'd go back to the main town, and there would be havoc."

In a way, the IDPs are already part of the city. Food distribution stopped in Badbaado roughly a year ago--many IDPs work as day laborers, or merchants in Mogadishu's sprawling Bakara market. A Somali NGO runs a single health clinic in the camp, but water remains the major reason that IDPs have stayed there. "If the water were cut, no one would spend a single night here," one IDP told me.