Somali mothers send teens to war-torn Africa to protect them from knife crime

TEENAGERS are being sent to wartorn Somalia by their parents to avoid Britain’s knife crime epidemic.

Of the 100 victims who have been stabbed to death in the UK so far this year, eight were of Somali heritage.

Representatives of the Somali community say hundreds of children have been sent back to Somalia and Kenya because of rising concerns over drugs gangs.

They include the mayor of Islington in north London who estimated that two in five families living in London were sending their children back home.

Rakhia Ismail, a mother of four who came to London from Somalia as a refugee, told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme that some areas of the city were unsafe for children. She said: ‘Does the parent wait for her child to be killed? Or does the parent take a decision – quite a drastic decision – to take him all the way back to wherever that child is from originally?’

Somalia and the northern independent state of Somaliland are in theory far more dangerous than the UK and the Foreign Office currently advises against all travel.

The Somali civil war is still ongoing. It began in the late-1980s and grew out of resistance to the military dictatorship of then-president Siad Barre.

The country, therefore, has very high levels of violent crime and there are frequent terrorist attacks by Jihadist groups. Nonetheless, Jamal Hassan – who mentors young men from Somali families in London – said parents wanted to protect their children ‘by all means necessary’.

He added: ‘If it means that child doesn’t finish school, college, university or he will not have a good job by the time you come for them the future is not really important. What’s important is that child’s life.’

Another woman, Amina, said her 15-yearold son had been seriously stabbed in November 2018, days after returning from Somaliland. She had sent him there as she was worried about the friends he was mixing in the UK and said he became a ‘studious’ child again when he went back. She said: ‘They damaged his bladder, his kidneys, his liver. He’s got permanent damage.’