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12-12-2023
BANI WALID, LIBYA: Salem Doma never imagined that, after escaping government oppression at home in Eritrea, his greatest hardship still lay ahead, in the town of Bani Walid in northwest Libya.
The 23-year-old had travelled through Ethiopia and Sudan before, on October 18, his family received a message from a Sudanese number. It was a video showing Doma being brutally tortured, naked, with his arms and legs bound as he was whipped across his back.
The abductors’ demands were clear: $12,000 from the family in Eritrea, or they would kill their son within a week.
At the time his brother spoke with media, on November 18, the family had managed to scramble together only 140,000 Ethiopian birr (about $2,500), and the clock is still ticking.
His older brother, Hussein, who lives in Ethiopia, is struggling to raise more. All the while, during repeated calls from Bani Walid, he has to listen to his brother’s screams as his abductors torture him.
“My heart breaks for what my brother is feeling, and I fear the traders (kidnappers) will kill him before we can gather the full amount,” Hussein says.
Within Libya’s shifting landscape of militias, refugee detention centres and illegal prisons, Bani Walid, about two hours southeast of Tripoli, has emerged as the pre-eminent hub for ransoming abducted refugees intercepted as they cross Libya.
Numbers are impossible to come by. However, of the 47,000 refugees and migrants estimated to have arrived in Italy from Libya so far this year, many will have spent time being illegally detained in Libya. A large portion of them in Bani Walid.
After two months of detention in brutal conditions, William Siyee, a 38-year-old Nigerian, managed to escape the human smugglers who held him in Bani Walid.
“When I wanted to migrate by rubber boat, I paid 6,000 dinars (approximately $1,100)” to go from the historic town of al-Khums to a new life in Europe, he says.
“It was pitch dark, and I didn’t know the exact destination, but I just wanted to go to Europe to live a decent life.”
Instead, his boat was intercepted by armed men who returned him and the other passengers to Libya. The young Nigerian prayed not to be taken and sold into the neighborhoods of Bani Walid, “the worst place on earth,” he says. (Int’l News Desk)
