How Shabaab cut short my journalism career and made me an asylum seeker

Sakarie Nour Farah, 31, was a journalist who enjoyed his job in Somalia. Despite being one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist, he never expected the danger to end up on his doorstep.

“I was already used to hardship, so survival was a daily routine. You, kind of, get used to it,” he told the Nation last week, referring to his work as a reporter for Garowe Online, one of Somalia’s media outlets that runs a news website and has a radio station.

Throughout his career, he has worked in 12 towns in Somalia, including Mogadishu, LasAnod, Galkaayo, Garowe and Bosaso areas.

He also worked for Goobjoog, another media outlet in Somalia.

Then al-Shabaab started threatening him. The stories he was covering, he says, did not sit well with the militant group.

The militants are notorious for targeting journalists who are either critical of the group or who report on aspects of the news that the group considers taboo.

At worst, they assassinate those who refuse to toe the line. 

In the last 14 years, they have targeted more than 50 journalists who have paid the ultimate price, according to press freedom lobbyists.

Sakarie fled before things got worse. But that meant he had to seek refuge elsewhere, which meant he became an asylum seeker, something he says he did not plan. Things happened very quickly last year.

As the threats mounted, he had to decide whether to give up something he enjoyed doing for safety, or stay and pay the price.

He chose the former and found himself in the queue for asylum in Ireland.

"I arrived in Ireland at the height of the housing crisis, due to a mass influx of refugees into the country, mainly from Ukraine," he told the Nation in an interview from Ireland, where he shares a room with two other refugees while they wait to be processed.

For a month and a half, he lived in a Dublin hotel that housed hundreds of new arrivals.  There, Sakarie found he had to queue for food and laundry.

In Somalia, despite the hardship and danger, Sakarie had his home, friends and relatives he could call and share a meal with and certainly a regular pay cheque.

"Back home, I had my room in the family house, food served to me and my clothes washed without me having to ask. It was a new experience, a difficult one," he lamented.

Ireland, like most European countries, has taken in thousands of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war in their country since February 2022, when Russia invaded.

As he queued for his turn, he was competing with around 1,000 other asylum seekers who were left homeless after the Irish government announced it had exhausted its capacity to house the new arrivals from as early as December.

Ireland is currently hosting some 101,585 people, mainly those fleeing the war in Ukraine and International Protection (IP) applicants, which is usually a group of people fleeing one form of persecution or another.

According to Irish government figures, there are 74,955 Ukrainians who have sought refuge in Ireland.

Torn between a rock and a hard place, Sakarie believes that sharing a room and waiting his luck in Ireland is safer than sticking his neck out on the streets of Mogadishu to be cut off by al-Shabaab.

In Ireland, after an exhausting wait, he was moved from the hotel to a camp within the country, where he now shares a room with three other asylum seekers.

"Thankfully, I don't have to look over my shoulder or ignore unknown callers. This place is safe, but life is hard for people like me who grew up in comfortable homes," he says.

But old habits die hard. After relocating, Sakarie volunteered at a local community radio station, where he launched a weekly Somali-language programme focusing on the lives of refugees from the Horn of Africa country.

"The initial feedback is that Somalis in Ireland appreciate the programme. Most of them only understand one language: Somali, and they are happy that someone is giving them information in their language."