It was not till Fadumo* was sitting in an unfamiliar room on Mogadishu’s outskirts, and the smile vanished from her mom’s face, that the 16-year-old realised she was not occurring vacation to Dubai.
On reflection, there had been clues earlier than they left England, when her mom all of the sudden introduced, in 2022, that the 2 of them had been occurring vacation in a couple of days’ time. However it had been a tough faculty yr and Fadumo welcomed the thought of a break as an opportunity to restore their crumbling relationship.
Onboard the aeroplane, her mom had defined that they had been flying through Mogadishu to see their household.
However Fadumo was certain one thing was unsuitable, so she searched the lodge room and located the aircraft tickets. Her mom’s flight was in a couple of weeks however hers was the next summer time.
When her mom informed her it was an outdated ticket, Fadumo requested to see the brand new one. Her mom mentioned she didn’t have it however she would have it tomorrow.
Tomorrow by no means got here. That night, Fadumo was in a automotive along with her household. “Everybody was lethal silent. Nobody would discuss to me,” she says.
As they left town lights behind, and the roads grew to become bumpier, she realised they had been leaving Mogadishu. “We stopped outdoors a compound. It was actually darkish so I couldn’t see the writing on the signal above the door. I believed perhaps we had been there to go to somebody.”
The place was intimidating, surrounded by barbed wire, with tall gates guarded by armed males. A person informed her to return inside and be part of her household. Every thing all of the sudden got here into focus.
“I stroll in and [my family] appear to be they’ve seen a ghost. But additionally like all of them know one thing I don’t,” she says. “I’m trying round, asking questions, making small discuss, and I discover they’re locking the gates.” Fadumo’s confusion turned to anxiousness, and she or he requested: “What are we doing right here?”
Lastly, she was informed the reality. “My mum takes me by the hand and says: “That is the place you’ll keep. Inshallah, you’ll turn out to be a greater individual.”
Shock and anger hit Fadumo. “I felt so betrayed,” she says. Then one of many males informed her mom it was time to go.
Dhaqan celis is a well known phenomenon within the Somali diaspora, the place mother and father typically really feel their youngsters have turn out to be too westernised. It may be translated as “return to tradition” and could contain being despatched to stay with family in Somalia. However lately, dhaqan celis has come to imply cultural re-education centres, providing an expertise like a boarding faculty or boot camp, with a strong Islamic training and strict routines to straighten out attenders.
Dhaqan celis centres emerged as youngsters of refugees who fled Somalia’s civil battle within the early Nineteen Nineties reached adolescence. Fb and Google characteristic innocuous footage of exteriors and guarantees that the centres rehabilitate younger individuals who disobey their mother and father or use medicine. Some characteristic movies of younger Somalis speaking positively about their experiences at these centres.
However many Reddit threads and TikTok movies characteristic anxious younger individuals who worry their households plan to ship them away for dhaqan celis. Youthful Somalis know that being despatched “residence” may occur to anybody at any time – and there’s little anybody can do.
Cousins or household mates can disappear after being caught consuming or “performing out”. If anybody asks the place they’re, the response is imprecise: they’re in Hargeisa, or Puntland, or with an aunt in Nairobi, or at a boarding faculty.
These tales encourage worry as a result of it’s an open secret amongst Somalis that these dhaqan celis centres are locations with little or no oversight, the place something can occur.
Fadumo was held at al-Xarameyn, Mogadishu, with ladies from the UK, continental Europe and North America. As soon as her household left, it bought worse. “They informed me to provide them my telephone however I refused. I put it in my bra, pondering they wouldn’t contact me there. One of many guards held my arms, one other pointed a gun at me, and a 3rd one went by way of my bra and bought it from me. They had been all laughing.”
A strict each day regime of non secular educating and violence started. “The employees hit me with a picket stick after I refused to do one thing,” says Fadumo. “I can’t even keep in mind for what now. It was a couple of individual hitting me for about 20-Half-hour, simply hitting me all over the place. Then they tied me up with chains.”
Any deviation from the foundations had brutal repercussions. Waking up late or incorrectly reciting from the Qur’an may result in beatings.
Throughout her time there, Fadumo’s well being deteriorated considerably. “The meals they served there was like inexperienced glue. I don’t even know what it was. I’d give my meals away; I simply didn’t eat.”
As she misplaced weight, her psychological well being additionally degenerated. “My physique felt dissociated from my thoughts, like this individual wasn’t me,” Fadumo says.
The Guardian has spoken to 2 different British Somalis who allege that they had been additionally detained at al-Xarameyn for months, and subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and psychological abuse.
One younger British lady, Bilan*, says she was despatched away in 2021 and detained for 2 years: first at al-Xarameyn, after which, after she tried to flee, at one other centre known as Luqman al-Hakim, additionally in Mogadishu. She alleges she was abused at each centres.
Like Fadumo, she says she misplaced weight, typically fainting due to a scarcity of meals and water. Bilan, now 22, claims brutal beatings had been routine at each locations. Luqman al-Hakim is a very infamous centre, with a number of on-line accounts of abuse there. “They beat me into submission,” one lady mentioned on YouTube. She additionally claimed that sexual abuse was widespread, together with of detainees below 16.
Al-Xarameyn and Luqman al-Hakim didn’t reply to a request for remark relating to the claims made by the previous detainees interviewed right here.
Two younger American Somalis, talking on situation of anonymity, had comparable tales. One believes his household wished him useless after they found he was homosexual. They tricked him into occurring vacation to Nairobi and informed him, as soon as he arrived, he was going for dhaqan celis. He escaped that evening, discovering his option to the embassy and again to the US. One other former detainee described shackling, beatings and solitary confinement.
Bilan mentioned her toes grew to become so swollen from lashings at Luqman al-Hakim that she couldn’t put sneakers on. Generally, she vomited from the shock. “They tied my legs up, blindfolded me and put me in ‘room 6’, the place they lock you up, and beat me up with drainpipes.” She additionally claims she was sexually assaulted within the first centre by one of many males operating the ability.
Hodan*, from Manchester, was 22 when she was detained in al-Xarameyn. She had been rising aside from her household and calls herself the “black sheep” of her siblings. As Hodan was an grownup, she didn’t consider dhaqan celis may occur to her. Nonetheless, the centres haven’t any age restrict.
Like Fadumo, she had no thought what lay forward till it was too late. After they arrived, Hodan’s father requested: “Have you learnt the place we’re? That is the place you’ll die.” Understanding him to imply that he would depart her there for the remainder of her life, Hodan says she had a horrible panic assault. “I believed I should be strolling into my grave,” she says.
At one level, Hodan spent 5 days locked up alone, with one rest room break and one meal a day. “It’s about making you’re feeling like you may’t do little issues by your self as a result of what they need you to do is to go away the place and be reliant on whoever is supposed to regulate you,” she says.
As they function outdoors the regulation, it’s unclear what number of centres exist. Estimates are tough in Somalia, the place the US and British embassies have a restricted presence due to the “fixed menace of terrorist assault”.
after newsletter promotion
The US embassy in Nairobi said it had helped about 300 citizens in Somalia and Kenya, where dhaqan celis is also prevalent, after they were held in “unlicensed facilities” against their will.
Bilan says these centres are all over Mogadishu. When she was finally allowed out of the centre where she was held, she saw another one across the street.
Guleid Jama, a Somali human rights lawyer who has represented former captives, believes hundreds of US and European citizens are trapped in these “detention centres”. With so little awareness of them, or political will to confront the problem, many people are left in limbo, Jama says. “There is a huge need for a legal framework, as currently there isn’t really one.”
The lack of regulation can be fatal: in 2014 an American teenager died in a “boarding school” in Somalia’s north-east state of Puntland. Ammar Abdirahman’s family said they wanted to get him away from gangs in Minneapolis and let him learn about his culture.
Instead, they say the 17-year-old was tortured and killed, pointing to photographs showing his badly beaten body. An autopsy suggested he was strangled. Somali authorities said they looked into his death in 2015, but it is unclear whether an investigation was even carried out.
According to US researchers last year, parents turn to dhaqan celis largely for fear of losing control of their children’s behaviour and values.
The 1991 civil war upended the lives of nearly 2 million Somalis and in much of the country fighting continues. Somalia is still one of the world’s most dangerous countries. “Because they were refugees, they couldn’t necessarily visit home often. So they couldn’t revise the idea of ‘home’,” says a co-author of the study, Farah Bakaari. “Somalia looks very different right now.”
This, combined with social alienation in their host countries and fear of cultural “corruption”, created a “perfect storm” of conditions that make Somali parents feel they should send their children away, says Bakaari.
Sorrel Dixon, a UK lawyer who specialises in child abduction, has spoken to parents who send their children abroad to places like dhaqan celis centres. “Many parents are probably reasonably well-intentioned, and think that if they send their children to be within the bosom of their family or country of origin, that somehow that is going to make them see the light and straighten them out,” she says.
The problem is so pervasive that Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said last November that it was working with other government agencies and the US embassy “in the fight against illegal rehabilitation centres in the country”. The DCI said foreign nationals, primarily from the US and Europe, were being subjected to “inhumane conditions” and “physical abuse”.
The DCI said: “It is after their arrival at the centres, and their travel documents get confiscated, that the youths learn that they are not on safari to learn their beautiful culture but a behaviour-rectification centre where the cane is administered thoroughly.” The DCI raided one Kenyan rehabilitation centre in April, rescuing 10 foreigners, many of whom were Somalis raised in the west.
The legal implications for people who take a child abroad for dhaqan celis are unclear. Very few detainees go to the authorities on their return home. Many have little trust in the authorities and point to the lack of action when they were being held against their will; or they believe nothing will be done if they do report it. They might also fear further reprisals from their family or feel the emotional toll of reporting a parent is too high.
For Hodan, it was a combination of these factors. Her friends grew worried when she stopped responding to messages and did not return from what was supposed to be a holiday. One friend called the police in the UK and the British embassy in Mogadishu but nothing was done, so the friend threatened the family with legal action and reporting them to the social services if they did not bring Hodan back.
Meanwhile, realising her only escape was to “play the game”, as she puts it, Hodan became quiet, respectful and promised her father that she had changed. After 91 days there, alongside her friend’s legal threat, Hodan was allowed to leave.
“I came back with a different perspective on life. I’m a lot more guarded because I never want to be put in that position ever again,” says Hodan. She no longer sees her family.
Fadumo, who was still only a minor when she returned, had no choice but to return to her mother in Birmingham. Before she was taken to Somalia, she was known to social services.
Sometimes, Fadumo says, her mother locked her out of her home as punishment for breaking rules. Once she was left outside all night before an exam and went to school hungry and unwashed.
Fadumo begged social services to take her complaints seriously, saying she was experiencing abuse. But she says they ignored her and told her to obey her mother. Fadumo believes no one at her school or in social services listened to her or tried to understand her situation before she disappeared. As a result, she felt that contacting local authorities or the police was futile. And, she added, no matter how betrayed she felt, she did not want to get her mother into trouble.
It is hard to comprehend how young Britons, barely out of childhood, can disappear abroad without anyone noticing, only to reappear months or years later, traumatised by abuse – and for there to be no consequences.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was aware of conditions reported by young British citizens who had experienced cultural rehabilitation centres in Somalia but consular support there was severely limited. An FCDO spokesperson said: “Any cases of physical or emotional abuse experienced by young British people are totally unacceptable and we stand ready to help those who need our support. Anyone concerned about a British national in Somalia or Kenya should contact us.”
On her first night in the centre, Fadumo started a tally on the wall. She knew when GCSE results came out and when the new school year had started. Her life in London was moving on without her.
Fadumo thought her way out of her restrictive life was to excel in her education, go to university and find a career she cared about; she would become financially independent and free. Those dreams have been destroyed.
After months in captivity she became seriously ill with malaria, which she says many other detainees also contracted. She received medication from a man she calls a “makeshift doctor”.
Her declining health, and the intervention of a relative who disagreed with her detention, pushed her mother and staff at al-Xarameyn centre to agree she should be released, nine months earlier than planned. But by the time she returned to Britain the school year had started and Fadumo was refused entry to the sixth form, despite achieving the required grades.
Fadumo believes her health has not fully recovered. Months later, an infection left her in hospital because of a weakened immune system. “I used to have a bit of meat on me; I used to have chubby cheeks,” Fadumo says. “I don’t have those any more.”
She is trying to move on and wants to go to university and leave her family. But she says her biggest realisation from her experience was that she could only rely on herself.
“I grew up thinking that the police and social services are here to help you. Imagine you’ve been going to school every day for five years and they’re telling you, ‘We’re always here for you’. Then as soon as you’re actually in a situation where you need serious help, they do nothing.
“It felt like no one cared about me. It still does.”
* Names have been changed
