Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  Nonetheless, many experts have cast doubt on al Qaeda’s centrality to those events. Journalists interviewed Somalis who said they had “never heard of bin Laden until he began boasting about Somalia years later.” Undoubtedly, during this period, bin Laden was seeking to make his mark, but Somali militias hardly needed his help to wreak havoc. The country had already descended into a perpetual state of civil war, with various warlords commanding militias that were terrorizing and destabilizing the country as they fought neighborhood to neighborhood for control. After the withdrawal of the UN force in 1994, Somalia plummeted deeper into chaos.

  The “Battle of Mogadishu” was the bloody finale to a mission codenamed Operation Gothic Serpent. Run by Major General William Garrison, then commander of JSOC, it went down as one of the greatest disasters for the US Special Operations community since the botched rescue mission in 1980 to free American hostages in Tehran. Many within the JSOC community did not see it that way. Lieutenant General Boykin, one of the original members of Delta Force, served alongside Garrison on the Somalia mission as the Delta contingent’s commander. “This ragged place had just chewed up and spit out elite fighters from the most powerful army in the history of the world,” Boykin recalled thinking as he stood in Mogadishu after the battle. He blasted the Clinton White House for abandoning Somalia. In the aftermath of the disaster, Boykin and Garrison had pushed for more troops and called for ramping up the offensive, requests that were rejected. General Garrison retired from the military on August 3, 1996. It was exactly two days after Mohamed Farrah Aidid died in Somalia, having sustained injuries during a gun battle a few weeks earlier. Although Somalia would be largely ignored by the United States in the years to come, it was never far from the minds of the JSOC operators.

  It was not until 1996, after bin Laden was expelled from Sudan, that al Qaeda began to make its presence felt in East Africa. In the summer of 1998, US agents in Albania facilitated the extraordinary rendition of five members of Islamic Jihad, Ayman al Zawahiri’s organization. The men were transferred to Egypt, where some claimed they were tortured, including by electric shock to the genitals. On August 5, Zawahiri published a letter in a British paper vowing revenge against America in “a language they will understand.” Two days later, on August 7, 1998, al Qaeda cells, organized out of Nairobi, carried out simultaneous truck bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including twelve Americans, and injuring 5,000 more. It was the first time much of the world had ever heard of bin Laden, and the FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted List. The al Qaeda leader, in taking responsibility for the embassy attacks, initially said that they were payback for the US “invasion” of Somalia, but the chosen date of the attacks also coincided with the eighth anniversary of US troops deploying to Saudi Arabia.

  “We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice no matter what or how long it takes,” President Clinton declared in the Rose Garden after the bombings. Clinton signed a secret finding authorizing the covert use of lethal force in hunting down those responsible; the White House had determined that a mission to kill bin Laden was “not inconsistent with the ban on assassinations.” While Clinton authorized the CIA to use lethal force against bin Laden, subsequent instructions issued to CIA station chiefs globally emphasized that arresting bin Laden was preferable. The option of using US Special Ops Forces was on the table, but the administration concluded it “was much easier and much less risky to fire off cruise missiles,” according to the Pentagon report commissioned by Rumsfeld that reviewed Clinton-era counterterrorism policy. General Downing, the former commander of JSOC and SOCOM, described the attitude he encountered from Clinton administration officials as: “Don’t let these SOF guys through the door because they’re dangerous.... They are going to do something to embarrass” the country.

  Although some US intelligence indicated that scouting missions for the embassy bombings were coordinated in Somalia, the Clinton White House would not permit any incursions into Somalia. Instead, the US response was to strike suspected al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan and Sudan with longrange cruise missiles in a mission code-named Operation Infinite Reach. The target of the Sudan bombing, al Shifa factory, turned out to be a legitimate pharmaceutical plant, which produced half of Sudan’s medications, and not, as the United States alleged, a facility for manufacturing nerve gas. Regardless, East Africa had been ripped wide open as a new front in what was rapidly becoming a covert US war against al Qaeda. “We are involved in a long-term struggle,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared. “This is unfortunately the war of the future.”

  When the Bush administration came to power, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld agreed with Albright’s assessment but viewed the Clinton administration’s approach to fighting that “war of the future” with utter disdain. He came into office determined to put the darkest of the US military forces front and center in the US war machine, and 9/11 had accelerated his plans. But, in the early years after 9/11, Somalia was, at best, a third-tier concern for the Bush administration—behind the war in Afghanistan and, eventually, Iraq.

  IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING the US and UN withdrawal from Mogadishu, Somalia was further destroyed. The beautiful, Italian-influenced architecture of the capital was transformed into a skyline of bullet-pocked skeletons of once gorgeous buildings. Jobless youth—many addicted to khat—joined up with clan-based militias and devoted their existence to the cause of the warlords. “Everyone was thinking in terms of creating a small slice of Mogadishu as his turf,” recalled Buubaa, the former foreign minister. “It was as if the Somali state was over and everybody wanted to create his little turf to collect money and to become powerful just for personal gains, not for national gains.” This was the Somalia that the Americans flew into in 2003 when they first approached Qanyare, one of the very people who had helped destroy the country.

  General Downing argued that “a low-to-invisible American profile in the region” was crucial to the US strategy in Somalia, warning that the United States should be careful not to “inflate the appeal of [al Qaeda’s] rhetoric or the resonance of their extremist ideology.” The Bush administration may have tried to follow the “low profile” part of Downing’s advice, but its embrace of the warlords forcefully disregarded the second part.

  Believing they had the support of Washington, Qanyare and his CIA-backed alliance soon morphed from thugs battling to control territory to paramilitary militias using the cover of the war on terrorism to justify their activities. CIA officers and Special Ops personnel would fly from Nairobi to Mogadishu, transporting cash and lists of suspects Washington wanted taken out. Initially, the focus was on rendition against foreign operatives. The CIA did not want the warlords to target Somalis for fear of further fueling the civil war. According to military journalist Sean Naylor, the head of the CIA’s warlord program was John Bennett, at the time the Agency’s Nairobi station chief. Bennett internally laid out ground rules for the program: “We will work with warlords. We don’t play favorites. They don’t play us. We don’t go after Somali nationals, just [foreign] al-Qaida.” The warlords, however, had their own plans. Qanyare told me his CIA handlers were reluctant to pull the trigger on kill operations, fearing that an American could be killed or captured. Instead, they left the dirty work to him and his fellow warlords.

  After making their deal with the CIA, Qanyare and his comrades engaged in an all-out targeted kill and capture campaign against anyone—Somali or foreign—they suspected of being a supporter of any Islamic movement. In a handful of cases, the warlords caught someone the United States considered to be of value, such as suspected al Qaeda operative Suleiman Ahmed Hemed Salim, captured in the spring of 2003. One of Qanyare’s fellow warlords, Mohamed Dheere, seized Salim and rendered him into US custody. Salim was reportedly later held in two secret prisons in Afghanistan. In 2004, directly contradicting Bennett’s supposed “rules” for the warlord game, Qanyare’s men carried out a raid on a home of a Somali m
ilitant, Aden Hashi Farah Ayro. Ostensibly aimed at capturing Abu Talha al Sudani, whom the United States was hunting in connection with the embassy attacks in Africa, they instead seized Ayro’s brother-in-law, Mohamed Ali Isse, who was wanted in connection with a spate of assassinations in Somaliland in 2003–2004. According to Isse, he was taken aboard a US helicopter and transported to a US Navy vessel. Chicago Tribune journalist Paul Salopek tracked down Isse in a Berbera, Somaliland, prison years later. He told Salopek that once aboard the US ship, he was first treated for a gunshot wound and then detained and interrogated by US plainclothes agents for about a month. Then he was taken to Lemonnier, en route to a clandestine Ethiopian prison, where Isse contends he was tortured by US-trained Ethiopian military intelligence using electric shocks. He was then returned to the Somaliland gulag, where he would remain.

  Scores of other “suspects” were abducted by the CIA-backed warlords and handed over to American agents. “The scramble by Mogadishu faction leaders to nab al Qaeda figures for American reward money has spawned a small industry in abductions. Like speculators on the stock market, faction leaders have taken to arresting foreigners—mainly, but not exclusively Arabs—in the hope they might be on a wanted list,” according to a report by the International Crisis Group in 2005. “According to one militia leader who has worked closely with the Americans in counter-terrorism operations, as many as seventeen suspected terrorists have been apprehended in Mogadishu alone since 2003—all but three apparently innocent.” In many cases, the United States would determine the prisoners had no intelligence value and repatriate them to Somalia. Sometimes, according to several former senior Somali government and military officials, the warlords would execute them to keep them from talking.

  “These people were already heinous warlords, they were widely reviled in Mogadishu. And then they start assassinating imams and local prayer leaders,” said Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, a Somali analyst who has written extensively on the history of al Qaeda and warlord politics in Somalia. “They were either capturing them, and then renditioning them to Djibouti, where there is a major American base. Or in many cases, they were chopping their head off and taking the head to the Americans and telling them, ‘We killed this guy.’” He added: “The vast majority of people they killed had nothing to do with the War on Terror.”

  In a diplomatic cable to the State Department from the Nairobi Embassy, US officials acknowledged that the use of the warlords and their militias to hunt down alleged terrorists “may seem unpalatable choices, particularly in light of civilian casualties in recent rounds of fighting in Mogadishu.” But, they explained, “These partners are the only means currently available to remove” the terrorists “from their positions in Mogadishu.”

  When I met Qanyare, he denied that his forces were committing extrajudicial killings, or kidnapping and torturing prisoners, but when pressed on his operations, he acknowledged he was capturing people and interrogating them. Then he shot back. “When you are fighting an enemy, any option is open. If you want to fight al Qaeda, you have to fight them ruthlessly, because they are ruthless.” He paused, before putting a fine point on his sentiment. “No mercy.”

  THE “US GOVERNMENT WAS NOT HELPING the [Somali] government, but was helping the warlords that were against the government,” Buubaa, the former foreign minister, complained. Washington “thought that the warlords were strong enough to chase away the Islamists or get rid of them. But it did completely the opposite. Completely the opposite. It was folly, you know, a foolish idea.”

  As the CIA deepened its involvement with Somali warlords, most of the JSOC and US military assets in the Horn of Africa were refocused on the war Cheney and Rumsfeld had come into office dying to wage: Iraq. This was not going to be a CIA-led war like the early stages of Afghanistan. JSOC was going to be running the show. And it would have a new leader, a “rising star” and one of the “Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’”

  “A Defeated Enemy Is Not a Vanquished One”

  YEMEN, 2003 –2006—Shortly after 11:00 p.m. on May 12, 2003, multiple teams of al Qaeda militants carried out a well-coordinated attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Using a combination of car bombs and heavily armed commandos, the al Qaeda cells hit three separate compounds housing large numbers of Americans and other Westerners. Among the targets hit was a facility owned by a US defense contractor, the Vinnell Corporation, which was training the Saudi National Guard, and another owned by a pro-US Saudi billionaire. Thirty-five people were killed and more than 160 others wounded. A few months later, in November 2003, another bomb attack targeting the Al Mohaya housing compound in Laban Valley killed seventeen people and wounded more than 120. The two attacks sparked a campaign against on al Qaeda networks in the kingdom—more than six hundred people were arrested, and others accused of complicity were hunted down and killed. Although the attacks were considered great successes by al Qaeda, the crackdown they spurred meant that the organization needed a safe base outside of Saudi Arabia. Many fled to Yemen.

  During this time, the al Qaeda network in Yemen was in disarray. A year after the November 2002 drone strike, Harithi’s successor, Muhammad Hamdi al Ahdal, was jailed, as were scores of other suspected militants. Under pressure from the United States, Saleh arrested more than one hundred people and locked them up, ostensibly on suspicion of involvement with the USS Cole attack.

  The period that followed, from 2003 to 2006, was notable only insofar as the Bush administration seemed to take almost all focus off Yemen and potential al Qaeda threats emanating from the country. “There was an interlude of a little over two years in which it appeared as though al-Qaeda had largely been defeated in Yemen,” recalled Princeton University professor Gregory Johnsen, widely considered a leading US expert on Yemen, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “But instead of securing the win, both the US and Yemeni governments treated the victory as absolute, failing to realize that a defeated enemy is not a vanquished one. In effect, al-Qaeda was crossed off both countries’ list of priorities and replaced by other, seemingly more pressing concerns. While the threat from al-Qaeda was not necessarily forgotten in 2004 and 2005 it was mostly ignored.” Johnsen believed this “lapse of vigilance” was “largely responsible for the relative ease” that al Qaeda had when it rebuilt its infrastructure in Yemen in the period that followed. Another factor that ultimately worked in al Qaeda’s favor was Saleh’s imprisonment of hundreds of people on simple suspicion of being affiliated with al Qaeda—in some cases with little or no evidence—which effectively turned the prisons into radicalization factories. “These men were tossed in security prisons with other more experienced fighters who did much to radicalize their younger more impressionable fellow inmates in the shared cells,” Johnsen told the Senate. “This problem was largely overlooked at the time” and “would come back to haunt both Yemen and the US throughout multiple phases of the war against al-Qaeda.”

  Policy makers in Washington seemed to lose interest in Yemen, but the US military, especially the Special Operations community, certainly did not. While Rumsfeld tapped most of the elite hunter-killer forces from JSOC for the high-value killing campaign in Iraq, Yemen remained on the radar of these very forces, whose stated mission was counterterrorism operations. Several Special Operations veterans from this period told me they were disillusioned by what they saw as a misdirection of their skills for operations in Iraq that could have been used to confront the more serious threat posed by al Qaeda elsewhere.

  In mid-2003, in Yemen, the ground was being laid for a resurgence of al Qaeda, as President Saleh found himself fighting to put down a domestic insurrection. In 2004, the Houthi minority launched a military uprising in the north, spurring a military offensive by Saleh that resulted in the deaths of hundreds, including Hussein Badreddin al Houthi, the leader of the rebellion. His brother, Abdul-Malik al Houthi, eventually succeeded him and continued the fight against Saleh. In confronting the Houthis during the p
eriod known as “the six wars,” which spanned from 2004 to 2010, Saleh used both al Qaeda and Saudi forces, as well as his own US-trained-and-equipped Special Operations Forces. An al Qaeda spokesman, Ahmad Mansur, claimed the Yemeni government had solicited al Qaeda’s support in fighting the Houthis in return for “eas[ing] the persecution of our members.” This account was backed up by several former senior US intelligence and military officials.

  Saleh also relied heavily on the Saudis in this effort. At one point, the Saudis were reportedly giving Yemen $10 million a month to fight the Houthis. For the Saudis, the situation in Yemen presented an array of challenges beyond the Houthi rebellion. Overall, the kingdom was Yemen’s biggest sponsor, giving Saleh’s government an estimated $2 billion a year in aid. To justify their wars against the Houthis to the United States, Saleh and the Saudis consistently used allegations of Iranian support for the Houthis and deliberately conflated them with al Qaeda.

  While he worked various angles to try to bolster his own military and political objectives, and the CIA and JSOC entrenched deeper in Yemen from the US base nearby in Djibouti, Saleh used the US desire to take custody of Cole bombing suspects to leverage additional support. Despite repeated requests from the FBI and other US agencies and officials, Saleh refused to hand over the top suspects in the bombing, including Jamal al Badawi, whom the United States explicitly asked be extradited after he was indicted in 2003 in federal court in the United States. “The Yemeni constitution prohibits handing over any Yemeni,” Saleh told the New York Times.