🚨 Gender Alert | The Coalition of Somali Human Rights Defenders (CSHRD)
“A Crime That Shatters the Soul: The Case of Fahima and Farah Mohamoud — A Nation’s Crisis of Perverse Sexual Violence, Silence, and Impunity”
27th June 2025
On a single, monstrous night — June 13, 2025 — in the embattled town of Lascanood, perched on the tense fault line between Somalia and Somaliland, two sisters, Fahima Yasiin Mohamoud (16) and Farah Yasiin Mohamoud (17), endured unimaginable horror. Twenty-five young men, some barely older than their victims, descended upon them like a pack of hyenas: beating, torturing, and gang-raping them in an act of savagery that has ripped through the community’s conscience and laid bare the abyss Somalia’s girls live with every day.
Today, Farah lies in a coma in a fragile hospital bed in Mogadishu. Fahima’s mind has fractured under the weight of a terror no child should ever know. Both cling to life, bodies battered and spirits scarred, their futures hijacked by a violence so perverse it defies belief.
Of the twenty-five perpetrators, twenty-one have been arrested — four remain free. But what good are arrests when the air is so thick with impunity that monsters walk the same streets as their prey? The Mayor of Lascanood held a single press briefing, a cold, bureaucratic acknowledgment that something unspeakable happened. Since then, there has been only silence. The kind of silence that allows rapists to re-offend and girls to disappear behind locked doors, forgotten.
Let us be clear: Fahima and Farah are not anomalies. They are the brutal proof of a crisis that stretches from Mogadishu’s IDP camps to the contested borderlands, a crisis that feeds on conflict, displacement, and the decay of law. In 2024 alone, the Coalition of Somali Human Rights Defenders documented over 1,200 cases of sexual and gender-based violence — an ocean of torment that includes rape, forced marriage, and child abuse. In Somaliland alone, over 750 rapes were reported in 2023; more than half were swept under the carpet by informal settlements, clan elders, or corrupt officials, silencing survivors for the sake of “community stability.”
What stability is this, when women and girls fetch water at dawn wondering if they’ll return alive? When mothers bury daughters in shallow graves because they were raped and no one cared enough to protect them? Somalia’s 3.8 million internally displaced people, the majority of them women and girls, live in makeshift camps where darkness is synonymous with danger — and yet, where is the outrage? Where is the justice?
Lascanood is just one wound on a nation’s broken body. Since early 2023, this town has been torn apart by clashes between Somaliland forces and Dhulbahante militias — a tinderbox where women’s bodies become battlefields. Governance has collapsed. The police are undertrained, underpaid, and under the thumb of clan politics. Survivors who dare speak are pressured back into silence. Those who cannot speak — like Farah, breathing through tubes — are simply left behind.
But this must end. Fahima and Farah’s agony must be the line we refuse to cross again.
This is our call:
To the Government of Somalia and Lascanood Authorities:
- Launch an immediate, independent investigation — no more vague statements and empty arrests.
- Deliver full, swift justice for every perpetrator, without clan interference or backroom deals.
- Protect these sisters — and all survivors — with safe shelters, trauma care, and legal aid.
To Parliament and the President:
- Pass and enforce ironclad laws that hold rapists to account.
- Ratify and implement CEDAW and the Maputo Protocol.
- Make the National Action Plan for Women, Peace, and Security more than paper — make it a lifeline.
To Somali Communities:
- Break the silence. Stand with survivors. Demand that traditional leaders condemn rape unequivocally — not excuse it in the name of “honor.”
To Women-Led Organizations:
- Build stronger networks. Raise louder voices. Teach our daughters they deserve protection — and our sons that they will be punished if they harm them.
To the International Community:
- Fund the frontline — women-led, community-rooted organizations that shelter survivors, defend them in court, and speak when governments will not.
The terror that was unleashed on Fahima and Farah cannot be undone. But we can decide — right now — whether it will be repeated or whether it will be the last. Their story must be a wake-up call for Somalia to rise from its silence and shield its girls from a lifetime of fear.
If we do not act, we stand complicit.
If we do not speak, we stand condemned.
If we do not protect, we have already lost.
We stand with Fahima. We stand with Farah. And we stand for a Somalia where every girl’s body is her own — safe, sacred, and never again defiled by silence.
Photo Credit: Internet