Yusuf Ali was 14 years old when he picked up a gun and became a child soldier. He is 34 now, married, with a son. The war never left him. It lives in the houses he once shot at. It lives in the mosque where Ethiopian soldiers once snatched 41 children suspected of being insurgents. It lives in the silence Somalia keeps about mental health.
His father died when he was one year old, killed in the Battle of Mogadishu, the infamous clash between Somali fighters and US soldiers after two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. Growing up fatherless was hard. But it was the Ethiopian invasion of 2006 that broke him.
Thousands of Ethiopian troops poured into Somalia backed by American drones. Their mission was to topple the Union of Islamic Courts, a coalition of Sharia courts that had brought a fragile stability to a country torn apart by clan warfare since 1991. The UIC’s youth wing was called al-Shabab. The Lads. Ali was too young to understand the geopolitics. He only knew what the mosque sermons told him. Foreign invaders were here. Defend your country. Defend your religion. Everyone was fired up.
He joined the Muqawama, the resistance coalition that included former army commanders. They trained him in small arms fire. Hit and run attacks. By 16, he was on the streets of Mogadishu with other young combatants, firing from windows and doorways at Ethiopian soldiers and the Somali troops allied with them. He saw dead Somali soldiers his own age. He paused. Then he kept moving. Kill or be killed. A cause worth dying for.
From 2007 to 2009, Mogadishu was reduced to rubble. Ethiopia eventually withdrew under international pressure. The militants splintered. Some joined the government. Others turned on each other. Ali’s uncle urged the family to let him leave. He was smuggled to Johannesburg. Five years working in his uncle’s shop. Then xenophobic attacks drove him home.
He returned to a city rebuilding itself. Paved roads. Street lights. Restaurants. But politically it was chaos. Al-Shabab had become a hardened militant group controlling swathes of the countryside. Inside Mogadishu, spies were everywhere. Neighbours watched neighbours. No one trusted anyone. Ali felt partly to blame. We fought to defend our country and religion, he says, and only made things worse.
Now he is married with a four year old son. He still recognizes houses he fired his gun from and wonders if the families living there know what happened inside their walls. He has never had counselling. Neither have other former child soldiers he knows who became drug addicts. In Somalia, you do not talk about your problems. You pray. You keep things to yourself. That is the culture. That is why so many are hurting and nobody realizes it.
Ilyas Adam, a human rights legal consultant with the Coalition of Somali Human Rights Defenders, says the normalization of violence means trauma often goes unrecognized and untreated. PTSD can be as debilitating as combat. Chronic mental health conditions. Social exclusion. Stigma. Increased risk of re-recruitment. A 2021 WHO report said Somalia’s mental health services were almost non-existent. In 2023, there were only 82 mental health professionals in the entire country.
More than 2,800 children were recruited by armed groups between 2021 and 2024, mostly by al-Shabab. Some as young as eight. Efforts to stop recruitment face resistance. Some even view it as a Western agenda, according to MP Mursal Khalif, who heads the Defence Ministry’s Child Protection Unit. Vocational schools exist but reach only a fraction of those who need them.
Ali still lives in Huriwaa, the impoverished district where he grew up. No state services. No counselling. The mosque where Ethiopian forces once abducted 41 children still stands. He prays there. He remembers. The government is still fighting al-Shabab. This week, government forces and opposition fighters exchanged gunfire in Mogadishu over delayed elections. The cycle Ali tried to escape as a teenager is still spinning.
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