Aisha got her first call from the terrorists when she was fourteen. It was 2013, and she was at home, in Mogadishu, Somalia, when an unknown number appeared on her phone. She picked up. The man on the other end told her that Islam does not allow women to play sports, or to wear shirts and pants. It was immodest and indecent, he said. His voice was harsh and menacing. He told her that he was going to kill her if she didn’t stop playing basketball. The next day, another man called to say the same thing.

Aisha changed her phone number three times, but the calls kept coming, and she became convinced that someone at the mobile-phone company was giving out her contact information. After a while, Aisha began to argue with the callers, telling them that she was going to do whatever she wanted. When they threatened to kill her, she responded that only God was permitted to be in control of people’s souls. She was just a teen-age girl, but even she knew that—unlike these supposedly pious men. Then her mother started getting calls, from men who warned that she was going to lose a daughter. Trying to appeal to her faith, they told her that basketball was haram—forbidden. Her mother was worried, and wanted Aisha to stop playing.

Aisha had first picked up a basketball only recently, but she had taken to it quickly. Her phone filled with photos and videos of the basketball player she most wanted to emulate: a famous American athlete named LeBron James. She had seen James on the Internet and found him mesmerizing. “He is black and tall and a really nice player,” she said. He was powerful and agile, endlessly clever. She wanted to have that kind of magic.

In a way, she felt destined for the game. Her mother, Warsan, had played when she was younger. Her father, Khaled, had worked as a referee in Somali basketball leagues, and she had gone to his games. “To see women and men playing, it was inspiring,” Aisha recalled. She began joining pickup games in tan-dirt lots around her house with kids who lived in her neighborhood. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she didn’t care; it was exciting just to hold a ball. “I always wanted to play basketball, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t find girls who would want to play with me,” she said. Not long after, a coach named Nasro Mohamed, a former teammate of her mother’s, asked if she was interested in playing regularly. Mohamed got Aisha together with seven other girls to start practicing.

Mogadishu was once a beautiful place, with pale, handsome government offices, mosques, and grand homes, all angling for proximity to the white beaches at the edge of the Indian Ocean. Now, after more than two decades of civil war and lawlessness, the buildings are riddled with bullet and shell holes, or crumbling from neglect, or newly built and characterless; the streets, where sand pools in the cracks, are filled with soldiers and policemen.

Aisha grew up in Suuq Bacaad, a neighborhood of low bungalows behind gates with bright, peeling paint. Her father had four wives and divided his time between them, but he managed to be with Aisha enough for her to feel loved. Her family wasn’t rich, but had enough money to get by. “My parents really worked hard to make sure that I had everything I needed,” she recalled. Aisha had two brothers and a sister, and she took it for granted that each member of the family would look out for the others. Even her neighborhood functioned like a clan: she played hide-and-seek with other children, some of whom were as close to her as siblings.

Warsan ran a café and a business that sold gold. She was tall and gentle, and never hit her children, as other mothers in the neighborhood did. She understood Aisha’s passion for basketball, because she’d once had the same need to play. Khaled supported Aisha, too, visiting her on the court and urging her to take the game seriously. Somalia has a club league, in which hundreds of girls and women play on eight teams in Mogadishu and several more in other parts of the country; the best players are recruited for the national team. “My father told me, ‘Either leave basketball or aspire to be a professional,’ ” Aisha said.

For Aisha, the best part of the day was going with her friends to a neighborhood court. In school, she was easily distracted. “I was not good with the teachers,” she said. “I never stopped talking and telling jokes. I annoyed everyone.” When she was in the eighth grade, she stopped going to school altogether. Her parents were upset; they had both gone to university and prioritized education for their children. They tried to force her to go back, but Aisha refused. “I didn’t feel like it was necessary for me to continue,” she told me. And, anyway, there was a civil war raging, and the future was impossible to predict.

Somalia ceased to be a coherent state in 1991, when its dictator, Siad Barre, was deposed by rebel militias. Barre, who had taken power in a military coup two decades before, had treated opponents brutally, but had also attempted to modernize the country. He moved to end the lineage-based clan, which traditionally defined politics in Somalia, by imposing a nationalist form of socialism. He codified a written form of the Somali language, which had been exclusively oral, and introduced a countrywide literacy program. His government promoted women’s rights, enabling women’s basketball to flourish; the national team played at the Pan Arab Games, and travelled to Iraq, Jordan, and Morocco.

A decade of lawlessness followed Barre’s fall, until the Islamic Courts Union, a group of Sharia courts backed by militias, assumed power. They took a harsh view of crime: thieves’ limbs were amputated, adulterers were stoned, and murderers were executed. Sports were declared satanic acts, and Somalis caught watching games on television were arrested; girls couldn’t go to stadiums to watch basketball, handball, or track and field, let alone compete in them. But, as the country reacted to the uncertainty with increasing conservatism, the Sharia courts had popular support. After a U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion disbanded them, in 2006, a faction of their militias called al-Shabaab, or “the Youth,” rose up in response. It was even more extreme than the courts: when its members caught Somalis involved in sports, they sometimes killed them.

For five years, al-Shabaab fought bloody skirmishes for control of Mogadishu and the surrounding regions. Soldiers from the African Union, a continental organization, battled against them, with help from Somali clan militias. The United States, eager to fight terror but reluctant to send in its own troops, provided aid to the A.U. soldiers’ home countries and often ignored their human-rights abuses. Finally, in 2011, the coalition took back control of Mogadishu.

But the militants just went underground, vying with government forces neighborhood by neighborhood. (The U.S. has also conducted a clandestine campaign through Special Forces and private contractors.) Somalis still endured terror attacks near their homes and at their weddings and funerals. Government officials allegedly paid off clan militias and al-Shabaab leaders to keep their positions, and to stay alive. Drone strikes and indiscriminate neighborhood raids left young people distrustful of the government. The Islamic State has attempted to gain influence, with insurgents trying to establish outposts on the coast.

For ordinary Somalis, the terrorists and the military were both menaces, not to be trusted. Last year, a friend took me to an outdoor restaurant in Mogadishu called Beach View, which al-Shabaab had attacked a few months before. Militants drove a car filled with explosives into the adjoining hotel, and then ran into the restaurant, shooting. Patrons hid under the tables and in the kitchen; some fled to the beach, only to die on the sand. At least twenty people were killed. But when I visited there was no sign of mourning. People crowded the tables, laughing, eating seafood, taking selfies. Past the balcony, children played on the beach and, out at sea, families were piled into wooden boats for sunset rides. While they lasted on this earth, Somalis would not be denied the few pleasures it had to offer them.

Aisha divided her time between her mother’s house and her sister’s house, in a neighborhood targeted by al-Shabaab because it contained a police station. When I visited her there, my driver was nervous, and said that he wouldn’t wait longer than a few minutes; he soon left without me. The house was bright blue, with a courtyard that had turned muddy from steady rain overnight. On the porch, Aisha’s cousins were braiding their hair, pulling on head scarves, drinking tea. A faint, melodic call to prayer came from outside the gate. The room where Aisha slept was off the porch. Dim and drowsy, the room had one window with half-open blue shutters; a crookedly hung drape blew in a weak breeze. Two mattresses with the sheets pushed aside were on the floor, and we settled on top of them.

Aisha was seventeen, with an expressive face and a gold nose ring so tiny that it took a few long looks to notice it. She described herself as “always happy,” and she had a compulsive need to say what she thought and felt. She talked constantly, in a scratchy, high voice, while gesturing with her hands; at practice, her coach regularly threatened to kick her out if she didn’t stop talking. She was slight, and I observed that she seemed small for basketball. “There are a lot of players who are short and really good,” she said. “The playing should be from your heart and not dependent on how tall you are.” She had a game that night, and she offered to point out a girl who was tall but didn’t know how to shoot.

When Aisha started playing, she didn’t have the right clothes or shoes. Nasro Mohamed, her first coach, helped her get the equipment, and she was grateful. “When you have the kind of passion I have for basketball, everything else is kind of blurry,” she said. If she didn’t have money to take a minibus to the court, she asked neighbors for help or called teammates to see if anyone could pick her up. “I go beyond everything just to get to the court,” she said.

Nasro Mohamed, who was in her late forties, had fair skin and mirthful eyes behind glasses with hot-pink frames. She had grown up in southern Somalia and come to Mogadishu as a teen-ager to play for a team called Jeenyo, one of the best at the time. “We would go from our houses to the basketball court wearing shorts and Afros—and then we would go home around midnight still wearing whatever we wore to the court,” Mohamed told me. Now, she said, “people take religion as everything. They tell you to cover yourself, force it on you.”

During the fighting, Mohamed left for the United Arab Emirates. When she returned, in 2012, she got involved again with women’s basketball, which was struggling. “I came back and took about thirty girls and trained them,” she said. It was not easy to protect the girls. “A lot of girls want to play, but they’re scared,” Mohamed said. “If you don’t wear the hijab, people will start talking on the street, and you always have to be alert because at the court you don’t know who could kill you because you’re wearing trousers.”

Aisha’s former teammate Amaal began playing with the encouragement of a friend, a lively, well-liked girl named Faiza. One day, before a game, al-Shabaab militants arrived at Faiza’s house. They took her to an empty lot and tortured her, cutting her body and face with shards of glass, shaved her head, and then left her to die. “It made me really scared for my life,” Amaal recalled. “You put your life in danger in this country because of the thing that you love.”

When Amaal joined Mohamed’s group, she was apprehensive, but she went to the gym to work out every morning, and then met up with the others in the afternoon. “It made me stronger,” Amaal said. “I used to be at the house doing nothing—I never had any friends. Basketball lets me know more about myself. I’m around women who are passionate, who are my friends.” She hid that she played, even from relatives and friends, because she didn’t know whom she could trust. She was still piecing her life back together: her family had lost its house during the fighting and moved into a refugee camp. But Amaal was determined. “To have a dream and wear pants and a shirt and hold a basketball—there’s nothing stronger to me,” she said. “To think about what I want for myself and to do it.”

Once Aisha had learned the fundamentals from Mohamed, she flitted among teams in the club league. She played with single girls, married women, mothers, students. They were mostly in their teens and early twenties, and they talked and joked like sisters. Aisha’s teammates were energetic and scrappy, a mix of experienced players and novices. In a game I saw, one short girl kept stealing the ball to take shot after shot, missing nearly all of them, with a wide grin on her face. When a player on the other team made a three-pointer, she went over to congratulate her. Aisha, by contrast, had a pugilistic intensity; she was constantly moving and scheming. She was a center, the most physical position on the court.

On a team called Heegan, Aisha made friends with two outgoing, adventurous girls named Salma and Bushra. One evening, after practice, the three of them hailed a tuk-tuk, one of the yellow rickshaw taxis that crash through Mogadishu’s streets, and told the driver their destination. On the way, the driver took a wrong turn and then stopped. Aisha leaned forward and asked him where he was going. He told her that something was wrong with the vehicle, and that he was calling for help. Another man approached, holding a gun. “You girls are infidels,” the man told them. “You’re playing sports and walking on the street wearing pants.” He aimed the gun at Salma, and she jumped up and lunged for the weapon. But he fired and the bullet grazed Bushra’s leg. The girls managed to call over a policeman. After they breathlessly told him what had happened, he took the men to jail.

Later, the police had a press conference announcing the arrest of the man with the gun; he had admitted to planning several bombings in the city. Aisha watched the announcement on television. “He is still in prison today,” she said with satisfaction. But there were others, all over the city, who shared his views.

Mogadishu is a hard place to go unnoticed; there are always eyes watching you as you make your way through the city. In sidewalk cafés, men gather to talk and argue at all hours, drinking tea, smoking hookah, and chewing khat. Women linger nearby, selling food from stalls. They all keep watch on the street, observing passersby and the events of the day. They can be friendly, willing to offer help if a car bomb goes off. Or they can be hostile. People in Mogadishu speak of spies—neighbors, colleagues, friends, family—who report to al-Shabaab.

Women have learned where in the city to cover themselves with burqas, and where to pretend that they don’t play sports, in order to leave with their lives. The girls in the league played in pants and shirts, but many wore niqabs to and from the court, shielding their faces to show piety and to keep from being recognized. Aisha refused to wear one. “I don’t care,” she said. “I just show my face.”

When I met Aisha, she was playing for a club team called O.F.C. Late one afternoon, at her sister’s house, she was getting ready for practice. In her bedroom, Aisha looked like the embodiment of a feminine Somali woman, wearing a long floral skirt, a pale blouse, and a dark floral-print head scarf. She then walked across the room to rummage through a red suitcase. She stripped off the skirt, the blouse, and the head scarf, and replaced them with a red cotton tank top and a sky-blue jersey with the number ten on the back. (She was already wearing matching track pants under her skirt, as she usually did.) She retied the head scarf, knotting it like a bun, instead of letting it drape around her shoulders in the traditional way. Next, she pulled on a floor-length skirt and a mustard-yellow jilbab, which covered her head but left her face exposed. She was ready to make her way to the court to play ball.

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Source: The new Yorker