I Suffered Female Genital Mutilation & Was Forced Into Marriage

How Ifrah Ahmed, the girl from Mogadishu, took her FGM story to the world

Ifrah Ahmed refuses to let the horrific female genital mutilation she suffered at the age of eight define her. “I don’t want to be a victim. I want to be a voice,” says the 32-year-old campaigner.

She is one of the first women to publicly speak out about female genital mutilation (FGM) in Somalia – a country where it is estimated that 98% of women have undergone the ritual – and now her journey from powerless victim to powerful role model has been dramatised in a film. A Girl from Mogadishu has just had its UK premiere at the Edinburgh film festival and will be released across the UK in cinemas later this year.

In the first 10 minutes it shows Aja Naomi King, who plays Ahmed as a 15-year-old girl, being violently gang-raped by Somali militants. After that, she makes the dangerous journey from Somalia to Ireland to seek asylum, too scared to question anything her male smugglers want her to do. Upon her arrival, a male gynaecologist examines her and tries to find out what has happened to her, but she has no words to explain it to the male translator, just tears. But then, about halfway through, with the help of other women, she starts to find her voice. By the end of the film, she is shouting about FGM in front of Barack Obama, making speeches at the United Nations and being praised by the president of Somalia.

For Ahmed, who has devoted her life to campaigning against FGM and was instrumental in bringing about the 2012 legislation banning the practice in Ireland, the movie was an opportunity to challenge how survivors of FGM are perceived. “I don’t want people to see me as a victim. I want people to see me empowering other women. I want to show people that whatever Somali women have been through, we can be strong and overcome it.”

She hopes that others who have suffered FGM will watch the film and feel less alone. “It’s hard for women to speak out about FGM. So when two young Somali women came up to me after watching the movie in Edinburgh and hugged me, and said: ‘Ifra, you are speaking for all of us,’ I felt so happy. I felt so proud.”

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LEYLA HUSSEIN | THE CRUEL CUT

Mothers send sons to Somalia to avoid knife crime

British teenagers are being sent by their parents to Somalia, itself recovering from a series of terror attacks, because of concern that the police cannot protect them from knife crime.

Representatives from north London’s Somali community say hundreds of children have been flown to Somalia, Somaliland and Kenya because of rising concerns over drug gangs and county lines, the criminal networks that use children to transport drugs from cities to the provinces.

In a series of interviews, Somali mothers who arrived in London after fleeing their country during its 1990s civil war told the Observer that many of their sons had asked to leave the UK because of drug gangs and the threat of violence.


Rakhia Ismail, Islington deputy mayor, said: “Sending them away has become the only way they can be safer. This issue of safety has been repeatedly raised by the community but nobody has listened. So many children have gone abroad. Two weeks ago, there was a stabbing and a child was taken back home two days later.”

The revelations follow a week of heated debate over the causes of and potential solutions to Britain’s knife crime epidemic. Seventeen people have died after attacks in London alone since the start of 2019. On Saturday, there were reports that three people were in hospital after an attack at a nightclub in Birmingham, a city reeling from three knife fatalities within days last month. And a 15-year-old boy was charged with murder after the stabbing of 17-year-old Ayub Hassan, in west London, on Thursday afternoon.

The supermarket Asda made a surprise intervention on Saturday into the issue, announcing that it will stop selling single kitchen knives.

 Another 15-year-old was recently sent away after his friend was stabbed to death in Islington and he was told 'you next'
The high levels of violence facing parts of British society are evident in the testimony of Islington’s sizeable Somali community. Representatives say 50-70% have been directly affected by county lines and knife crime.

Sadia Ali, treasurer of Islington Somalia Forum and founder of Minority Matters, said: “Hundreds of youngsters have been taken to Somalia, Somaliland and Kenya, some taken all the way to the rural areas. Parents feel they have no choice if they want their son to be safe.”

Ali, a mother of seven, sent her 15-year-old son to Somalia to protect him from gangs and said many of her friends now have children on two continents. Another 15-year-old son was recently sent to Somalia after his friend was stabbed to death in Islington and he was told “you next”.

Recently, Somalia has suffered a number of terror attacks. A car bomb in the capital, Mogadishu, killed seven people and wounded several others on Thursday, following. It followed another the week before which killed 29 people.

On Friday, a north London Somali mother flew to Mombasa, Kenya, to dissuade her 19-year-old son from returning to the UK after gangs asked him to return: “I am very scared what the gangs will do if he comes home.”

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‘Sex tourists’ duping Somali virgins into marriage

The Mothers of Rinkeby: Last Night in Sweden | This is Europe

It's 7pm and Ardo is getting ready for her shift. She puts on her orange jacket and makes her way through Rinkeby town centre, passing under its famous Rinkeby Centrum arch.

It's bustling on a Friday evening with elderly men sitting on benches, chatting and watching passersby, young people making their way to and from the nearby gym and families heading out to eat in the Pakistani restaurant or pizzeria.

In this neighbourhood where many of the residents are first, second or third generation migrants, she passes people from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Chile, Syria, Turkey and the country where she was born, Somalia.

A nursery teacher during the day, Ardo is a well-known face around here and her orange jacket a familiar sight.

She is one of the neighbourhood's night patrol mothers, a group of Somali mothers and grandmothers who, following the deaths of several boys in gang-related violence in the area, decided to act.

Every Friday and Saturday night, they put on their orange jackets and walk through the community in groups of two or three.

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HALIMA ADEN INTERVIEWED BY IMAN

Last November, one photograph changed Halima Aden’s life. Competing in her local beauty pageant, Miss Minnesota U.S.A., she wore her traditional hijab onstage. The image of Aden alongside a lineup of girls in plunging evening gowns opened a wellspring of online praise. Born in a Kenyan refugee camp, Aden moved to the United States at age six, her family settling in the burgeoning Somali-American community in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Today, as a college student suddenly armed with a following, she wishes to expand and redefine perceptions of young American Muslims. Aden spoke to her hero, Iman—a fellow Somali—about the importance of self-worth, the perils of representation, and the pride of the hijab.

HALIMA ADEN Oh my God, this is such a huge deal! Every time someone asks me who my inspiration is, I say Iman—someone who has broken the glass ceiling.

IMAN Oh thank you, but you have broken it yourself. The photos of you competing at Miss Minnesota were such a sensation.

HA I remember feeling so much gratitude, and I felt so proud of the media, because for a very long time they were pushing this negative image of Muslims.

IMAN I think often the West does not understand the history and the privilege of wearing a hijab. They always think of oppression.

HA Yeah, totally. I always tell them, “Just look around you, there are Muslim women who wear it and Muslim women who don’t.” We have to break the stereotype.

IMAN I’m going to be 62 years old in July. So the Somalia I grew up in—there weren’t so many women who wore hijabs. When I was growing up there, we all wore traditional clothes. Most of the time we didn’t even cover our heads. I’ve heard all types of critiques—as a Somali girl, as a model, as a mom, as a Muslim who does not wear a hijab, marrying a white man, my late husband David Bowie. But you know, I live my truth.

HA I love that.

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Female genital mutilation: 'Mothers need to say no'

For Samira, the very idea of this kind of mutilation is incomprehensible. Brought up in London, she was working as a model when she was approached by BBC3 to present a documentary about Somalia. Visiting the war-torn country, she met women who planned to have their daughters cut and saw a six-year-old girl who had been recently subjected to FGM. "I just didn't understand how a mother who had gone through this pain could have it done to her children. I don't blame the women, I blame the society that doesn't stop it."

Since the film came out last year, Samira has been touring schools withSave the Children to highlight issues facing Somalia. "One thing I have learned is that while people may say we are moving on, it still continues."

According to Forward, a leading UK charity that campaigns to end FGM, the practice takes place in many cultures and occurs in several different religious communities. However, mainstream spiritual leaders have denied that the practice stems from religion. Samira believes the desire to control women's sexuality lies behind it.

"I think women here are scared their daughters will become too westernised and not get married – that they will have boyfriends and go out, and this is why they have it done."

Yet the subject, she says, is rarely discussed. "I go into schools with a high number of Somali girls, and they always seem shocked that it is part of our history and culture. We need women to talk about their experiences, men to talk about their marital experiences, clerics to explain it is not linked to religion and doctors to talk about the problems it causes. Then things will change – when we discuss what FGM is really doing."

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Afghanistan worst place in the world for women, but India in top five

Targeted violence against female public officials, dismal healthcare and desperate poverty make Afghanistan the world's most dangerous country in which to be born a woman, according to a global survey released on Wednesday.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Pakistan, India and Somalia feature in descending order after Afghanistan in the list of the five worst states, the poll amonggender experts shows.

The appearance of India, a country rapidly developing into an economic super-power, was unexpected. It is ranked as extremely hazardous because of the subcontinent's high level of female infanticide and sex trafficking.

Others were less surprised to be on the list. Informed about her country's inclusion, Somalia's women's minister, Maryan Qasim, responded: "I thought Somalia would be first on the list, not fifth."

The survey has been compiled by the Thomson Reuters Foundation to mark the launch of a website, TrustLaw Woman, aimed at providing free legal advice for women's groups around the world.

High maternal mortality rates, limited access to doctors and a "near total lack of economic rights" render Afghanistan such a threat to its female inhabitants. "Continuing conflict, Nato airstrikes and cultural practices combine to make Afghanistan a very dangerous place for women," said Antonella Notari, head of Women Change Makers, a group that supports women social entrepreneurs around the world.

"Women who do attempt to speak out or take on public roles that challenge ingrained gender stereotypes of what is acceptable for women to do or not, such as working as policewomen or news broadcasters, are often intimidated or killed."

The "staggering levels of sexual violence" in the lawless east of the DRC account for its second place in the list. One recent US study claimed that more than 400,000 women are raped there each year. The UN has called Congo the rape capital of the world.

"Rights activists say militia groups and soldiers target all ages, including girls as young as three and elderly women," the survey reports, "They are gang raped, raped with bayonets and some have guns shot into their vaginas."

Pakistan is ranked third on the basis of cultural, tribal and religious practices harmful to women. "These include acid attacks, child and forced marriage and punishment or retribution by stoning or other physical abuse," the poll finds.

Divya Bajpai, reproductive health adviser at the International HIV/Aids Alliance, added: "Pakistan has some of the highest rates of dowry murder, so-called honour killings and early marriage." According to Pakistan's human rights commission, as many as 1,000 women and girls die in honour killings annually.

India is the fourth most dangerous country. "India's central bureau of investigation estimated that in 2009 about 90% of trafficking took place within the country and that there were some 3 million prostitutes, of which about 40% were children," the survey found.

Forced marriage and forced labour trafficking add to the dangers for women. "Up to 50 million girls are thought to be 'missing' over the past century due to female infanticide and foeticide,", the UN population fund says, because parents prefer to have young boys rather than girls.

Somalia, a state in political disintegration, suffers high levels of maternal mortality, rape, female genital mutilation and limited access to education and healthcare.

Qasim added: "The most dangerous thing a woman in Somalia can do is to become pregnant. When a woman becomes pregnant her life is 50-50 because there is no antenatal care at all. There are no hospitals, no healthcare, no nothing.

"Add to that the rape cases that happen on a daily basis, and female genital mutilation being done to every single girl in Somalia. Add to that famine and drought. Add to that the fighting [which means] you can die any minute, any day."

Monique Villa, the chief executive of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, said: "Hidden dangers – like a lack of education or terrible access to healthcare – are as deadly, if not more so, than physical dangers like rape and murder which usually grab the headlines.

"In Afghanistan, for instance, women have a one in 11 chance of dying in childbirth. In the top five countries, basic human rights are systematically denied to women.

"Empowering women tackles the very roots of poverty. In the developing world when a woman works, her children are better fed and better educated because they spend their money for their family."

The survey was based on responses from more than 200 aid professionals, academics, health workers, policymakers, journalists and development specialists chosen for their expertise in gender issues.

Each country was also ranked in terms of six risk factors including: health, discrimination and lack of access to resources, cultural and religious practices, sexual violence, human trafficking and conflict-related violence.

In terms of individual risk categories, Afghanistan was deemed to be the most dangerous for health, economic/discrimination and non-sexual violence; the Congo is most plagued by rape and sexual violence; and India has most problems with trafficking.

"You have to look at all the dangers to women, all the risks women and girls face," said Elisabeth Roesch, who works on gender-based violence for the International Rescue Committee in Washington.

"If a woman can't access healthcare because her healthcare isn't prioritised, that can be a very dangerous situation as well."

The TrustLaw website has been in existence for some time, linking up local NGOs and social entrepreneurs with established law firms who are prepared to offer legal advice on a pro-bono basis. The groups are vetted by Transparency International.

More than 450 law firms are already involved including some from China. Among those that have recently benefited have been the charity Riders for Health, which delivers medicine to remote villages, and reviewed its contracts in Nigeria.

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Terrorists Kidnap a Hero

Militants are holding the Mother Teresa of Somalia hostage, and as a result, dozens of children have already died. Eliza Griswold talks to Dr. Hawa Abdi from the home where she is being held captive.

At dawn last Wednesday, Dr. Hawa Abdi, a 63-year-old Somali gynecologist, woke to the whistle of shells falling around her at her family farm. This was nothing new. For the past four years, Islamist militias have been battling Somalia’s weak and ever-changing government for power over the world’s longest-running failed state. But 10 minutes later, those familiar sounds turned into 500 militant members of al Qaeda-linked Hizbul Islam, one of the two lethal Islamist groups vying for control in Somalia, bursting into her home and surrounding her hospital. They rounded up dozens of Dr. Hawa’s employees and killed two of them. (Twenty security guards are still being held hostage.) They told Dr. Hawa that she could no longer be in charge of the hospital she has spent the last 15 years building, or the refugee camp that has sprung up around it.

“We came three months ago and told you that as a woman you can’t run this place,” the militant leader said. Dr. Hawa recounted this story to me last night by phone from her bedroom, where she was being kept under house arrest by five militant members of Hizbul Islam who were stationed outside her room and in the hospital. “It’s very dangerous for me now. I am still not free,” she said. “It’s strange how they think, these people. They think that women can’t do anything, have property, or be leaders.”
“I’m in my room and afraid to go anywhere,” she told me. “The refugees have come to sleep with me. But the militants are stronger than us, so we are praying to God.”

Hours earlier, the militants had told her to quit talking on the phone, but she refused. She said she had nothing left to lose. “This isn’t government,” she said. “This is my home.”
Dr. Hawa is one of Somalia’s few heroes. A divorced mother of two, she trained in Ukraine as a gynecologist during the Cold War. In 1993, she opened the one-room women’s hospital. Given Dr. Hawa’s reputation as a doctor and humanitarian, people suffering from the famine of the early ’90s flocked to her farm. She buried more than 10,000 people who died of starvation there. The latest wave of refugees has built their homes, which look like overturned bird’s nests, on the hill that serves as a mass grave.

I first walked up this hill with her in 2007, when the camp seemed full to bursting with 20,000 recent arrivals. When I visited again, in 2008, the number of displaced people had grown. Now the population has more than tripled. The numbers are indicative of the spiraling humanitarian crisis that is threatening to outdo the infamous early 1990s. When that famine ended, Dr. Hawa’s work did not. She kept adding on to her hospital.

Hawa Abdi and her operating team during a gynecological procedure. She opened her private clinic for women and children in 1983. (Seamus Murphy/VII Network) All 400 beds were full when last week’s shelling started. Eighty-two children suffering from malnutrition or cholera were waiting for the doctor in her feeding center. Seventy-two thousand other people were squatting on her crammed farm. She sold all her family gold long ago to feed them. She offers every family a small plot of farmland so they can grow their own corn and vegetables. Until two months ago, the World Food Program supplied at least nominal help to Dr. Hawa, providing corn for 500 families. Then things got so bad it couldn’t get shipments of food through. Doctors Without Borders ran a clinic on Dr. Hawa’s land, too—until last Wednesday, when Hizbul Islam had the depravity to take the popular doctor hostage.

The militants have been holding Dr. Hawa under house arrest for the past five days. In the beginning, they hung their black flag outside the clinic to show their power. In response, Dr. Hawa had the nerve to hang up a white one. “This is my protest,” she told them. “Take your flag down. Even the holy Quran says you can’t enter a private house without an invitation.” The militants told her she should not dare to speak to them in this manner. But as usual, she refused to back down.

Somalia’s baffling war has its panoply of villains—from warlords to al Qaeda-linked militants—all vying for control of the country. The fighting began when neighboring Ethiopia invaded Somalia in late 2006 with the backing of the United States. At the time, Somalia was under the sway of a loose group of religious leaders and businessmen who believed that the country’s only hope for survival lay in Islamic law. According to the CIA, al Qaeda-linked militants were also hiding out in this badland. America hoped to uproot these unsavory men and send them fleeing down Somalia’s long coast to the border of neighboring Kenya, where the militants would be easy to arrest. The plan was to dislodge a small number of bona fide terrorists and deny a larger number of their potential recruits any comfortable hiding zone in East Africa. The plan didn’t come off, however, and instead this invasion helped to create the very enemy the U.S. was seeking to destroy: a group of well-armed radical religious fighters who believed that Islam demanded they protect their land and its people.

Over the past several years, these militants, known as both al-Shabab (The Youth) and the newer group Hizbul Islam (the Islamic Party), have put themselves at al Qaeda’s disposal. Hizbul Islam is led by Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, a former military man who is on both the U.S. and the U.N. terrorist watch lists. (In 2009, al-Shabab issued the popular web video “Here I am at your service, Oh Osama.”) On their own and together, the militants have killed African Union peacekeeping troops, murdered Somali journalists and international aid workers—and attacked fellow Somalis like Dr. Hawa. Their willingness to break all such societal ties is an indication of their power and their unpopularity.

Dr. Hawa says she will rebuild, but much has been lost. At least 20 of the 82 children who were at the feeding center are now dead. There is still some water for every family, but no food, she said: “No food. Totally no food. Peace is more important than food.” I thought this was a kind of platitude, but she corrected me. Without peace—a cessation of violence—no one could go to their farms. They were stuck, like she was, waiting for the militants to leave. Dr. Hawa was already demanding reparations, which she knew Hizbul Islam wouldn’t pay. Still, she kept asking. Her hospital has been decimated. “The windows, the doors, the operating tables, the hospital beds, the sterilization equipment, they destroyed all,” she said. “Every, every, every instrument they took or they broke.”
The only thing protecting her is the sheer number of people surrounding her—the displaced people she has sheltered, many for more than a decade, are now protecting her. They are arriving by the hundreds to visit her in her room. “I’m in my room and afraid to go anywhere,” she told me. “The IDPs [the internally displaced people, shorthand for refugees who haven’t yet crossed international borders] have come to sleep with me. But the militants are stronger than us, so we are praying to God.”

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Somali population, cultural tension rising in St. Cloud, Minnesota

St. Cloud, Minn. — The Facebook group, "I hate the Somalians at Tech High," didn't live online for a long time, but word traveled fast among high school students in the St. Cloud area.

While that page no longer exists, students of Somali descent say the attitudes expressed on that Facebook page have a strong presence on two of St. Cloud's public high schools.

Sahra Alin Ahmed, a Somali student and freshman at Apollo High School, wasn't surprised by the group's views as she regularly hears them on campus.

The atmosphere at the city's high schools is so hostile to Somali students that Alin Ahmed finds herself having to stand up for newly arrived immigrant students.

"They don't say anything to the people that know English, but the ones who just came from Africa, who don't really know English, you know, who don't really understand, those are the ones they get at most," she said.

Somali students now make up about 10 percent of the student population in the St. Cloud Area School District 742 and their numbers have been steadily growing. The entire district has about 10,000 students.

Alin Ahmed said white students make disparaging remarks about how they perceive their Muslim classmates to dress, speak, and smell.

Apollo sophomore Fadumo Adan said she's been the target of those comments ever since she moved to Minnesota from Somalia two years ago.

"They always make fun of us and they say, 'Go back to your countries,' and, 'You guys stink,' and, 'This is our country, and we don't need black people,' so it's every single day," Adan said. "It's not several times, it's all the time."

Adan said some of her classmates spray perfume as Muslim students exit classrooms. Although she has complained about that to teachers and her counselor, sometimes they won't do anything, she said.

But Alin Ahmed said that in her experience, school administrators do try to address racial tensions when problems arise.

St. Cloud Area School District 742 Superintendent Steve Jordahl said school administrators do follow district discipline policies when students report any kind of inappropriate behavior. When district officials receive complaints of bullying, racial, sexual or religious harassment, he said, they take action.

"Detention can happen [and] legal authority, the police, in other words, can be called in," Jordahl said. "Kids can be suspended or dismissed from school. Sometimes expulsion things can happen. Of course, that doesn't happen very often, but it does happen."

That's what happened to 18-year-old Kyle Adams, a senior at Area Learning Center Wilson, an alternative school. Adams used to go to Technical High School, but officials expelled him when he was in the tenth grade.

"I was young and dumb and saying some stuff and then a Somalian came up at swung at me and I ducked out of the way and then I said, 'you stupid, f'ing n----- and all of this,'" Adams said. "And then I got in trouble and got kicked out and there was nothing followed up on them for swinging at me or yelling at me and that really made me kind of mad."

This wasn't Adams' first altercation with classmates of Somali descent.

Though Adams now says he shouldn't have said the things he said, he still harbors resentment. He was one of the people who joined the Facebook group, "I hate the Somalians at Tech High." He's also a member of another Facebook group called, "I am a 'Rasist' [sic].. ok,, So Deal With It."

Adams, who grew up in Kentucky, explains he called his classmate a racial epithet because his beliefs about race are deep-seated.

"I was raised in believing that this country was founded upon a white Christian nation and the belief of racial separation," he said.

Adams said his family and friends think it's normal to use racial slurs. He said his attitude toward Muslim students is also common among many of his classmates.

His friend, 18-year-old Matt Mayavski, said a few people at the school call themselves "rednecks" on campus. Others make their views known by wearing Confederate flag belt buckles or belts or wearing certain brands of clothing, said Mayavski, a lifelong St. Cloud resident who also went to Technical High School.

Adams and Mayavski say they flash the Confederate battle flag -- an offensive symbol to many blacks -- because they believe in small government. They say it has nothing to do with race.

The resentment stems from feeling like Muslim students receive preferential treatment, Mayavski said.

"Towards the end of my junior year, I was in math class and the Somalians asked to go pray before lunch," he said. "Well, I went to ask my teacher for [a prayer break] and [she] sent me down to the office and I got written up for it. And I was like, 'Well, how can the school respect their religion, but they can't respect ours?'"

Nimco Ahmed, a policy aide to a Minneapolis City Council member, said it's understandable that white students in St. Cloud have such questions.

"Why can they go every Friday and step out of class and have a Friday prayer while I have to be in class is a good question," said Ahmed, who is from Somalia. "It is a legitimate question and somebody needs to answer these questions to them."

When Ahmed went to Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis ten years ago, the Somali population was growing rapidly, and cultural misunderstandings were common.

Ahmed said school administrators have to take extra steps to educate students about other cultures. That's how her school was able to overcome cultural tensions.

"They reached out to other people outside of our school. They had people come in and educate us and sit down with us and mediate us," she said. "That's exactly what is needed. And when we learned how to do it, we reached out to other schools that had the same problems. We didn't stop."

Ahmed said such challenges are typical of any area undergoing significant demographic changes. But the issues at St. Cloud schools need to be addressed quickly before they escalate, she said.

Superintendent Jordahl said he wants people to understand that his schools are doing what they can to address these problems.

"As adults in the system, we recognize that the issues exist and our job is to raise student achievement," Jordahl said. "We recognize that if kids don't feel good, feel safe, they are not going to do as well as if they did. So we want to make sure we are addressing this all the time."

But schools can't tackle them alone, he said.

"We really, really want our parents to understand that they have a huge role in this," Jordahl said. "In fact, I always say this, parents, you are the first and most important teacher your child has."

While Jordahl said St. Cloud schools are working hard to address racial tensions, critics in the wider St. Cloud community say the district isn't doing enough. They've called on the district to adopt a more aggressive anti-bias curriculum than what the district currently has.

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500,000 displaced people live along the 20-mile Afgoye Corridor, west of Mogadishu

The plaque on the State House building in Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, is an oblique commemoration to an event that never occurred. It was built in 1952 for a visit to the then British protectorate by the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen never came. These days the half-ruined structure is known for another reason than as the former seat of gin-sipping British colonial officials.

The grounds, including parkland once laid out as a golf course, have bred domed shelters – "bool" they are called – thatched with plastic and segments of scavenged cloth. In places, walls have been tiled with panels of flattened cooking oil cans, which in their repetitions resemble Warhol prints. The bools are low, windowless huts through which the harsh light bleeds messily at the sewn seams to illuminate the kicked up dust. The occupants of this camp sit at the far end of the planet's social spectrum from the State House's first intended guest. Not a monarch and her retinue but refugees from war.

The huts are so densely packed together they block the State House from sight. It is barely visible when approaching the camp, but the monument marks the centre of a labyrinth of winding, narrow lanes where cockerels scrabble. When I reach it at last, I find the State House is not occupied itself save for a single wing of outbuildings. Its rooms are open to the sky, floors scattered with detritus. Glassless window frames swing in the wind.

But it is far from empty. Children clamber over walls of square-cut honey-coloured stone, partly demolished by fighting in the city in 1988. They sit on the floor of what once was a grand reception room to play complex games with piles of pale round pebbles, tossed and snatched from the air by competing hands. Outside, a few young men sit on a veranda painted with graffiti, listening to music. They pull jackets over their heads to hide their faces at our approach and warn against photography.

It is a clue to the identity of many living inside the State House camp: the still anxious victims of the war in the south, in Somalia proper, the country from which Somaliland – recognised by no other state – split in 1991. Victims of the world's worst humanitarian disaster. And conflict, even at a distance from the running gun battles on Mogadishu's streets, imposes its own hierarchies.

The most recent refugees, the poorest, live at the periphery, farthest from the State House itself. Which is why it is surprising to find Sarida Nour Ahmed, aged 31, a recent arrival, occupying one of the building's few habitable rooms, a few metres square. Once used to house the British governor's staff, these days it is roofed with corrugated metal which leaks in the rain. A bool would be much better, she explains.

Sarida fled from Somalia in March, abandoning three of her 10 children in the chaos of flight. "The situation was unbearable. Mortars were landing during the day. At night there was torture, rape and beatings. At first we thought it was because of the Ethiopian invasion. But things got worse. They came to our houses. Robbed and raped." I ask her who? The Shabaab, she says. The Shabaab. The word means literally "the youth". And it is the story of the victims of the Shabaab's continuing war that I have come to the camps of Somaliland to find.

Once comprising the northernmost part of Somalia's failed state, for the past two decades Somaliland has proclaimed itself an independent republic. Stable, if not prosperous, it has become a refuge for Somalis from the south, most making their way up north from Mogadishu. For those from Somalia's southernmost towns it is a dangerous journey that can take several months, with long stretches on foot.

The Shabaab was once one of the Islamist militias attached to the Islamic Courts Union, which, in 2006, brought a semblance of peace to a country that had been wracked by years of internecine violence and warlordism. The Courts were routed after a few months by a western-supported Ethiopian invasion. Now the Ethiopians have gone, too, and a fundamentalist hardcore of the Shabaab is resurgent, Somalia's most bitter tormentor – Africa's own Taliban.

Its masked men, accused by America of being proxies for al-Qaeda, enforce their own notions of justice, seizing suspected collaborators with the feeble new government from their houses and murdering those it regards as opponents, including dozens of local journalists and aid workers. Its feared and secret sharia courts have sentenced women to be buried and stoned to death for adultery or publicly beaten for infringing strict Islamic dress codes. Somalis say that, beyond the facade of harsh and rigid piety, the group robs and kills and sexually assaults with impunity.

Arriving at the State House camp, accompanied by Oxfam, which is helping to support its residents, I ask to talk to the most recent arrivals from Mogadishu and the south. A group of women lead me through a ruined stone doorframe and across a little yard. It is here, in a dark, bare room smelling of smoke from her cooking fire, that I first meet Sarida. In Mogadishu, she tells me, she and her husband had a "proper house" with five rooms. They owned a little shop and sold cold juices and vegetables in the market. These days she washes clothes and skivvies, when she can, to feed her children. She cannot remember the last time they ate meat.

She describes the violence in fragmented snatches that reflect the chaos in a city where all sides – government, African Union peacekeepers, Ethiopians and the Shabaab – fight their pitched battles over civilian neighbourhoods, not caring who is killed.

"First the Shabaab fought with the Ethiopians. When the Ethiopians left," recalls Sarida, "we thought then that Somalis would come together. But it didn't happen." What happened instead, she explains, is that the Shabaab moved to impose its values on Somalis in the large areas it controls, bringing more violence as it did. "Women get 90 lashes even for wearing 'light' clothes," says Sarida. "And for not wearing the veil. But the veil costs money. I didn't have money for a veil..." It is a complaint I hear from many women.

Sarida describes the worst day of her life. She does not cry. Not quite. It was a day that began with mortars falling on her neighbour Amina's house and ended with the loss of three of her children. "To see her in pieces…" she loses her train of thought for a moment. "Mogadishu is a big city. You used to be able to run to another neighbourhood [to escape the fighting], but the fighting was all over the city. I grabbed the children that were close to me and fled with the clothes I was wearing." Her eldest children, aged 12, 11 and 10 – nowhere in sight in the family's panicked impulse to flee – were left behind. So too was Sarida's husband, Abdi Khader. I ask the children's names. She says quietly: "Mohammed, Abdi and Hussein. I cheat myself thinking my husband might have got to the children and rescued them."

But Abdi Khader does not know where Sarida ran to. Or where she is living now. Since that day, she hasn't heard from him. "If I could turn back the clock I would have my husband and my children here with me. But I can't go back."

Meanwhile what is happening in Somalia?

Fatma Adow reaches for a remote control to amplify the volume of her music player as she engages a customer in a seemingly funny joke. They talk loudly amid the thundering music from the woofers, and finally the customer parts with a music cassette.

"Try this in Somalia, and that will be the end of you," she said. "You'll be lashed, stoned to death, or forever get shunned,” Fatma said.

Fatma is one of the 25 women, who on November 2008 faced the wrath of militiamen from the Islamic Courts Union for taking part in a folklore dance galore in Shabelle zone, Mogadishu, north of Somalia.

"Charges were opened against us, and we were accused of taking part in an 'un-Islamic event,'" she told IslamOnline.net (IOL). She managed to flee the country and is now operating a music shop in Eastleigh, a Nairobi suburb inhabited by Somalis.

Such punishment, according to Fatma, has been meting out to a number of other Somalia woman musicians.

"Even our customers and spectators have also been punished for 'wasting' their time and corrupting morals," she added.

Lists of edicts have been circulated to a number of media houses, warning them to trash all secular songs from their broadcasts.

Late last year, Radio Warsame, a local private, commercial FM radio station in Baidoa region in southwestern Somalia, was ordered closed indefinitely by Al-Shabab movement, an Al-Qaeda proxy in Somalia.

"This is unacceptable. We have refused to air their tenets and are now zooming in to media houses from all angles. They have lashed women and imposed 'fatwa' on music. This is barbaric," Abdullah Adan, National Union of Somali Journalists told IOL.

Militants who control swathes of the Somalia have banned music in the country. Somalia musical bands are unfastened, and their careers discarded, and most of illustrious musicians and artists are now hopeless.

Mogadishu: world's most hostile city

From The Independent:

Cooking pots and pans stained with blood were still scattered around the courtyard of the Martini Hospital. A mortar bomb had landed in the garden of this war veterans' retirement home in the Somali capital the day before, killing nine people and injuring 23. In the kitchen, weeping relatives and angry civilians had gathered to mourn the victims. Corpses covered with sheets were being prepared for burial and the air was heavy with incense burned to cover the stench of death. Sunlight filtered in through cracks in the roof, lending the scene a hellish air. "These two were 13 and 14," said a Red Crescent volunteer, pointing to the bodies of two victims. "Nobody knows who did it."

Scenes like this are a daily reality in Mogadishu, a city ravaged by almost 20 years of civil war and abandoned by half its population. Here, civilians bear the brunt of a war that has caused thousands of deaths and displaced 1.5 million people in the past three years alone, according to the United Nations and local human rights groups.

Once full of fine neo-classical Italian architecture dating from its years as the capital of Italian Somaliland, the city centre of Mogadishu is now a mass of rubble and destroyed buildings. Mohammed Farah Siad is a local businessman whose house stands on the front line between the warring factions of the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the Islamist rebels of Al-Shabaab. "They're fighting as usual," he says, his voice barely audible above the bursts of machine-gun fire and the roar of rocket-propelled grenades flying back and forth outside his compound. This morning, two militias nominally allied with the TFG are clashing for control of the port, and Mr Siad keeps the gate of his house open to give shelter to civilians caught in the crossfire. "It's the only way to survive here, we have to help each other," he explains. "Always call your friends before venturing out and keep your cell phone with you to receive updates on clashes. It can save your life."

Packed with people in the morning, the streets of Mogadishu suddenly empty in the early afternoon. As darkness falls, clashes increase dramatically. Staying out after 3pm means being at the mercy of the ruthless militiamen who roam the city on "technicals", the machine-gun-equipped pick-ups that have become a grim trademark of the Somali war. The cruelty and greed of the militiamen are notorious, their loyalty always in doubt because of the continuously shifting alliances inside Somali society. Some have mutated into freelance armed groups, kidnapping the few foreigners who dare to venture inside Mogadishu and selling them to the highest bidder. But TFG, cash-strapped and beleaguered, is forced to depend on these unreliable troops to help it fight Al-Shabaab and hang on to the few areas of Mogadishu it still controls.

In this city, which has been labelled the most dangerous on earth, anarchy is the only rule. Carrying a rifle is one of the few ways to earn both a living and the fear of others, if not their respect. "Militiamen break into your house, take all your money and valuables and rape your women. It happens so often. And you can't even complain, because then they will have the pleasure of killing you," laments Abukar Mohallin Mouse, a 60-year-old porter working at Mr Siad's warehouse. "Everything we do, we are scared: you go to the market and get hit by a mortar shell, you speak with foreigners and someone will kill you because he thinks you are a spy. This is not life."

Somalia has not had a functioning government in control of its territory since 1991, and today the divisions run deep. Even if the TFG claims to have the full support of the Somali population, recent events tell a different story. Ideologically linked to al-Qa'ida, Al-Shabaab is growing bolder and stronger by the day, filling its ranks with young men lured by promises of food, money and a holy war to fight for.

"We are receiving more and more reports of foreign fighters coming to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab's ranks," says Sheikh Omar Ali Rooble, a regional leader of the Sufi militia of Ahlu Sunnah wal Jamee'a, a moderate Islamic group allied to the TFG. "They don't speak our language and are not fighting for the sake of this country. They're killing our people and digging our graves, that's why we were forced to take up arms. They claim to defend Islam, but Somalia is 100 per cent Muslim already."

One collateral effect of the prevailing anarchy is lawlessness at sea: with no coastguard or navy to patrol the harbours and monitor comings and goings, Somalia has become the world capital of piracy, a phenomenon which became a headline-grabbing menace in 2009. Today the waters around Mogadishu are patrolled by dozens of warships from many nations, but they have failed to halt the problem, as evidenced by the recent seizure of the Chandlers, a British couple, from their yacht, and this week's hijacking of a huge oil tanker with oil valued at $20m on board.

But Al-Shabaab is the most pressing threat. The hopelessly ineffective rump government is bitter about what it regards as its abandonment by the outside world. Confined to the hills surrounding Villa Somalia, the presidential palace, Deputy Prime Minister Abdulrahman Adan Ibrahim blames his regime's impotence on its abandonment by the outside world.

"If we had received even 30 per cent of the €250m pledged to us by the European Union, Al-Shabaab wouldn't be in Somalia today," he says with a clear hint of bitterness. "We are fighting a group openly linked to al-Qa'ida, which has brought an ideology that has nothing to do with Somali culture."

From outside his office, perched on Mogadishu's highest hills, the view is deceitful: with its whitewashed houses, banana trees and bright blue sea, the city looks like an earthly paradise. But on the road, the scars of this endless civil war are everywhere.

"There was a suicide attack here a few weeks ago," says B, a civilian who didn't wish to be named for his own safety, passing concrete barriers at the entrance to an outdoor market. "More than 10 people died." Crowded areas are becoming the favourite targets of the insurgents, whose Iraqi-style martyrdom tactics were unknown in Somalia until recently.

In September Al-Shabaab staged a suicide attack against the main base of Amisom, the African Union-sponsored peacekeeping mission, in an area that had previously been believed to be beyond the rebels' reach. The attack killed 21 people, including 17 peacekeepers. Originally intended to be 8,000-strong, the mission today has only 5,000 Ugandan and Burundian troops, who are mainly focused on controlling sensitive areas of the city and delivering humanitarian aid. In its hospital, which consists of three military-style tents hidden among the sand dunes of Mogadishu airport, hundreds of patients are treated every day. Under the baking sun, civilians wait patiently for the only doctor available.

"Every night I pray the city remains calm because we are breaking the rules by treating civilians," he says, treating a toddler lying on a stretcher with a gunshot wound in his right leg. "But we can't chase them away, they don't have anywhere else to go." Beds are few and medication is constantly running out as the number of patients multiplies, but the hospital is one of the few facilities functioning in Mogadishu.

And in the view of spokesman Major Barigye Ba-Hoku, it's more than that: it is also a tool to "win the heart and soul of the Somali people". The mission's mandate was recently bolstered to allow it to engage the insurgents, but for him ending this carnage is not about fighting.

"You can send as many reinforcements and weapons as you want, you won't solve the problem," Major Ba-Hoku maintains. "This war has been going on for 18 years: the solution has to come from within. Somali people have to accept peace. Any process driven from outside would be fruitless."

The humanitarian crisis is steadily worsening on a daily basis, and even Somalis are losing faith in their ability to end the conflict. Sitting in the courtyard, Abukar Mohallin Mouse, the porter, stares in despair when asked about the future.

"When there was peace, this city was one of the most beautiful in the world," he recalls. "I really fear I will die before this war is over."

A few yards away, his employer Mr Siad laughs bitterly. "We are destroying our future with our own hands," he says. "Today, a teenager born here has never experienced peace in his whole life. Only a massive foreign intervention can save us. It's sad to say, but we are not able to look after ourselves."

Additional reporting by Ugo Borga and Giampaolo Musumeci

When women are sinners in the eyes of extremists

By Alaa Al-Aswany in The Independent:

The Shabaab movement in Somalia controls large parts of the south and centre of the country, and because officials in this movement embrace the Wahabi ideology they have imposed their views on Somalis by force and have issued strict decrees banning films, plays, dancing at weddings, football matches and all forms of music, even the ring tones on mobile phones.

Some days ago these extremists carried out a strange operation: they arrested a Somali woman and whipped her in public because she was wearing a bra. They announced clearly that wearing these bras was unIslamic because it is a form of fraud and deception.

We may well ask what wearing bras has to do with religion, why they would consider them to be a form of fraud and deception, and how they managed to arrest the woman wearing the bra when all Somali women go around with their bodies completely covered. Did they appoint a special female officer to inspect the breasts of women passing by in the street? One Somali woman called Halima told the Reuters news agency: "Al Shabaab forced us to wear their type of veil and now they order us to shake our breasts... They first banned the former veil and introduced a hard fabric which stands stiffly on women's chests. They are now saying that breasts should be firm naturally, or just flat."

In fact this excessive interest in covering up women's bodies is not confined to the extremists in Somalia. In Sudan the police examine women's clothing with extreme vigilance and arrest any woman who is wearing trousers. They force her to make a public apology for what she has done and then they whip her in public as an example to other women.

Some weeks ago the Sudanese journalist Lubna al-Husseini insisted on wearing trousers and refused to make the public apology. When she refused to submit to flogging she was referred to a real trial and the farce reached its climax when the judge summoned three witnesses and asked them if they had been able to detect the shape of the accused's underwear when she was wearing the trousers. When one of the witnesses hesitated in answering, the judge asked him directly: "Did you see Lubna's stomach when she was wearing the trousers?" The witness gravely replied: "To some extent."

Lubna said she was wearing a modest pair of trousers and that the scandalous pair she was accused of wearing would not suit her because she is plump and would need to lose 20 kilos in order to put them on. But the judge convicted her anyway and fined her £500 or a month in prison.

In Egypt too, extremists continue to take an excessive interest in women's bodies and in trying to cover them up entirely. They not only advocate that women wear the niqab but also that they wear gloves on their hands, which they believe will ensure that no passions are aroused when men and women shake hands. We really do face a phenomenon which deserves consideration: why are extremists so obsessed with women's bodies? Some ideas might help us answer this question:

Firstly, the extremist view of women is that they are only bodies and instruments for either legitimate pleasure or temptation, as well as factories for producing children. This view strips women of their human nature. Accusing the Somali woman of fraud and deception because she was wearing a bra is the same charge of commercial fraud which the law holds against a merchant who conceals the defects of his goods and make false claims about their qualities in order to sell them at a higher price.

The idea here is that a woman who accentuates her breasts by using a bra gives a false impression of the goods (her body), which is seen as fraud and deception of the buyer (the man) who might buy (marry) her for her ample breasts and later discover that they were ample because of the bra and not by nature. It would be fair to remember that treating women's bodies as commodities is not something found only in extremist ideologies but often happens in Western societies too.

The use of women's naked bodies to market commercial products in the West is merely another application of the idea that women are commodities. Anyone who visits the redlight district in Amsterdam can see for himself how wretched prostitutes, completely naked, are lined up behind glass windows so that passers-by can inspect their charms before agreeing on the price. Isn't that a modern-day slave market, where women's bodies are on sale to anyone willing to pay?

Secondly, the extremists believe women to be the source of temptation and the prime cause of sin. This view, which is prevalent in all primitive societies, is unfair and inhuman, because men and women commit sin together and the responsibility is shared and equal. If a beautiful woman arouses and tempts men, then a handsome man also arouses and tempts women. But the extremist ideology is naturally biased in favour of the man and hostile to the woman, and considers that she alone is primarily responsible for all sins.

Thirdly, being strict about covering up women's bodies is an easy and effortless form of religious struggle. In Egypt we see dozens of Wahabi sheikhs who enthusiastically advocate covering up women's bodies but do not utter a single word against despotism, corruption, fraudulence or torture because they know very well that serious opposition to the despotic regime (which should really be their first duty) would inevitably lead to their arrest, torture and the destruction of their lives. Their strictness on things related to women's bodies enables them to operate as evangelists without any real costs.

Throughout human history, strictness towards women has usually been a way to conceal political abuses and real crimes. Somalia is a wretched country in the grip of famine and chaos but officials there are distracted from that by inspecting bras. The Sudanese regime is implicated in crimes of murder, torture and raping thousands of innocents in Darfur but that does not stop the regime from putting on trial a woman who insisted on wearing trousers. It is women rather than men who always pay the price for despotism, corruption and religious hypocrisy.

Fourthly, the extremist ideology assumes that humans are a group of wild beasts that are completely incapable of controlling their instincts, that it is enough for a man to see a bare piece of female flesh for him to pounce on her and have intercourse. This assumption is incorrect, because humans, unlike animals, always have the power to control their instincts by will power and ethics.

An ordinary man, if he is sane, cannot have his instincts aroused by his mother, sister, daughter or even the wife of a friend, because his sense of honour and morality transcends his desires and neutralises their effect. So virtue will never come about though bans, repression and pursuing women in the street, but rather through giving children a good upbringing, propagating morality and refining character.

Societies which impose segregation between men and women (as in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia), according to official statistics, do not have lower rates of sexual crimes than other societies. The rates there may even be higher. We favour and advocate modesty for women but firstly we advocate a humane view of women, a view that respects their abilities, their wishes and their thinking.

What is really saddening is that the Wahabi extremism which is spreading throughout the world with oil money and which gives Muslims a bad image is as far as can be from the real teachings of Islam. Anyone who reads the history of Islam fairly has to be impressed by the high status it accords to women, because from the time of the Prophet Muhammad until the fall of Andalusia, Muslim women mixed with men, were educated, worked and traded, fought and had financial responsibilities separately from their fathers or husbands. They had the right to choose the husband they loved and the right to divorce if they wanted. Western civilisation gave women these rights many centuries after Islam.

Finally, let me say that religious extremism is the other face of political despotism. We cannot get rid of the extremism before we end the despotism.

Democracy is the solution.

Weired News: Somali man aged 112 marries girl of 17

A MAN claiming to be 112 married a 17-year-old at a ceremony in central Somalia, his sixth wedding in total but his first in three quarters of a century, he said Thursday.

"My wife is ten times younger than me but we love each other so much and I believe that I can give her the kind of love that not any young man can offer," Ahmed Mohamed Dhore told AFP.

"Married life is about love and passion rather than age and beauty," said the centenarian, whose wedding ceremony in the town of Guriel was attended by hundreds on Wednesday.

"The first time I got married was so long ago I cannot remember and the last time must have been about 75 years ago, I was still a young man," he said.

Dhore - who already has 13 children by five wives - said he would like to have more with his new wife, Safia Abdulleh.

"Today God helped me realise my dream," he said, after the wedding in the region of Galguduud.

The bride's family said she was "happy with her new husband", according to the BBC.

Dhore said he and his bride - who is young enough to be his great-great-grand-daughter - were from the same village in Somalia and that he had waited for her to grow up to propose.

"I didn't force her, but used my experience to convince her of my love; and then we agreed to marry," the groom said.

Dhore would have already been an adult when the nationalist leader "Mad Mullah," Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who fought the British empire and created the Dervish state died in 1920.

He said the secret to a longevity spanning three different centuries was "healthy food when he was young".

"I'm 112 and can live the life of a youngster... The idea to get married again came from my children and grand-children," he said, explaining that his only other surviving wife was 90 and ailing.

According to statistics by international aid and development agencies, the average life expectancy of a Somali male is 47.