The silence, he says, is the worst. Not the silence of a quiet room, but the silence after a gunshot. The moment when the world holds its breath and you don’t know if you’re alive or dead.
I spoke to Ahmed (not his real name) in a safe house on the outskirts of Mogadishu. He is 16. He has been a soldier for seven years. He was nine when al-Shabaab took him from his village. They gave him a Kalashnikov. They told him to kill or be killed.
“You learn fast,” he said, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the wall. “You learn to shoot. You learn to stab. You learn to run. You learn to die.”
Ahmed is one of an estimated 2,000 former child soldiers in Somalia waiting for rehabilitation. The UN says al-Shabaab has stepped up forced recruitment. The numbers are climbing. The resources are not.
He told me about his first kill. A government soldier. Ahmed was 11. He was hiding behind a wall during an ambush. The soldier ran past. Ahmed shot him in the back. “I saw him fall. I saw the blood. I felt nothing. That’s the worst part. You feel nothing.”
But the nothing doesn’t last. At night, the memories come. The faces of the dead. The screams of the wounded. The smell of burning flesh. “I see them in my dreams. They are always dying. I am always killing.”
Ahmed escaped three months ago. He found his way to a camp run by a local NGO. He shares a tent with 12 other boys. They all have the same look. The same hollow eyes. The same trembling hands.
“They tell me I am safe now,” he said. “But I am not safe. The nightmares are not safe. The killing is not safe. I am still in the war. The war is inside me.”
The rehabilitation centre has two counsellors for 300 boys. The funding is erratic. The government barely acknowledges them. The international community has other priorities.
Ahmed wants to be a doctor. “I want to save lives. I have taken many. I want to give back.” He smiled, a faint, fleeting thing. “But first, I need to sleep. I need to sleep without seeing the blood.”
He showed me a scar on his arm. A bullet graze from a firefight. “This is nothing,” he said. “The scars you cannot see are the ones that kill you.”
I left him sitting on a wooden cot, staring at his hands. The same hands that held a gun at nine. The same hands that now tremble when he holds a pen.
Outside, the sun was setting over Mogadishu. The call to prayer echoed from a nearby mosque. Ahmed didn’t move. He was somewhere else. Back in the fight. Back in the nightmare.
“Kill or be killed,” he whispered as I walked away. “That’s the only rule. I wish I had never learned it.”
This is not a story about politics. This is not a story about strategy. This is a story about a child who was forced to become a monster, and the long, lonely fight to become human again.
