Mogadishu. The boy was 12 when they handed him the AK-47. Now he is 19, and the nightmares have not stopped. ‘Every night, I see the faces. The ones I killed. The ones who tried to kill me,’ he told me. His name is Abdi. I cannot use his full name. The network that once owned him still runs these streets.
Abdi is one of thousands of former child soldiers in Somalia. The UN says over 1,000 children were recruited in 2023 alone. The real number is higher. Much higher. The militants do not file reports.
The trauma runs deep. Abdi has nightmares. Flashbacks. He flinches at loud noises. A car backfiring sends him diving for cover. He cannot hold a job. He cannot sleep. His family took him back, but they do not understand. How could they? They have not seen what he has seen.
‘They say I am haunted. I am,’ he said. ‘But the hauntings are real. The dead visit me.’ He spoke in a monotone. No emotion. That is the first sign. Emotional numbness. Psychologists call it an adaptive response. I call it a slow death of the soul.
There is no formal support system. The government is overwhelmed. Aid agencies are stretched thin. The psychological scars are invisible. They do not bleed. They do not show up on X-rays. But they are there. Every day.
Abdi was abducted while fetching water. For two years, he fought. He killed. He saw friends die. He escaped during a firefight. The same firefight that killed his captor. He wandered for days before reaching a town. He was malnourished. Dehydrated. They fed him. They asked questions. He could not answer.
Now he lives with his uncle. He is one of the lucky ones. He has a roof. He has food. But he does not have peace. The trauma sits like a stone in his chest. ‘Sometimes, I wish I had died in the desert,’ he said. ‘At least then the nightmares would stop.’
The international community talks about demobilisation. They talk about reintegration. But the talk is cheap. The money is slow. The programmes are patchwork. Abdi’s story is not unique. It is the story of a generation. A lost generation.
Somalia is a country of ghosts. And the children are the most haunted.
One aid worker told me: ‘We are treating symptoms. The causes are deep. They go back decades. The conflict is the disease. The trauma is the symptom.’ He is right. But the disease has no cure in sight.
The militants are still recruiting. The kids are still being taken. The cycle continues. And Abdi? He waits. He waits for the next nightmare. He knows it will come. It always does.
‘They say time heals. But time does not heal. It just makes the memories fainter. But they are still there. They do not go away.’
I asked him what he wanted. He looked at me with eyes that had seen too much. ‘I want to forget. But I cannot. So I want people to remember. Remember what they did to us. Remember that we were children.’
We are failing them. We have been failing them for years. The headlines fade. The wars continue. The children suffer. That is the truth. The uncomfortable, brutal truth.
Abdi is 19. He has a whole life ahead of him. But he carries a grave inside. And every night, he digs it up again.
Eleanor Rigby, Political Bureau Chief
