Somalia's al-Shabaab militant group is recruiting thousands of soldiers, but it also needs people to perform public services in areas under its control.
Anyone who tries to escape faces execution.
At the same time, the government is trying to encourage defectors and run rehabilitation centers to help them reintegrate into society.
Three of them sit across from me in a dark room.
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Ibrahim is on the left. His look is full of confidence, sunglasses tucked into a striped polo shirt, a large watch on his wrist and big brown eyes shining from under his baseball cap. He says he is 35 years old.
Mulid is in the middle. He is thin, wearing yellow flip flops to match the yellow T-shirt. He is 28 years old.
Ahmed is on the right. He has a neatly trimmed beard and his head is wrapped in a keffiyeh scarf. He wears a sky blue shirt with a sky blue t-shirt underneath. He is 40 years old.
They have a grievance.
They don't like the breakfast on offer at this safe house, behind the wire fence of Mogadishu International Airport.
“It's not our normal food, like pancakes and beans. We don't like bottled water. We like simple life and simple water," says Ahmed.
Unfortunately, the airport tries to please international tastes. There's pizza, steaks, beer, not Somali traditional cuisine.
I start telling them that I won't use their real names, I won't photograph them, and I won't write about anything that might endanger them or that they don't want to talk about.
Ibrahim interrupts me.
"We are not afraid to tell our life stories. Ask us anything you want. You can take pictures of us and use our real names."
However, I still decide not to photograph them and not to use their real names, because I fear for their lives.
That's because they all defected from the violent Islamist group al-Shabaab, which has existed for more than a decade and controls large parts of Somalia, enforcing strict rules and punishments.
The group established a parallel administration, with ministries, police and a judicial system.
It runs schools and health centers, irrigates the land and repairs roads and bridges, and they need people to do those jobs.
The penalty for desertion is death. Al Shabaab told me that this punishment applies to anyone who leaves the group without permission, not just fighters.
"The only reason I joined al-Shabaab was money," says Ahmed, the most straightforward of the three.
"They paid me 200 to 300 dollars a month. I was in charge of their transportation system in my area."
Ibrahim rubs the fingertips of his right hand with quick movements to symbolize money.
“And I joined them for the cash. I was an Al-Shabaab soldier for three years. When you're in it, you enjoy it."
"What I didn't enjoy when I was in al-Shabaab was the way they tried to brainwash me.
Every two weeks they sent a brainwashing team to our battalion who sat with us for hours reciting verses from the Koran and repeating over and over how the government, the African Union and their other international allies are infidels and apostates."
"It was like having al-Shabaab sim cards inserted into our brains."
The three say that although they were brainwashed by that indoctrination, they realized that the group was not fighting for a purer, better form of Islam, but for a perverted, deviant version.
It was no longer enough that the militants paid them in money.
But the decision to desert was terrifying, they tell me.
First came the escape itself, then the long, lonely march out of Al-Shabaab-controlled territory.
"In the beginning, I was walking at night, while my feet were pierced by thorns," Ahmed says.
"Fortunately, I had a phone, so I contacted the family. They found someone I could trust, and he took me to a safer place.
This went on for days, and fear gripped me with every step I took. I was terrified that they would stop me and send me to certain death, to be executed in a public place, because that's what al-Shabaab does with defectors."
But there was also fear of what would happen on the other side, as older militants told recruits that Somali security forces would torture deserters with electric shocks.
Most of them do not know that there are government amnesty or rehabilitation centers where they are "re-educated" and reintegrated into society.
There is an initiative to spread the word in al-Shabaab territory about this program for defectors.
Colorful leaflets were made, with pictures for those who can't read, showing al-Shabaab members being saved, as well as a phone number they can call.
These efforts led to an increased number of deserters, with more than 60 of them leaving al-Shabaab in a two-month period in the first half of the year.
Ibrahim, who spent three years in Al-Shabaab, spent two months considering whether to escape.
He says that he will never be able to return to his native village - he will spend the rest of his life trying to blend into the big city of Mogadishu.
Otherwise Al-Shabaab will find him and execute him.
All three ended up in a rehabilitation center in the capital, Mogadishu.
The threats to them are so serious that when I visited them, there were 80 guards for 84 defectors.
The center does not accept senior Al-Shabaab members; there is a special program for high-ranking defectors as more dangerous group leaders.
This one is for lower ranking members - soldiers, doormen, mechanics and the like.
Before being accepted, defectors are cleared by the National Intelligence and Security Agency to ensure that they have voluntarily left the group and renounced its ideology.
But a journalist in Mogadishu tells me that some active members of Al Shabib slip through the net and send messages to the group from the camp.
The aim of the center is to rehabilitate defectors physically, mentally and spiritually, and to impart skills to them so that they can slowly reintegrate into life outside, in their native communities or elsewhere.
"I drove an armed pick-up truck, which we called a 'Volvo', when I was with al-Shabab. I wasn't afraid of anything," says Mulid.
"When I arrived, the authorities saw that I was talented at driving. I worked as a driving instructor in the camp, teaching other defectors to drive.
Now I have a job as a school bus driver. One day I would like to open my own transport business."
Ahmed now makes money by buying and selling land.
Ibrahim describes how he learned to be a hairdresser at the rehabilitation center and soon showed such talent that he began to earn money by cutting the hair of other defectors and guards.
He now has a barber shop in Mogadishu, where he employs three people.
"I earn enough to support two wives and eight children," he says, adding that he brought them to the city to live with him.
But life after Al Shabaab is rarely easy.
Mulid explains that some members of his family have disowned him, while others do not believe him.
Ibrahim says he cannot return to his community even if there is no danger of being found and killed.
Although his family forgave him, his neighbors did not.
And he says that deep inside he still carries the wounds from his time in Al Shabaab - and that they haunt him.
"I'm struggling to remove the al-Shabaab sim card from my brain," he says.
"Images of the bad things I've done and the bad things that have been done to me keep playing before my eyes."
At the rehabilitation center, handouts are printed in classrooms where basic literacy, English, math and other subjects are taught.
Others learn mechanics, welding, IT, driving and other skills.
In the great room, an apprentice tailor sews colorful dresses that are displayed on mannequins on the wall.
In al-Shabaab territory, women must wear heavy robes and hijabs, mostly black or some other muted color.
After the outbreak of the corona virus, tailors began to make protective face masks that are distributed around the city outside.
Several young men are resting in the dormitory, a room in which there are neatly arranged rows of bunk beds. There are large lockers next to the beds where they keep their things.
Loud music blares from another room.
The two defectors sing and dance - activities that are completely forbidden by the militants, except for the persistent repetition of verses from the Koran - but occasionally they switch to a machine step, similar to the marching style seen in al-Shabaab's recruitment videos.
It's like they can't let go of the past, like they're still programmed to move the way they learned when they were under al-Shabaab.
A professional soccer coach comes to the center, gathering defectors, staff and guards to play games on the immaculately maintained field.
Sheiks also come to visit them to help with de-radicalization, to convince young people that there is another kind of Islam, unlike the one instilled in them by Al-Shabaab.
Center staff explain how defectors receive political education to be more positive towards the government.
After a while, they are allowed to go on weekend leave, while some study or work outside the center, returning to it late in the afternoon.
There is a two-bed clinic where medical staff treat defectors for typhus, malaria, malnutrition, hepatitis and parasites.
They say that the most common disease among newcomers is syphilis.
Some arrive severely dehydrated, with bullet scars all over their bodies, some of which are still in them.
But the center was not always the functional, positive place it is today.
It was founded in 2012 and struggled until it found its way.
At times, conditions were so bad that some residents actively dissuaded former comrades from leaving al-Shabaab.
Militant leaders allow recruits to have phones, although they sometimes take them away for part of the week.
Now that they are functioning more successfully, rehabilitation centers are being organized both for defectors' wives - who sometimes join their husbands when they are recruited to work for Al Shabaab - and for women who were themselves active in the group.
I meet Bashir, a well-dressed, well-spoken young man who recently left the rehabilitation center after spending two years there.
It is hard to imagine how such a gentle soul could be part of a group that devotes itself so much to violence, both in deeds and words.
"I was a teenager when I joined them. I did well in science. Al Shabaab said I could help their medical team.
I didn't dare to refuse them and I needed the money. They paid me $70 a month," he says.
Bashir used the $250 he got when he left the center to enroll in college and opened a small pharmacy.
"I also sell ice cream there," he says. "I fear every day that Al Shabib will find me."
That is a real possibility. Al Shabaab regularly kills people across Mogadishu; residents of the city say that militants are everywhere.
They "tax" the people, distribute charity and administer justice in areas nominally under government control.
Despite the initial problems, the low-level defector program seems to be working for those who join it.
Staff say hundreds of people have completed the program, and they don't know of anyone who has returned to al-Shabaab.
Thousands more remain with Al-Shabaab and continue to strike fear into the bones of Somalia and beyond. The group attacked hotels and shopping malls in the heart of Nairobi, Kenya's capital.
It carries out massive truck attacks in Mogadishu, killing hundreds of people.
Ibrahim, Mulid, Ahmed and Bashir have built new lives and seem genuinely relieved to be free of Al Shabaab.
The challenge will be to convince many others to leave it and reach centers like this one.
Illustrations Katie Horwich
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