Somalia: How the Isis reign of terror touched every life in a Somalian village

hukri Muse was six months pregnant when a gang of men kicked down her door and shot her and her seven-year old son dead in the name of religion.

She was a strong-willed woman and the men did not like the fact that she answered back to them. That she walked around the village unaccompanied by her husband. That she bridled at their insistence that she swap her bright dresses for a black niqab. That she questioned their extreme interpretation of Islamic law.

These self-proclaimed arbiters of God’s will were Isis militants, who for five years controlled the village of Dhaadaar, where Muse lived, along with a vast swathe of the Cal Miskaad mountains in Puntland, northern Somalia.

Many of them were veteran terrorists from the Middle East who had fled the destruction of the so-called Islamic State caliphate that existed in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019.

In Somalia, a country destabilised by decades of civil war, they saw the potential for a new dominion.

Under the leadership of the charismatic cleric Abdul Qadir Mumin, the Puntland outpost grew to become one of the biggest branches in the global Isis network before Somali forces began military action against them this year. As it did so, the atrocities that many thought had been consigned to the ruins of the last caliphate began to happen here.

Among Dhaadaar’s population of about 500, there is not a single life that was not touched by the cruelty of Isis’s reign. When The Times visited the village, people came forward one after another over the course of several hours to give vent to the suffering they had endured.

Muse’s uncle, Yusuf Jama Mahad, said that on the day of her murder she had warned her neighbour, a delivery driver for the World Food Programme, that Isis suspected him of being a spy and were planning to kill him. Learning of what she had done, six militants came to her home that night and killed her and her seven-year-old son, Mohammed, while her two other children slept in their beds.

“Mohammed was deaf and was always at his mother’s side,” said Mahad, 56. “When they came into the house that night, he was right beside her — and so they shot him too.”

Mahad’s sister — Muse’s mother — has moved to another part of the region because the village serves as a reminder of what happened to her daughter.

The village sits in a plain between two valleys and to reach it takes more than a day by car from Bosaso, the nearest big city. Nearly everyone who lives here earns their living from the land, either through livestock or from the frankincense trees that grow abundantly in these mountains.

Life in Dhaadaar before the arrival of terror was “simple but happy”, said Ahmed Usman Yusuf, 68, one of the village elders. In the early days of the occupation, a group of young militants came to loot his house. When he challenged them, they tied his hands together and knocked out his front teeth with a brick.

The terrorists never lived in the village, instead using the mountains’ cave networks. But they exploited the village as a source of food and money, regularly stealing goats and robbing homes.

They also saw the villagers as a source of danger, fearing above all the infiltration of government agents. This paranoia was the basis of one of the most notorious incidents that took place here when three men — the youngest of whom was 18 — were publicly murdered.

The men had travelled to Dhaadaar from Qandala to visit family. Accused of working for the Puntland authorities, they were dragged before an assembled crowd of villagers and beheaded. Footage of the killing was later posted on an Isis propaganda website.

“Fear changed the whole atmosphere of the village,” said Yusuf, 68. “It was like total darkness.”

Some 20,000 people from Cal Miskaad are estimated to have fled Isis-controlled territory, most of them ending up in refugee camps in Bosaso. People say they feared the most for their children. The terror group is reported to have forcibly recruited young boys into their ranks.

They also snatched young girls. In Dhaadaar the name of Fatima Mussa is well known. In 2023, the 17-year-old girl was kidnapped from the village while out getting water for her family. People say she was stopped by two men for not wearing the correct clothing. They beat her with sticks and carried her away on a motorbike.

She has not been seen since and it is believed that she may have forcibly married to an Isis member, who are often enticed into travelling to Somalia by the prospect of being provided with a wife. Mumin himself is thought to have married for a third time while living in the mountains to a young Ethiopian woman who had accompanied her brother to join Isis, according to Puntland intelligence.

Fatima Jama Ibrahim, 40, was Fatima Mussa’s neighbour and has several children of her own, who she says she never let out of her sight during the years of occupation. “Every day was like swimming in a sea that you knew was full of sharks,” she said. “You were constantly afraid.”

Ibrahim, along with her two friends Hawa Mahamoud Ibrahim, 53, and Maryan Mohamoud Adan, 35, spoke wearing the colourful headscarves common among Somali women.

When Isis was here, these were clothes that they were forced to hide away. The tea shop that the three of them run together — selling Somali tea, known as shaah, which is brewed with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves — was also forced to close.

The militants thought their hold over this land would never end. Written on the wall of the village mosque to this day are the words: “The Islamic State will remain here forever”.

But at the beginning of this year Puntland forces, with the support of the United States, began a military offensive against the terror group, liberating dozens of towns from their control. Somali troops entered Dhaadaar on February 26.

Since then, some of those who fled have gradually returned. Children are playing in the streets again. Women are selling tea. “It’s like we were dead then,” said Ibrahim. “But now, slowly, we are coming back to life.”

Source: The Times