How Al-Shabaab captures hearts of Somali youths

The reluctant Al-Shabaab recruit reveals how East Africa’s most infamous terror group recruits youths and turns them into diehard combatants versed in making bombs

On a breezy night in June 2007, in the outskirts of Baidoa, central Somalia, a lanky Somali teenager called Osman Ahmed was travelling alongside 50 other youngsters when gunfire erupted, targeting them.

The young lads, recruits of the Al-Shabaab, had camped around a fire for the night. They were headed to a training camp. In the face of gunfire, their fate, it seemed, was sealed.

Mukhtar Robow, popularly known as Abu Mansuur, who would later be appointed the spokesman of Al-Shabaab, had led the group from Baidoa.

Ahmed was Mansuur’s guard that night. The rest of the recruits were from the coastal town of Merca.

As the first bullets whizzed past their ears, panic set in. The unarmed greenhorns had no clue where they were in Somalia.

As a barrage of shots blasted through the thick vegetation, the youngsters ran for dear lives into the darkness.

“I dropped my gun and ran away,” Ahmed, who grew up in bullet-scarred Mogadishu, recollected a few weeks ago in an interview.

It turned out that the group shooting at the young recruits comprised Abu Mansuur’s allies, who had mistaken them for robbers who had fought each other in the same location a night earlier.

By the time the associates identified each other and stopped firing, three of the youngsters were dead, six were severely injured, and 25 were lost for good in the wild.

“It is all God’s destiny,” Ahmed remembers Abu Mansuur saying. “We will treat whoever is injured and transfer them to Mogadishu.”

Even before their first training session, the young men got a taste of what it meant to be ambushed and killed.

Away from home, hungry and distraught, Ahmed said that looking into the faces of the dead boys angered and saddened him. “Those kids didn’t even know how to carry a gun, let alone shoot.”

The shootout marked the beginning of a three-month training that saw Ahmed rise from a mere Mogadishu teenager to a hardened combatant.

Ahmed was born in the north-western city of Borama, in an IDP camp in the 1990’s.

His story serves as a key insight into how Al-Shabaab, with a blend of scare tactics and convincing incentives, has caught Somalia’s young minds.

Ahmed was barely 12 years old when he first joined Al-Shabaab. He was a schoolboy in Mogadishu, and when the three-month long holidays approached in 2007, he was nudged by friends to join the insurgents.

“When you join, they give you a mobile phone and every month you are given $30,” he said. “This is what pushes a lot of young people to join.”

Ahmed says he enlisted with the group at a local dugsi – religious school. After two weeks of fitness training in Mogadishu, Ahmed, alongside 60 other children, were put on a lorry and driven to Baidoa, 250 kilometres from Mogadishu.