By: Michelle Shephard
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Teenager spirited out of Mogadishu after his limbs were hacked off by Al Shabab is adapting well to life in Norway, doing well in school and dreaming big.
Ismail Khalif Abdulle fled Somalia for Norway after Al Shabab amputated his hand and foot as punishment for not joining the terrorist group. He is thriving in Harstad, a small town 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle.
HARSTAD, NORWAY—A warm glow starts to spread over the white-capped mountains framing this snowy island town, 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. The polar nights are beginning, three months of winter when the sun will stay below the horizon, offering only a couple hours of twilight each day.
It is so quiet, the blue light hauntingly beautiful, like looking at the sky through thick ice.
“Want to see me run?” Ismail asks, handing me his coffee cup. He sprints through the snow without waiting for an answer, his arms swinging awkwardly in a bulky ski jacket, snowflakes swirling about as he jogs toward the darkness at the end of the dock.
He turns, comes back laughing, no noticeable limp.
Cagmadhige. That’s what his Somali friends called him as a kid, which literally translates to “one who runs so fast his feet do not touch the ground.” It also means “restless.”
“See?”
It has been almost three years since I’ve seen him, after dropping him off in this remote town where he had been offered refuge. I left thankful he was out of Somalia but wondering just how a teenager from Mogadishu missing a hand and a foot was going to survive. He went from swimming in the warm waters of Mogadishu’s Lido Beach, to Harstad’s frigid fjords, from the red earth to icefields, Somalia’s punishing sun to these days of darkness.
Ismail Khalif Abdulle is 20 or 21 now. His mother didn’t record the birth and he sometimes forgets the date he was assigned on his Somali passport. In June 2009, he was but another victim of Somalia’s wars. He had refused to join Al Shabab, Al Qaeda’s group in East Africa, so they made him their prisoner, then dragged him into a soccer stadium and cut off his right hand and left foot as an example to others. He escaped and I met him in Mogadishu soon after, in January 2010. Later that year, others would help him flee from Somalia.
Ismail didn’t just survive. He has thrived.
Al Shabab maimed him, but stole nothing else. He is almost always smiling, or laughing, and has a wicked sense of humour. He won’t even acknowledge the terrorist group, using only the nickname he gave them: AC Milan. Not that he has anything against the Italian soccer team. He just thought it was funny.
Ismail today speaks Norwegian, fluently, and his English is getting there. He has many friends and even more fans among his teachers. He dreams of visiting Miami, owning a sports car; he’s learning to drive. He loves everything Canada: the maple leaf, the country’s history, the fact that we apologize a lot and produce good musicians and comedians; that Canada Day is July 1, the same day as Somalia’s independence day.
He has state-of-the-art prosthetics for his right hand and left foot. He doesn’t have to pay back the Norwegian government loan as long as he does well in school. He is doing well in school.
And once again, Ismail can run.
But his story is hardly a fairy tale, even if the small town where he lives looks like the set of one; a blur of lights, Christmas trees, the smell of burning wood and bubblingglogg.
His first year here was hard. He was lonely, and often still is. He goes on Facebook all the time talking to friends back in Somalia. Restless. He misses his mom and younger siblings who live in Somaliland. He has an unknown future to contemplate, memories of the terror — that rarely, but sometimes creep back — to live with.
Ismail is a member of the Somali generation that has come of age amid war, many fleeing around the world like their nomadic forefathers. More than one million Somalis live abroad, nearly one-tenth of the country’s population.
He was born in Mogadishu in the “Black Hawk Down” era when the world was shocked by the killing of 18 elite U.S. soldiers and how the hulking beasts they piloted were shot out of the sky. Somalia, already chaotic, collapsed, thousands died and the international community pulled out, unwilling to sacrifice any more.
The international reluctance to intervene in the region had a devastating effect. When Rwanda’s genocide broke out the following year the world watched until it was too late.
Somalia became a symbol for a failed state, a country that served as a comparison, beyond repair. Is (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali) the next Somalia?
Somalia is on a tentative path of recovery, but only after 20 years of lawlessness. There were greedy warlords, regional proxy battles and politicians that got richer as the country got poorer. Somalia became the place where ill-informed foreign policy went to die and in the last eight years, during this vacuum of power, the Shabab has grown.
The Shabab’s numbers are down from a peak between 2007 and 2009, when they had popular support as they fought an Ethiopian invasion. But the Shabab stayed when Ethiopia withdrew, and the group formally joined Al Qaeda, adopting a hardline interpretation of Sharia law. Their ruthlessness is unfathomable. Fuad Shangole, a Shabab leader who held Ismail captive, decided they had failed to amputate Ismail high enough above the ankle. So he pressed three fingers on Ismail’s calf and told them to cut again. They used a saw.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2011 that the Shabab was ousted from the capital. They may be weakened but are far from gone, and have developed into a disciplined terrorist group intent on striking at home and abroad, including the September attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall.
While Ismail’s tale of survival is one of inspiration, it has all the elements of the greater dark narrative: how more than a decade after 9/11, terrorism still impacts so much of our lives in the way we think, and govern. Ismail’s story unfolds in Norway but it could take place in many Western nations that are home to both terrorists and victims of terrorism.
Norway will be forever scarred by the memory of July 22, 2011, when Christian fundamentalist Anders Behring Breivik went on a murderous rampage, killing eight in an Oslo bombing and systematically executing 69 others, many teenagers, over a 90-minute period at a youth political retreat.
Breivik hated people like Ismail, a Muslim refugee, who he saw part of an immigrant invasion ruining Europe.
He would hate immigrant Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow too, even though they share many of the same traits.
Dhuhulow is a 23-year-old Norwegian citizen of Somali origin who, according to Kenyan authorities, was one of the four attackers that led the September assault on the Nairobi mall, killing more than 65 men, women and children.
Dhuhulow grew up in a small town about an hour outside of Oslo, not unlike Harstad. His relatives told reporters he never felt at home.
Ismail cannot even contemplate that choice, incredulous at how someone can grow up with the wealth of Norway and leave to join a terrorist group in Somalia.
Their stories are all separate yet connected by the fundamental issues of citizenship, of belonging and the vilification of the “other,” which drives terrorism.
All of this context, these weighty geopolitical issues swirl about us as I stand with Ismail in the snow on this winter morning, in this remote outpost.
But for the moment, that seems far away when all that matters is the sound of Ismail’s feet crunching in the snow, breaking the silence as he runs away and back again.
Cagmadhige.
“Please don’t be a Muslim.”
That’s what Ola Steinvoll and Nina Hellevik were thinking as the bomb ripped through Oslo’s downtown in the summer of 2011. Steinvoll and Hellevik were in charge of Harstad’s refugee program and were among the first to welcome Ismail here. Norway has a generous program but every year it is a fight to sustain the funding for the predominantly Muslim refugees.
In the first frantic hours following the Oslo explosion, Al Qaeda was the natural suspect. As I boarded a plane bound for Norway, the facts were still uncertain. It wasn’t until I touched down in Heathrow and went online that the full horror of the tragedy was taking shape and reports of a well-armed white man began to surface.
A Facebook photo of Breivik, the blond, blue-eyed killer, dressed in a salmon-hued polo shirt and black Lacoste sweater, stared out from newspapers and television screens in the excruciating days of funerals and tributes that followed.
Breivik had struck the heart — the future — of Norway, by gunning down young campers at a Labour Party retreat on the island of Utoya after bombing Oslo. Karoline Bank had hidden in the woods as Breivik roamed the camp, pressing a shredded T-shirt into the wounds of her friend, who Breivik had shot in her palms and clavicle as she raised her hands to shield herself.
Bank told me that she was happy Breivik was Norwegian. “We don’t need more racism. We don’t need more fear of the unknown,” the 20-year-old said just a couple days after the attack. “I have heard racist people say, ‘No, not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslim.’ This has proven this is not right. Terrorists are people who have grown up the wrong way or have the wrong impression of things. It has nothing to do with religion or where you come from or who your mother is.”
Breivik had a Twitter account with only one tweet: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests,” he wrote, reworking a quotation by philosopher John Stuart Mill. If Breivik hoped he would fuel a right-wing, anti-immigrant movement that was gaining momentum throughout Europe and beginning quietly in Norway, he managed the opposite and elicited nothing but revulsion.
“The July 22 attack calmed down the state quite a bit,” says Thomas Hegghammer, director of terrorism research at the Oslo-based Norwegian Defence Research. “It made it politically much more difficult to come anywhere close to Islamophobic statements. It muted for a while at least the populist anti-Muslim (voices) of the far end of the debate spectrum.”
Norway’s political landscape has changed since then, shifting to the right with September’s election and the rise of the anti-immigration Progress Party. There is great debate what impact this will have — if any. But there is renewed talk about discrimination, sparked most recently with a tweet from a Norwegian medical student of Somali heritage and the hashtag, “#norskrasisme,” which translates to “Norwegian racism.” Her subsequent tweets detailed 140-character instances of racism her family had experienced and soon the topic was trending.
At the same time, Hegghammer says he has also seen a rise in Norway’s “jihadi community,” a militant movement growing both in “size and pitch,” with many citizens leaving the country to fight in Mali, Syria or Somalia. This is not unique to Norway, and Hegghammer says it follows a trend throughout the West with the popularity of conflicts that Al Qaeda can exploit.
“I think in a sense Norway has caught up with the rest of Europe.”
The truth is I chose Ismail. Journalists do this as part of a media natural selection. The weakest survive — the children, the elderly, the strong who are no longer strong, the young who look old. You look for the way to shout above the noise of news: pay attention to this tragedy.
For instance, when covering Somalia’s 2011 famine with videographer Randy Risling, we decided to follow the plight of a 2-year-old boy, Abdisalam. There were many kids near starvation in that hospital where we spent a week. Abdisalam Osman had the longest eyelashes I had ever seen on a little boy, the most sunken ribs and emaciated legs. With the scope of tragedies so overwhelming — 29,000 children died in the famine — sometimes it is easier to grasp the story of one.
I chose Ismail on that January 2010 day in the government compound known as Villa Somalia because he was the first to talk and because he was younger than the two other young men on the couch, who had also been dragged into a stadium and had their hands and feet amputated by the Shabab.
I chose Ismail because I was staying that night at the African Union forces compound – one of the only safe places in Mogadishu at that time — and my military escort was yelling at me. It was near dusk. The convoy of massive IED-proof armoured vehicles was waiting on me. We couldn’t drive in the dark back to the compound because Al Shabab still owned most of the roads. I wore a flak jacket. Ismail wore a dress shirt that was too big, one cuff hanging over the stump where his hand once was. I only had time to get the story and photo of one of the boys.
As the escort paced, we talked quickly with the help of a Somali translator. Ismail took off his prosthetic and crossed his legs for the photo. He looked panicked. He stared at the Canadian pin on my computer bag. I took it off and gave it to him as I ran out. He dropped it. When I looked back he was on the ground trying to find it.
Ismail owes his rescue in the months that followed largely to Sahal Abdulle, a Somalia-born Canadian photojournalist.
Sahal left Somalia for Canada, via the U.S., just before the government collapsed in 1991. He returned as a Reuters journalist and covered the worst of the wars. In August 2007, he survived a car bombing that killed his close friend, another Canadian journalist, Ali Sharmarke. It took him a couple of years to get the courage to travel back to Mogadishu. He went to meet Ismail in early 2010 after reading about him in the Star, and told him he would get him out.
“There is just something about Ismail,” he told me after meeting him. “I can’t describe it.”
Sahal fashioned an escape route, getting Ismail to Nairobi in September 2010, where he unofficially adopted him and helped him register as a UN refugee. Norway was the first to offer, and in January 2011, Sahal, Ismail and I flew here to his new home.
Sahal wants to save Somalia. He can’t. But he did save Ismail. He helped the other boys too, who eventually made it to Kenya but have not fared as well. One spends too much time chewing the leafy stimulant khat, which is popular in East Africa. Sometimes Ismail will send money — and he urges him to spend it on food and education, not khat. They both say they feel a little lost outside of Somalia.
In Harstad, Ismail lives with roommates in an apartment and goes to school five days a week, never missing a day. His attendance wasn’t as good when he first arrived. He couldn’t get up on time. He spent his first stipend quickly, buying shoes, nice clothes. Steinvoll and Hellevik had to sit him down to budget.
During the first few icy weeks he often fell walking to school, once tumbling down an embankment, rolling and rolling in the snow until he stopped at the bottom. He was miserable and complained to Hellevik, the petite, no-nonsense director.
“I think someone told him he could have a taxi,” she said when we met for dinner recently. “And I’d say, ‘No, you have to walk. You cannot define yourself as handicapped or you’ll become handicapped.’ But he’d say, ‘I’m in pain,’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, we have to find a solution.’ ”
So she walked with him, and arranged to have a second set of books for him at school so he could lighten his load. It was only a couple of weeks later when visiting a doctor for a prosthetic that Nina realized how ill-equipped he was and that he had sores on his leg. “Oh, I felt bad,” she says now.
Ismail has become amazingly steady on his feet, expertly negotiating the halke, which is the Norwegian term for snow on top of ice (there are many Norwegian words describing snow conditions), even keeping me up as I slip, slide and then when he lets go, tumble.
Ismail sits in the back row of the English class taught by Jon Bjerkan.
The class discussion on this morning has turned to racism. The dozen students come from all over the world — Burma, Eritrea, the Palestinian territories. They share personal stories of discrimination: it is hard to get a job; sometimes people don’t want to share a seat on the bus.
Ismail shrugs later when I ask him about this, about his own experiences with the “us” versus “them” mentality that he may have encountered. “It’s okay, doesn’t bother me,” he says.
He believes it may be a question of culture, more than discrimination. Norwegians tend to be more reserved at first whereas personal space is not a concern in Somalia. Anyone who has flown to Mogadishu knows it’s a race across the tarmac, where sharp elbows are needed to find a good seat.
“Yeah, sometimes people didn’t want to take a seat or talk to me,” he says, but proudly notes how it doesn’t bother him anymore. “Now I sometimes put my bag on the seat beside me.”
It is hard to gauge where Norway is headed, if indeed there is this divide forming or anti-immigrant sentiments building, as some believe. My own impressions are skewed by the only three visits I’ve made — twice for Ismail and to cover the Breivik massacre. As an outsider looking in, the country seems impressively tolerant.
Mustafa Almi, Ismail’s good friend who was also born in Somalia, sits beside him in class. They wear matching “I Love Haters” hats with the word MOTIVATION written under the large bill. Ismail rarely takes the hat off, but can’t explain what it means, or the roots of the brand, which is popular with skateboarders in the U.S. He just liked the colour — green.
But his teachers say “motivated” is an apt description for Ismail. With only a few years of education in Somalia, Ismail has excelled here and will be going to high school next year. Three years later, if all goes well, he will apply for university. He hopes to study political science although he’s uncertain. As Steinvoll says, “He will be fine. He has a good brain. What 21-year-old Norwegian knows what he wants to do?”
Ismail is also wearing the Maple Leafs scarf and Roots shirt my parents had bought him as a present. Even though it is Norway that has given him a new life, Ismail still dreams of visiting Canada, the place that gave Sahal a home. He chose Canada as the country he will profile for his English class project. I brought him a bag of Canadian pins to hand out — to make up for the one lost in Mogadishu.