Former child soldier in Somalia says combat nightmares continue

Mohamed Gabobe, MogadishuSunday June 7, 2026

Fighters from the Union of Islamic Courts took control of Mogadishu in June 2006

For Yusuf Ali, the sounds of Mogadishu’s past have never really gone away. The 34-year-old shopkeeper still lives with the memories of being drawn into Somalia’s insurgency as a child soldier, fighting in the streets of the capital while the city around him descended into ruin.

As Mogadishu gradually rebuilds, the psychological wounds left by years of war remain largely untreated. Few services are available for people still carrying the trauma of the conflict.

Warning: This article contains details some readers may find upsetting.

When Ali was 14, a coalition of Sharia courts seized power in Somalia, bringing a measure of order to a nation torn apart since President Siad Barre’s government collapsed in 1991 and clan warfare took hold.

But the Union of Islamic Courts, or UIC, also represented the first significant breakthrough for political Islam in Africa after al-Qaeda’s 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States.

In Washington, the UIC was viewed with suspicion and hostility, with officials accusing it of links to al-Qaeda. Its armed youth wing was known as al-Shabab, or “The Lads”.

Six months after the courts took power, in December 2006, thousands of Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia with US drone support in an effort to remove them.

The invasion was fiercely opposed across Somalia. Al-Shabab and allied splinter factions, including a coalition known as the Muqawama, meaning “Resistance”, united against the Ethiopian presence.

Ali was living in Huriwaa, a poor district in northern Mogadishu, at the time.

He had already lost his father at the age of one. His father was killed while taking part in what became known as the “Battle of Mogadishu”, when Somali fighters famously clashed with US troops after two American Black Hawk helicopters were shot down.

Growing up without his father was difficult, but it was the guerrilla war unleashed by the Ethiopian intervention that marked him most deeply.

“At night, I’d often hear a buzzing sound. I was in secondary school and didn’t realise it then, but these were planes surveilling our neighbourhood,” Ali tells the BBC.

By spring 2007, the fighting had escalated, with heavy shelling and bombardment hitting densely populated civilian areas suspected of sheltering insurgents.

“On one of the nights, a large barrage of shells hit our area and some of them struck our neighbour’s house. Our house shook and I felt like the soil under my feet had moved – then I started hearing screams,” Ali recalls.

Neighbors rushed to dig through the rubble, and Ali saw a body for the first time.

“Someone aimed a torch and I saw blood stains and a body lying nearby. A young girl that looked around my age, but she wasn’t moving. I’ve seen death, but nothing prepared me for that night.”

The family fled to Elasha Biyaha, north-west of Mogadishu, which had become a haven for hundreds of thousands displaced by the fighting.

But many young people, including boys his age, were determined to go back and fight those they called “Gaalo” – a Somali term meaning infidels, used to refer to non-Muslims.

“From the sermons at the mosque that called on people to defend their country from the Gaalo, everyone was fired up,” he says.

That fervour led him to Muqawama, which included former army commanders.

“They trained us in small arms fire… We practised hit-and-run attacks,” he says.

By then 16, Ali was back in Mogadishu among other teenage fighters, taking part in brutal urban combat. They were given weapons but no pay, and shared meals with the rest of the force.

Following the collapse of Somalia’s government in 1991 it was easy to buy a weapon in Mogadishu

Some of the people he was trained to kill were also young, including Somali soldiers aligned with the transitional government and fighting alongside Ethiopian forces.

“Street by street, from windows and doorways, we were firing on Ethiopian soldiers and the Somali soldiers with them,” he says.

“At times I’d find myself shooting… and as we advanced and noticed a dead [Somali] soldier was around my age, I paused but then would keep moving because the fighting was so intense. It was either killed or be killed – and this was a cause we were willing to die for.”

He says Somalis fighting alongside the Ethiopians were seen as traitors who had “betrayed their country”. The transitional government they backed was recognised by the United Nations, the US and other Western countries as Somalia’s legitimate authority.

Between 2007 and 2009, Mogadishu was largely reduced to rubble. Ethiopia, with US backing, came under intensifying international scrutiny as allegations of war crimes by all sides mounted.

Ethiopian troops eventually withdrew, leaving Islamist militants fractured and fighting one another. A more moderate faction went on to join the interim government against hardliners.

Ali began to question whether the war had been worth the cost. “Some of the men I fought alongside were now fighting their former comrades.

“My mother and siblings wanted better for me. And so did my uncle – and he urged my family to let me go to South Africa and live with him to start afresh.”

In 2009, Ali was smuggled by road to Johannesburg, where he spent five years working in his uncle’s shop.

But xenophobic attacks in South Africa, which often targeted foreign-owned businesses, pushed him back to Mogadishu.

He returned to a city that was rebuilding: the airport was functioning, roads had been paved, restaurants had opened along some streets and lighting now kept once-avoided neighborhoods bright after dark.

Yet the politics remained volatile. Al-Shabab had evolved into a hardline militant force controlling large areas outside Mogadishu, where it enforced strict rules including dress codes and bans on music.

The group maintained an extensive network of spies inside the capital and carried out frequent targeted killings of people linked to the emerging government, which was supported by the international community and an African Union force.

“No-one trusted each other. No-one dared to speak about politics publicly. Your own neighbours could be spying on you and you wouldn’t even know it.”

He says he still feels responsible for part of what his community endured. “We fought to defend our country, people and religion but only made things worse on them all these years later.”

Even now, married and the father of a four-year-old son, Ali remains haunted by what he saw and did.

“I still recognise some of the houses I had shot my gun from and wonder if the current family living there knows about the blood stains that once covered their home.”

He says he has never received counselling or any other support to process his experiences, and neither have other former child soldiers he knows who later became drug addicts.

“In Somalia, we don’t talk about our problems,” he says.

“I try to find peace through prayer. We pray and keep things to ourselves. This is the culture here and is the reason why many people are hurting but most don’t realise it.”

Ilyas Adam, a human rights legal consultant with the Coalition of Somali Human Rights Defenders, says this kind of suffering is widespread among young Somalis.

“The normalisation of violence in some areas means that trauma often goes unrecognised and untreated, making it a silent but pervasive crisis,” he tells the BBC.

“When trauma is normalised, oftentimes individuals do not recognise their need for help. Complicating matters are the cultural barriers, where mental health is not openly discussed.”

He says post-traumatic stress disorder can be every bit as damaging as the fighting itself.

“The long-term effects include chronic mental health conditions, social exclusion and stigma or increased risk of re-recruitment or involvement in violence,” Adam says.

A 2021 World Health Organization report said mental health services in Somalia were almost non-existent, with no community-based care. Two years later, a WHO official said there were only 82 mental health professionals in the entire country.

Armed groups continue to recruit children in Somalia, with more than 2,800 cases recorded by the UN between 2021 and 2024.

Most of those children, some as young as eight, were recruited by al-Shabab, still regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s most successful affiliates. The UN report also documented 101 cases involving government forces.

Mursal Khalif, an MP and head of the Ministry of Defence’s Child Protection Unit, says efforts to stop the recruitment of children often meet resistance – “some even viewed it as a Western agenda”.

Still, he says progress is being made slowly, pointing to vocational schools for former child soldiers.

In Huriwaa, where Ali now lives again with his family, state services remain absent. The district is still feared because it was once an al-Shabab stronghold.

Government officials and international workers rarely enter the area, and when they do, they travel under tight security.

As dusk falls and the call to prayer drifts through the neighborhood, Ali walks to his local mosque – the same site where Ethiopian forces carried out a deadly raid in 2008 and abducted 41 children suspected of being insurgent trainees.

After an outcry, all of the children were released. But for Ali, the mosque remains a stark reminder of past abuses, the suffering still endured by Somalis and what he sees as the country’s “never-ending cycle of violence”.

The government is still fighting al-Shabab, while this week government forces and opposition fighters exchanged gunfire in Mogadishu over delayed elections.

“The fighting is still ongoing, people are suffering and two decades later, more countries than ever before have troops deployed in Somalia.”