BY THE time Mohamed Abdi Ibrahim decided to leave Somalia, life in the southern city of Kismaayo had become, as he put it with consummate understatement, "complicated". Young men there had long shouldered AK-47 assault rifles and joined clan militias. But as an Islamist militia known as al-Shabab took control this year, it had become a place where boys were paid $50 to throw bombs, soccer fields served as militia training camps and Islamist leaders walked into classrooms to take names of potential recruits.
Ibrahim and two friends fled a few months ago, just after the Shabab began beating people not attending prayers and just before it publicly stoned to death a 13-year-old girl for adultery.
"For us, it was not good to join," said Ibrahim, a lanky 22-year-old who fled to this overflowing refugee camp across the Kenyan border. "Because if we join one side, the other side will hunt us and kill us."
The scenario unfolding in Somalia is the very one a US-backed Ethiopian invasion nearly two years ago had been intended to thwart: a takeover by radical Islamists. At the time, Ethiopian forces ousted a relatively diverse Islamic movement that had briefly gained control of Mogadishu. In its place, they installed a transitional government headed by a warlord who allowed the US to launch counterterrorism operations in the moderate Muslim nation. But the policy backfired, inspiring a relentless insurgency of clan militias and Islamist fighters that has left Somalia's first central government since 1991 near collapse.
The two-year insurgency has energised the most radical Islamist faction, the Shabab ("youth" in Arabic) - designated by the US as a terrorist organisation. Rallying young men with anti-Ethiopian rhetoric and a ticket to paradise, the group advanced this year across much of southern Somalia, including the capital, Mogadishu. Analysts predict the Shabab will extend its control after the Ethiopians withdraw, which they have promised to do within weeks.
The US and United Nations are now supporting a political settlement that shifts power from the transitional government under president Abdullahi Yusuf to an opposition coalition that includes some Islamist leaders cast as extremists two years ago and clan leaders excluded by Yusuf's government. But the situation on the ground - and in swelling refugee camps such as this one in Dadaab - suggests the Shabab is gaining strength. "Young people . . . were joining every day," Ibrahim said. "They would tell them to fight for your religion, fight for your land, and they'd also give them money - they were difficult to resist."
It was morning in Dadaab, and Ibrahim was standing with his two friends, Mohamed Shuep (25) and Hussein Hassan Adan (16) in a huge, sweaty crowd - the same sort of exhausted, frustrated crowd that gathers every day at the barbed-wire edge of the camp. Their growing number is a testament to what Somalia has become: a place from which to escape.
Out of a population of nine million, more than one million have fled their homes, preferring drought-stricken regions to the crossfire of militias battling for control of Mogadishu and other areas. Attacks on aid workers have made humanitarian assistance almost impossible.
Hundreds of thousands more have abandoned the country. At least 20,000 have taken their chances this year aboard rickety boats bound for Yemen, and many more have travelled on foot or in stifling smugglers' trucks that bring about 5,000 people to this camp each month.
Built in 1991 to accommodate 90,000 people fleeing Somalia's last civil war, Dadaab is now a sprawl of more than 220,000 refugees - a desert limbo land of rounded stick huts and overburdened water taps emblematic of more than a decade of failed governments and peace initiatives.
Ibrahim and his friends arrived a few months back. Like many young men, they left extended families behind and began their journeys alone, walking and hitchhiking toward Kenya. They became friends in the Somali border town of Dobley, where they worked in a restaurant, and shared scraps of food and the shelter of a tree at night. They paid their way on to a smuggler's truck crowded with people and goats. It took four nights and a shakedown by bandits to reach Dadaab.
It took four months of waiting for the three youths to reach a pre-pre-registration area, where they were standing on a recent day, hands on each other's shoulders.Mostly, people here just wait. They wait to be registered, for food, for their leaders to stop fighting so they can go home. A bus here has the word "wait" painted on its side like an omen.
There is a straw-roofed shelter inside the camp where men have passed years waiting - playing cards, arguing over politics and following the rise, fall and rise again of the Islamists on the BBC.
"There is no hope for Somalia," said Abdi Ahmed Mohamed, who was 23 when he arrived here in 1991 during the civil war. "All the people who could do something for their country are here as refugees. Pretty soon, they're going to be fighting over empty land." - (LA Times-Washington Post service)