Beaten and conscripted into Putin’s army: a Somali refugee attempts to reach Europe

A year ago, the Somali journalist Ilyas Ahmad Elmi set out for Europe. He had been repeatedly threatened by jihadi extremists at home, and hoped to make it to Germany, where he planned to seek asylum and be with his eight-year-old son.

“I left because I wanted to see my son, who I’ve never met … and because I had received threats,” said Elmi, in a telephone interview.

Elmi flew to Russia and then travelled over land to Belarus, from where he aimed to cross the border into Poland, often considered a safer route to Europe than the Mediterranean.

But instead of a secure route into the EU, Elmi instead suffered months of hardship. He recounts being beaten up by border guards, forced to spend weeks living in a forest and watching a young Somali woman in his group die from lack of medical attention.

In desperation, he says, he went back to Russia, with the hope of crossing into Finland. But before he could reach the border area, he was arrested and coerced into joining the Russian army. He was told he would be trained at a camp with many other irregular migrants to Russia, and sent to fight in Ukraine.

He refused, and now faces deportation, but still hopes for an intervention that would allow him to go to Germany or another safe country.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of the whole ordeal for Elmi is that he made it into EU territory on two occasions, crossing the border from Belarus into Poland. Both times he was forcefully pushed back into Belarus by Polish border guards, a common practice that rights activists say is illegal and inhumane.

As the conversation on migration in much of the EU moves further to the right, the story provides a remarkable illustration of the unintended consequences of Europe’s harsh border policies, whereby a person seeking shelter on the EU’s doorstep can instead be pushed towards Vladimir Putin’s war machine.

The turning point: “I fainted…in fear”

Elmi thought his decade-long history of journalistic work and the threats he had received at home would be sufficient to make a claim for asylum. He had worked as a journalist in difficult conditions for years; an international human rights worker who asked not to be named recalled assisting him back in 2010, when he was forced to flee his home town in Beledweyne region, when it was taken over by the jihadist group al-Shabaab.

In 2015, there was an al-Shabaab raid on the town where Elmi lived, his former wife Muna said in a telephone interview. “I was frightened stiff and really didn’t know what to do. I was pregnant and feared for my child,” she said. “I saw some people leaving the town and left with them … I didn’t think my husband survived the attack. And I just ran away.” She lived initially in Nairobi, before travelling to Norway and then Germany, where she and her son received refugee status.

Elmi stayed behind, working at different jobs before taking up his most recent journalistic role in Mogadishu, where he was head of programmes and social media for the state television network, SNTV. He said he received frequent threats from anonymous phone numbers on his mobile phone. In late 2021, an al-Shabaab suicide bomber killed his friend, the Radio Mogadishu director, Abdiaziz Mohamud Guled. The incident was a turning point. “I fainted that night in fear and couldn’t continue working,” he said.

Shermarke Mohammed, the former director of SNTV, was also in the car with Guled. He was injured in the blast, and now lives in Europe. “Somali journalists face a daily threat to their lives,” he said, in a telephone interview, adding that he believed Elmi “had to leave the country to save himself”.

Elmi left Somalia and spent some time in Kenya, before obtaining a Russian visa and flying to Moscow, having heard about the supposedly safe route via Russia to the EU. When he arrived with a group of other Somalis to the Belarus-Poland border area late last summer, he realised the crossing would not be so easy. The terrain is thickly forested, and Poland had erected a wall along parts of the border, making it hard to cross.

“We were drinking rainwater, and picking up bits of food where we could find it, mainly grass and fruits growing out of trees, which were extremely sour. Every morning Belarusian authorities would come and beat and harass people,” he recalled.

When his group did make it into Poland, the Polish guards beat some of the refugees, and forced them back across into Belarus. There, the Belarusian guards refused to let people leave the border area, meaning people were often stuck in a thickly forested border zone for weeks on end.

“It’s the most frequent scenario,” said Małgorzata Rycharska, a Polish rights activist who works to help people stuck in the border zone. “Someone gets to Belarus and tries to go to Poland, then they realise it’s a trap and they can be stuck there for weeks or months in that border area, they can’t go back because the Belarusians don’t allow them.”

The Guardian first made contact with Elmi in September last year, when he had finally been allowed to leave the border area and was hiding out near Minsk. He recounted how a fellow Somali, 20-year-old Sadia Mohamed Mohamud, had died before his eyes after being pushed back from Poland twice and then mistreated by Belarusian border guards. Finally, the Belarusians called an ambulance, but it was too late for her.

“Of all the time in Somalia with bombings, and civil war, I’d never felt more fear than in Belarus,” said Elmi.

“My child hasn’t ever seen his father”

Hiding from Belarusian authorities and fearful that his health would not survive another attempt to make it into Poland, Elmi heard news on the grapevine that a route had opened overland from Russia into Finland, and he decided to try that way. He crossed from Belarus to Russia without any checks, but close to the Finnish border he was apprehended by Russian police, and arrested as his Russian visa had long since expired.

“While I was in prison and waiting for deportation, officers from the [Russian] ministry of defence came to us and offered us the opportunity to avoid deportation and work for the army for one year,” said Elmi. His main priority was not to be deported, and the officers had promised six months of training. He thought that during this time he would be able to explain his background as a journalist and claim asylum.

After he signed a Russian-language contract that he could not understand, he was swiftly sent to a training camp in southern Russia. There were many Somalis, Syrians and people from all over the world at the camp, and the men lived in tents, despite the fiercely cold weather.

The promises of six months of training turned out to be false. “We were told that we would have two weeks of training and then go to war in Ukraine,” he said. Some decided to stay and fight for Russia, but Elmi and a few others refused. He was sent back to a pre-deportation holding facility in Rostov region.

He was later released and allowed to launch an asylum application, but that has been rejected, and he faces deportation or being reconsigned to the detention facility at any moment.

Elmi has spent the past months contacting numerous organisations and press freedom groups; they have either told him they cannot help, or said they could help only when he is already on European territory. He hopes that he might find a way to make it to Germany eventually. Although he is separated from his ex-wife Muna, they remain in contact, and she told the Guardian she would appreciate having him in Germany. “My child hasn’t ever seen his father. It would be important to have him nearby,” she said.

On the Poland-Belarus border, pushbacks remain a frequent measure used by Polish border guards, despite a new liberal government led by Donald Tusk replacing the old populist Law and Justice government last October. Earlier this year, a pregnant woman from Eritrea was forced to give birth alone in the forested area between Poland and Belarus. On Friday, the government passed a law allowing border guards to use weapons against people trying to cross.

“The huge hope that things would really change was based on beautiful declarations of many politicians, but it turned out to be false,” said Rycharska.