‘He was brainwashed’: young men are disappearing from Zanzibar. Are extremists to blame?

At least 20 men have gone missing from the island since August. But a culture of concealment around terrorism means families have been left to guess at their fate

At 10am on 16 August, police in Zanzibar received a missing person’s report concerning a man who had left his home on the island for an “unknown destination”. It was the first of seven reports the police would receive that month of men between the ages of 19 and 36 who had mysteriously vanished from the Tanzanian archipelago.

Their families have been left to piece together events that may have led to their relatives’ sudden and unexplained departure. Common patterns about the disappearances have emerged. Before they left, they had all grown more solitary, more hardline about their religious beliefs, concerned about increasing “moral indecency” on the island, and keen on the teachings of Aboud Rogo Mohammed, a radical Islamist cleric from Kenya. Rogo, who was killed in 2012, had wide influence across east Africa and had been linked by the UN to the Somali militant group al-Shabaab.

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