On October 16 2011 when Kenya’s armed forces invaded southern Somalia in the middle of a severe famine hoping to eventually capture the port city of Kismayo and cut off what at that time was thought of as the most vital lifeline for the group, Fatma was a 15year old whose main concern was whether the henna she had applied the previous night would hold on to her fingernails for long. She had no idea that within three years, she would be in Somalia training new recruits, going toe-to-toe with people who had committed to protecting the family she had left behind.

I killed. I watched people kill

Fatma

Fatma’s hands are not soft. Her body is not wrapped in layers of baby fat. Her face is kind and her smile bewitching. Her voice sounds like it is suspended in age, stuck somewhere between a tenor and a soprano. Too deep to be a woman’s, but not deep enough to be a man’s.

Her oval eyes are clear. Sometimes she sees you, sometimes she doesn’t. Most of the time, she sees the faces of the five men she shot dead. Her ears are hidden deep behind her head scarf. Sometimes she hears you, sometimes she doesn’t. Most of the time she hears screams from the dozens of men and women she saw beheaded for something as trivial as a refusal to sleep with yet another man.

A burn scar runs across her right forearm. For her though, the scars in her life run deeper than her skin. They are in her soul. In her heart. And most importantly, in her mind. Three years after she came back home, the memories of her life as an Al Shabaab wife have refused to leave her.

“I can never forget what I went through,” she says. Unknown to her, neither can the country she once called home.

She spoke to the Sunday Standard ten days after giving birth to a son whose father remains in the dark about her previous life.

“He knows nothing about me,” she says. Only three men know her story. The first is her father. The second is the man who took her to Somalia. And the third is a Kenya Defence Forces soldier who saved her from the forest then made her his wife.

Her story could start from Mombasa, her place of birth, but it really doesn’t. It starts when she turned 19 and fell in love with a 24 year old food vendor in Mombasa who had a lot more going on than the viazi karai and tamarind juice he sold off the streets.

“He was good to me,” she says. “Treated me right and said all the good things.”

Just months after meeting him, she moved out of home to stay with him in Mombasa’s Bombolulu area. He was giving her all the things she couldn’t get at home.

“He was attentive to my needs. He brought me gifts and listened to me,” she says.

One day, he came from work and said business was not good. And that he wanted to try his luck as a fisherman.

“He said he had friends who were leaving for Lamu by boat and were willing to have us on board,” Fatma says. With all her heart, she followed him. But the boat did not dock in Lamu. It proceeded further north to Kismayo. No fishing happened.

“But I couldn’t ask any questions. He was the man of the house,” she says.

Even when handed her over to a group of strangers and then walked away, she didn’t ask questions. When this second group handed her over to yet another group she chose silence again.

“They had guns. I was in a forested area, I felt helpless,” she says.