Wednesday February 27, 2019
Eight years after fleeing war in Somalia, Ifrah Ahmed returned to her ravaged homeland with a mission - to end the “silent killer” of female genital mutilation.
Somalia has the world’s highest rate of FGM, affecting 98 percent of women, but Ahmed is undaunted by the challenge.
“Somalia is still dangerous, and I’m at risk from people who don’t like what I’m doing, but I always say if I can save one girl’s life, I will stay,” said the dual Irish-Somali citizen who has been based in Mogadishu since 2014.
Ahmed’s extraordinary journey from refugee to award-winning global activist has been turned into a film, “A Girl From Mogadishu”, expected to be released later this year.
“I can’t change what happened to me, but I don’t want any other girl to go through it,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Dublin where the film premiered at the city’s International Film Festival on Friday.
The film tells how Ahmed, now 30, was cut when she was eight years old with her sisters and cousins. When she was 13 she was raped by soldiers and underwent FGM again. She later escaped child marriage to a man three times her age.
At 17, she traveled to Ethiopia, nearly falling prey to a trafficker reputed to sell girls into slavery in Saudi Arabia.
Another man intervened, promising to get her on a flight to the United States to join her aunt, but when the plane landed Ahmed discovered she was in Ireland, a country she had never heard of.
She spoke no English and knew nobody, but within six years she had galvanized a campaign against FGM, leading to Ireland outlawing the practice in 2012.
Ahmed now has her sights set on Somalia, where the prime minister has appointed her his gender advisor.
Her campaigning has brought the long-taboo subject into the mainstream media, earning her the nickname IfrahFGM.“THREE SORROWS”
Somalia practices the most extreme form of FGM in which the clitoris and labia are removed and the vaginal opening sewn up, leaving a small hole for menstruation and urination.
Ahmed’s grandmother called it “the three feminine sorrows” - the first is the cut, the second the wedding night, the third childbirth.
Girls are cut in groups and remain for weeks in a hut with their legs bound together while the wounds heal.
Urination was agony, said Ahmed. One of the girls next to her died from an infection because she could not urinate.