Najah Jama has not been heard from since August when she called her boyfriend at the Toronto apartment they share, telling him she was jailed for refusing to marry a local Somali. Jama had left Toronto with her mother in March for a six-month vacation in northern Somalia. It was the first time she had ever visited her mother's homeland.
The couple stayed in touch during her vacation, but in July a distraught Jama called her boyfriend, Seifu Getahun, to say she had been taken into custody. She said her mother had asked her to marry a Muslim man from her hometown and became upset and called police when Jama insisted she wanted to wed Getahun, a Canadian of Ethiopian Christian heritage. Ethiopia and Somalia have a long history of war, most recently exacerbated by the presence of Ethiopian troops in Mogadishu, the country's anarchic capital.
