A youth awareness organization called the Somali Youth Advocacy Organization (SYAO) based in Nairobi and Mogadishu started to awaken the Somali youth on Facebook and Pal talk chat in an attempt to connect youth in the diaspora as well as within the country to fight the misleading ideas coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
SYAO started this activity earlier this month and immediately successfully spread the idea to over 1700 registered youths on Facebook and Pal talk pages. “We are discussing with the youths how they can face these wrong ideas and we talk about the ongoing war against Al Qaeda and how to improve stability in our country after 20 years of civil war” said Mohamed Ali, the chairman of SYAO.
Mr. Mohamed said that most of the registered youths live in the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Kenya and refugee camps in Kenya. “We mostly discuss how to behave towards the extremist group Al Shabab and how they influence youths with these wrong ideas. We link the discussion pages with YouTube videos that show how dangerous this group is.” said Mohamed.
Although the youths outside of the country are often misled by clerics in European countries, we encourage all of them to keep on the right track and we have achieved to strengthen the youth’s support for peace and a governing system. Mohamed told these things to the media after yesterday he held a symposium about how parents can protect their children from being used in a war and even suicide.
“We hope that our effort to connect the Somali youth becomes a success in the near future and I request the youth to overthrow the Al Qaeda linked group Al Shabab in a popular uprising” said Mohamed, “We have had cartoonists show the wrong behaviour of Al Shabab and we have shown the youth how wrong these things are.”
This campaign for an uprising by the Somali youth to overthrow the Shabab was first launched on Facebook and Pal talk, but right now it is nothing but this. At this time the most important things are creating awareness of the problem and to stop the youth from joining Al Shabab.