Somali women back Islamist militia

Mogadishu: 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 castoffs in a traditional society that demands virginity at marriage.

"Four-year-old girls, five-year-old girls were raped," said Anab Mohammad Isaaq, 35, a solemn, long-faced widow who has two girls among her five children. "I was scared for my daughters."

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 Islamist militias who 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."

"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.

"I think it is even something that the men acknowledge now. Finally."