“Al Shabaab controlled our lives in the village,” says Ali. “Young boys were recruited forcibly, so my parents had to save me from that."
According to UNICEF, the Al Shabaab militant group that emerged in 2007 is the largest recruiter of children worldwide of any militant group. Children who grow up in Al Shabaab-controlled areas are at constant risk of being forcibly recruited to fight. The United Nations estimates that over 8,000 children were reportedly recruited by Al Shabaab and other armed groups in Somalia between 2010 and 2018 with numbers peaking between 2017 and 2018.
Ali left his village in 2016. Al Shabaab reportedly captured the main town close to where Ali came from and the surrounding areas in 2017.
Within a week of the announcement, Ali’s parents and older sibling immediately decided to send him away to Mogadishu, a journey that took place in the middle of the night.
"Women are forced into marriages, and boys who refuse to undergo the training are put in jail. I can’t tell how I felt when I left my mother and father who gave birth to me and raised me, saved me, managed to get me on the road.” Ali said.
Two weeks after his arrival in Mogadishu, his father was abducted by unknown armed men. Worried that the abduction could be linked to his departure from the village, Ali ran off to Kenya, afraid that the militant group would come after him.
This marked the beginning of an arduous journey, relying on smugglers, through Kenya to South Sudan, Sudan, and eventually to Libya where he first learned of his father's death.
“As soon as I reached Libya, my first phone call was to my parents. They told me about his death.” Says Ali. “He had been killed and thrown out in the street.”
Despite the condition he was in, the news of his father’s death affected him deeply.
“How can one feel when he loses his father? The one who raised you, helped you until you grew older and became a young man, you can’t tell how it feels” he says. “I was being beaten by the traffickers. But the day I was informed about his death, I changed so much that I forgot about the beating and my injuries.”
In Libya, he was held by three traffickers at different times in the notorious north-western town of Bani Walid. Since he could not pay the ransom demanded by the traffickers, he was subjected to torture and sometimes forced to work in construction sites with no pay. He witnessed the death of people around him who succumbed to suffering, hunger, and illness.
One day, the traffickers beat him until he passed out, and dumped his body, assuming he was dead.
"I truly believed I was going to die,” Ali says.
One day, the Libyan forces raided the traffickers' den, setting everybody who had been held free. The authorities took them to the UNHCR office, where he was screened and eventually offered evacuation.
Ali was eventually evacuated to Niger through UNHCR’s Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM) to evacuate vulnerable refugees and asylum seeker from Libya.
“I can’t describe the feeling the day I came to Niger. It was unbelievable to me. I never thought I would leave Libya,” he says.
Since the Establishment of the ETM in 2017, UNHCR has evacuated over 4,000 of the most vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers - like Ali - to Niger and Rwanda from Libya, where long-term solutions are being sought for them.
As of November 2021, UNHCR had registered approximately 41,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Libya. An unknown number of persons of concern are held by traffickers and in unofficial detention centers. UNHCR advises people not to travel to Libya, which is not a country of asylum.
Even though Ali is on the road to recovery, he suffers psychologically from his experience in Libya. Sometimes he wakes up panic-stricken, thinking he is still in there.
“I truly I feel like I’ve been through hell,” he says. “Some nights, if I remember while sleeping, I panic and get scared.”
Today Ali is married and lives in a commune of Hamdlladaye outside of Niamey. Here, he receives food, medical care and psychosocial support as UNHCR seeks a long-term solution for him.
ENDS
