Abdulqadir Abdi Dilahow, 23, left, and Ali Mohamed Gedi, 21, seen last month in Eastleigh, a neighbourhood in Nairobi, where they fled to from Somalia after Al Shabab publicly amputated their right hands and left feet in 2009 in a display meant to intimidate their fellow citizens.
For weeks, they spent their days in a tiny apartment, playing dominoes or cards, venturing out only for groceries.
Ali makes lunch, Abdulqadir dinner.
It is not much of a life, especially for Ali, who struggles to walk with a crutch and a cane since his leg was amputated. It’s a task made more difficult as he is also missing his right hand.
But it’s a better life than the one they escaped in Mogadishu, where they feared that Al Shabab, the militant Islamic group that robbed them of the life they once knew, would find them again and rob them of life altogether.
Ali Mohamed Gedi, 21 and Abdulqadir Abdi Dilahow, 23, are what some Somali-Canadians call the “other” boys.
In June 2009, they were kidnapped by Shabab members and dragged to a stadium along with two other young men. One by one, each had a hand and then a foot severed for refusing to join the militant group. The gruesome public amputation was intended as a warning to others of what would happen if you defied the Shabab.
Six months after the barbaric ritual, the Toronto Star featured the story of 17-year-old Ismail Khalif Abdulle, the youngest of those boys.
His plight touched Star readers. In September 2010, with the help of a former Somali-Canadian journalist living in Nairobi, Ismail escaped to Kenya. A couple of months later Norway accepted him as a refugee in need of immediate protection.
In January, Ismail flew with the Star to Harstad, a Norwegian town 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, where he now attends school, has his own apartment and receives medical care.
Ali, Abdulqadir and a third young man, believed to have escaped to Djibouti, were left behind.
Last month the pair agreed to come out of hiding in the chaotic Eastleigh suburb of Nairobi, whose residents are mainly Somali, to talk about their own escape and the challenges ahead. If there’s any jealousy about Ismail’s fate as compared to their own, they didn’t show it.
“We are so happy for what happened with Ismail,” says Ali, declining a cup of tea at the meeting with the Star. (He is fasting to try to make his prayers better heard.) “That really showed that the world cared about us.”
A group of activists in Toronto’s Somali community helped these “other” boys escape to Nairobi and are now trying to find them a permanent home.
“I hope they will also get a new chance elsewhere,” said one community leader, asking to remain anonymous.
Ali and Abdulqadir have applied to the United Nations’ refugee agency, UNHCR, but the list is long. Somalia is in the grips of famine, and warring between Shabab fighters and combined forces from Kenya, Ethiopia, Burundi and Uganda has sent refugees fleeing from southern Somalia. Many end up in Kenya.
When the Star met Ali he said his dream is simple: he wants a prosthetic leg. (He fled Somalia before he could receive one there.) Those who know him say he remains haunted by the public amputation and needs psychological counselling.
Both Ali and Abdulqadir’s eyes fill with tears when asked if they have difficulty sleeping since that day of horror.
“Forget nightmares,” says Ali. “We can’t even have knives in our kitchen.”
They use their teeth to cut vegetables or prepare food, they say.
A week after the Star met the pair in Eastleigh, Ali left for Mombasa on Kenya’s coast. He told Abdulqadir he was going to meet friends and relatives. But soon after, he called the Star and others in Toronto from Mombasa’s Shimo La Tewa prison.
Ali said authorities picked him up because he was not carrying proper identification after Kenya went on high alert after the Shabab issued warnings of retaliatory attacks.
Others in jail, taking pity on him, helped him raise part of the bail set by the court; Toronto’s Somali community sent him the rest this weekend.
“We, as Somalis in the diaspora, have the responsibility to rehabilitate and save lives,” said the community leader in Toronto. “We’ve lost an entire generation.”
Source: The Toronto Star
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