updated 8:04 AM EDT, Thu September 26, 2013
A boy belonging to Al-Shabaab shows the wound he suffered battling government forces in Mogadishu in a 2009 photo.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- James Fergusson: Somali teens lured into Al-Shabaab by promise of food, security
- Many are orphans, he says, with no real Islamic ideology, who want to survive
- Recruiters tell of virgins in heaven, he says; Americans lured by tales of battle
- He says until Somalia gives teens a chance at a decent life, they will turn to Al-Shabaab
Editor's note: James Fergusson
is a freelance journalist and foreign correspondent who has written for
many publications including The Times in London and The Economist, and
is a regular commentator on Islamism and security matters on BBC
television and radio. His latest book, "The World's Most Dangerous
Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia," was published by Da Capo
Press.
(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.
James Fergusson
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.
They wanted what all
young people want everywhere: security, food and water, and (if a little
older than Liban) at least the prospect of an education, a job, a
family, a home -- the chance of a half-decent life. And until such time
as the Mogadishu government, and by extension the Western governments
who support it, finds ways to start meeting those basic needs,
Al-Shabaab will likely continue to find support.
Children have always
been useful to Al-Shabaab, an organization whose name, after all, means
"the youth" or "the lads" in Arabic. Children are capable of the most
terrifying, feral violence when armed, as well as insane courage in the
battlefield. Liban's moral compass was not so much awry as completely
absent: No one had ever shown him one. He made life in Al-Shabaab sound
like "Lord of the Flies" with automatic weapons.
How terror group recruits in the U.S.
How Al-Shabaab recruits in the U.S.
A good dollop of jihadi
claptrap helps put backbone into some of them. The impressionability of
some young Somali recruits is as breathtaking as the cynicism and
hypocrisy of their mentors. Martyrs for Islam, famously, are rewarded
with the attentions of 72 virgins in the afterlife. Adult trainers are
said on one occasion to have shown their pupils Bollywood DVDs and told
their young charges that they were watching real footage shot by
militants who had blown themselves up, and then beamed it down from
Paradise.
Recruits from abroad are
generally not so naive. Americans have long feared that Al-Shabaab's
poison-merchants are also at work in U.S. Muslim communities, notably in
Minnesota's Twin Cities, home to the largest concentration of Somalis
in exile in the United States.
Since 2007, at least 20
young Somali-American men are known to have vanished from their homes
and re-appeared in their homeland as volunteers for the Islamist cause.
At least three of them have died as suicide bombers; and two or three of
them might have been among those who attacked the Nairobi Westgate mall
in Kenya.
Ideologues do exist in
America. The Yemeni-American Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a U.S. drone
missile in Yemen in 2011, is perhaps the most prominent example.
Awlaki was necessarily a
sophisticated orator: Westernized Somalis are unlikely to be seduced by
the promise of a piece of fruit. Of far greater influence, however, are
online videos of fiery speeches and stirring footage of, for instance,
Al-Shabaab's latest and carefully edited successes on the battlefield.
The FBI says that the Al-Shabaab recruitment process in Minneapolis has
no evil "mastermind" as such, but is, as FBI Supervisory Special Agent
E.K. Wilson told me in Minneapolis, "a very lateral, peer-to-peer
organization," which is another way of saying the recruits tend to talk
each other into it.
Those who make it to Somalia often do not like what they find.
Some of the Minnesota boys sent e-mails home complaining about the heat
or the malaria. They missed things like McDonalds and coffee. Burhan Hassan, 17,
once a diligent student at Roosevelt High School who was eventually
killed in 2009, phoned his mother to say that, while traveling by boat
to a Shabaab base somewhere in southern Somalia, he had been so
violently sick that his glasses had flown overboard. His mother sweetly
fetched his prescription and read it out to him, in the faint hope that
he could find an optician to replace them.
Some of the gunmen at
the Nairobi mall also showed a disarmingly human side. One of them,
scolded by 4-year-old British boy Elliott Prior as a "very bad man,"
replied, "Please forgive me -- we are not monsters," and gave him a Mars
Bar. There can be no better illustration of the insane contradictions
and conflicted morality of killing innocents in the name of Islam.
SOURCE: THE CITIZEN
