This week’s issue features a short story by Nuruddin Farah about a boy named YoungThing who has been drafted into the Shabab-led insurgency in Somalia and charged with delivering a carry-all of explosives to a safe-house in Mogadishu. Farah writes of YoungThing:

He smiles with youthful bravura, betraying none of his trepidation. He does not want to fail; he cannot afford to fail. He is aware of the huge difference between martyring oneself and making a blunder of things and getting oneself killed.

Early in the story, YoungThing encounters a woman named Cambra, who is wearing a body tent. By way of explaining her choice of garment, Farah gives some recent history:

Somali women, who never used to wear veils, resorted to them when the strife began, in 1991. They felt safer from sexual harassment by armed youths. But lately, ever since the Islamic Courts Union took control of Mogadishu, expanding their rule of Sharia law, veiling has become de rigueur. Women are punished if they put on trousers or the less restrictive dresses that were common before the civil war.

New Yorker readers interested in learning more about the recent history of Somalia can turn to John Lee Anderson’s 2009 Letter from Mogadishu, “The Most Failed State.” Anderson profiled the President of Somalia, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, and laid out the complexities of the milieu in which Farah story is set:

The Shabaab (the name means “the youth”) has ties to Al Qaeda, and in the areas it controls—most of the southern part of the country, including a large swath of Mogadishu—it has imposed its own harsh form of Sharia, or Islamic law, with punishments such as public flogging, stoning, and amputation. Last year, in the port of Kismayo, a young girl accused of adultery was buried up to her neck in the field of a soccer stadium packed with spectators, and then stoned to death; her family said that she was only thirteen years old and had in fact been gang-raped. This summer, in the ancient coastal town of Merka, the Shabaab decreed that gold and silver dental fillings were un-Islamic, and dispatched patrols to yank them out of people’s mouths….

Just a few weeks before our flight to Mogadishu, the Obama Administration had let it be known that it had given Sharif’s government forty tons of arms, and that it intended to send forty tons more. French and U.S. military personnel were also said to be training Somali security forces in nearby Djibouti, where the United States maintains an airfield and a small military force as part of AFRICOM, the U.S. military command for Africa. This was a remarkable turn of events. As recently as two years ago, sending American arms to Sharif would have been unthinkable—he was a Western pariah, the titular head of the Islamic Courts Union, or I.C.U., an amalgam of local Islamic Sharia courts. The Courts, formed to rein in Somalia’s anarchy after years of clan-based warfare, had evolved into an armed movement that encompassed extremists linked to Al Qaeda. The Shabaab itself had grown out of the Courts. Sharif and his allies had taken power by defeating warlords who were supported by the United States.

