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A boy belonging to Al-Shabaab shows the wound he
suffered battling government forces in Mogadishu |
(CNN) -- In the dying days of the Battle of Mogadishu two years ago, on the beachside base used by Ugandan African Union troops in their successful campaign to drive Al-Shabaab from the capital, I came across three new prisoners. Handcuffed, dirty and dejected, the eldest of them was 17, the youngest 15.
They were volunteers, they said, who had put their hands up when an Al-Shabaab recruiter came to their school. This had happened a fortnight before; they had surrendered when they became separated from their unit and ran out of bullets. Why, I asked, had they put their hands up in the first place? The boys all looked at each other. "We were given a piece of fruit every day," one of them said.
I later interviewed several Al-Shabaab deserters in a government camp set aside for the purpose, prepared for anti-Western hostility from a gang of hardened jihadist militants. Instead I found a crowd of teenagers, spirited, unruly, and for the most part instantly likeable. It was disorienting, but in their Lakers T-shirts and Nile tracksuits, they resembled schoolboys anywhere in the world. Their average age was 15; one of them, Liban, was 9.
Like so many young Somalis in this shattered country, Liban was an orphan; the militants, for whom he had already fought for two years, were his surrogate family.
"I'm not scared!" he trilled. "I'm ready to fight again -- for the government!" These boy soldiers, I found, had little interest in Islamist ideology. Most of them had decided to join Al-Shabaab -- particularly in 2011, a famine year -- simply to survive. (
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