Somalia - the Disappeared

On the evening of 26 June 2021, a woman named Ikran Tahlil Farah left her home in Mogadishu after receiving a call from a number she did not recognize. She got into a car. Her family watched her go. They have not seen her since.

Ikran Tahlil Farah was not a dissident or a journalist. She was not an opposition politician or a civil society activist. She was a senior officer of Somalia's National Intelligence and Security Agency -- NISA -- serving as the head of its cyber security division. She was, by any definition, someone the Somali state was supposed to protect.

Her disappearance has never been officially explained. No body has been found. No investigation has been publicly disclosed. No one has been held accountable. As of today, Ikran Tahlil Farah is a disappeared person -- one of thousands in Somalia's history, and one of the most recent.

Her case would be shocking in isolation. In the context of Somalia's fifty-five-year history of enforced disappearance, it is a continuation.