Somalia: Sometimes, the women here said, it began with a knock on the door after dark or with a kidnapping in broad daylight. And sometimes, the gunmen who ruled this city would use a long, sharp knife to slice open the tin shacks of poor families and snatch their daughters away.
The girls would return - if they returned - in the morning, sobbing and marked permanently as cast-offs in a traditional Islamic society that demands virginity at marriage.
An epidemic of sexual violence during 15 years of lawlessness in Somalia was among the factors that strengthened opposition to this city's notorious warlords, residents said. The Islamic militias that drove them out in months of recent fighting were embraced as keepers of public order, as a force strong enough, and pious enough, to keep Mogadishu's daughters safe.
That helped the militias win the support of Mogadishu's increasingly influential women who, in recent years, had joined the job market en masse to support their families in the midst of a collapsing economy.
"Women were doing what men used to do here," said Shariff Osman (45), dean of the faculty at Mogadishu University. "They were paying the bills."
When fighting broke out in January, the airwaves suddenly were full of angry denunciations of the secular warlords and support for the Islamic militias fighting them. Most of the callers were women, said Somalis who monitored the political upheaval as it played out on radio talk-shows.
And though it was guns and not words that chased away the warlords, the intensity of the public revulsion for them provided crucial support for the Islamic militias as they advanced through this oceanside capital.
"Somalia was saved because of the Somali women," said Khadija O Ali (47), founder of a women's group here and a graduate student in conflict resolution at George Mason University.
In absence of a central government - the last one fell to the warlords in 1991 - city leaders chose to deal with these problems by establishing traditional Islamic courts, with one overseeing the members of each of the city's dozen or so leading families.
The courts relied on Islamic law, which calls for thieves' hands to be amputated, murderers to be publicly executed and rapists to either die or face public lashings.
Few dispute there has been a dramatic decline in crime in Mogadishu since the fall of the warlords on June 5th, though without a police force, there are no crime statistics.
But not all women say their stature has grown as the country moves toward Islamic law.
Ubah Mohamed (34), a widow with seven children, was among the women who joined Mogadishu's workforce. But she said the beauty shop she opened a decade ago has been losing regular customers, falling from more than 300 to about 100, as radical Islamic values appear to be gaining wider acceptance.
"The militias patrol our areas looking to see if girls are going out with boys," she said.
"So the girls don't come to beauty salons like ours."
In a city where residents report that public viewing of the World Cup has been curbed, she predicted beauty shops, including hers, would be closed.
Anab Isaaq, a widow with five children, has mixed feelings about the changes in Somalia. She would rather have remained home with her children, as her mother did, she said, but was forced to sell clothes from door to door.
Her two daughters - Nasteexo (10) and Hamsa (7) - also spent most of their time at home because Isaaq forbade them to walk alone outside.
She grimly recalled seeing the body of a girl of about four, the relative of a neighbour, who had been raped and killed. But now Isaaq revels in watching her daughters leave the house, hand in hand and without her.
For the first time since she had them, Isaaq said, she worries not at all.
- (LA Times-Washington Post Service)