'It was either kill or be killed': former child soldier still haunted in Mogadishu

The BBC followed the story of Yusuf Ali, who was forced into fighting at 12 by an armed group, in the streets of Mogadishu. Ali said he works as a day labourer at the port and described nights when distant sounds replay as gunfire: "Even when you sleep your brain is listening for shots." According to the report, UN documents have identified five different armed groups using child soldiers in Somalia.

Somalia's parliament passed a law in 2023 criminalising the recruitment of children into armed groups and the issuing of weapons to them; enforcement remains uneven across the country's five federal member states. A Save the Children Somalia director told the BBC that 1,180 former child soldiers entered rehabilitation programmes in 2026, half of them funded by Unicef.

A security analyst quoted in the piece said that al-Shabab still "treats child-soldier recruitment as a training model." The report concludes that durable stability in Somalia depends on integrating education, vocational rehabilitation and trauma therapy into front-line services. Yusuf Ali ended his testimony by saying his story "is still going on."