He also read the works of Charles Dickens (Hard Times), Shakespeare (King Lear) and Herman Melville (Moby Dick). “There was a particularly mean Prison Head who decided to ban me from having any Islamic books,” Awlaki later wrote. “Shakespeare was the worst thing I read during my entire stay in prison. I never liked him to start with. Probably the only reason he became so famous is because he was English and had the backing and promotion of the speakers of a global language.” Awlaki, however, praised Dickens’s works. “What fascinated me with these novels were the amazing characters Dickens created and the similarity of some of them to some people today. That made them very interesting,” he wrote. “For example: the thick and boastful Mr. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown was similar to George W. Bush; Lucy’s father, Mr. Gradgrind, was similar to some Muslim parents who are programmed to think that only Medicine and Engineering are worthy professions for their children; the amazing cruelness of Stephen Blackpool was similar to some people who appear on the surface to be decent and kind human beings; and Uriah Heep was similar to some pitiful Muslims today.”
Awlaki later reflected on the food in prison. Describing kudam, the “staple breads of prisoners and soldiers in Yemen,” Awlaki wrote: “[They] are supposed to be multigrain. That is how it was in the old days. Now they are most likely whole-wheat. They are fermented so their taste resembles San Francisco’s sourdough bread (those who live in America would know what I am talking about). They consist of a solid crust (and I mean really solid); they could be used for fights.” He recalled, “Before my imprisonment, I had discussions with former prisoners about how it was in jail, so there was some mental preparation for what was to come. I remember the words of one of the shuyukh [religious figures] who had been to this same prison. He said the food was so horrible, so I was expecting the worst.” His first morning in the prison, Awlaki recalled, “I began hearing the opening of the doors and soldiers screaming at prisoners to pick up their meals. It was my turn and I was already awake. They opened my door and there were two soldiers, one holding a bucket and the other dragging a sack full of kudam. The one with the bucket took my plate and poured in it a cupful of steaming pinto beans while the other handed me six” pieces of kudam. After a few weeks, he said, he had concluded: “This food stinks.”
Eventually, the prison authorities permitted Awlaki to receive home-cooked meals from his family twice a week. “However the prison administration would use this as a method to pressure prisoners. Under the pretext of searching our food for contraband items I would sometimes receive my food in an inedible state. They once mashed together my rice, chocolate cake and salad and then poured over it a package of cranberry juice. Even the guard who delivered the meal to me was saddened by the state of my food,” Awlaki recalled. Prison, he said, reaffirmed his commitment to his religion. “Islam is not something that we use to fill in the spiritual compartment of our life while we leave everything else to our whims and desires. Islam should rule over every aspect of our life.”
After Anwar Awlaki had been locked up for seventeen months, the tremendous pressure from tribal groups that Saleh’s regime had to keep on his side to maintain power, and from Anwar’s influential family, finally forced his release. Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed had gone to see the Yemeni president to offer his personal guarantees that Anwar would not cause trouble if he was set free. “OK, if you have anything against Anwar, please take him to court,” bin Fareed told the Yemeni president. “And if you prove anything, you kill him. We don’t mind. If you have anything, any proof against him, we don’t mind if you take him to court and you kill him. If you don’t, then give us our son.” The president, he said, told him, “To be honest, I have nothing against Anwar, whatsoever.” That day, the order was given to release Awlaki. “The Americans were not happy about it,” said bin Fareed.
A US diplomatic cable about Awlaki’s release elevated Anwar to a “sheikh” and referred to him as “the alleged spiritual advisor to two of the 9/11 hijackers.” The cable added that Yemeni government “contacts” told US officials that “they do not have sufficient evidence to charge [Awlaki] and can no longer hold him illegally.” A few years later, the US government would characterize Awlaki’s imprisonment as evidence he had long been involved with terror plots against the United States. Without providing any evidence to support the claim, the US Treasury Department statement alleged Awlaki “was imprisoned in Yemen in 2006 on charges of kidnapping for ransom and being involved in an al-Qa’ida plot to kidnap a U.S. official, but was released from jail in December 2007 and subsequently went into hiding in Yemen.”
“America Knows War. They Are War Masters.”
SOMALIA, 2004–2006 —While JSOC came to dominate the expanding killing fields in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Somalia continued its descent into chaos. The murderous warlords who were running the CIA’s targeted kill/capture operations were widely feared and reviled. By 2004, the Agency’s outsourced Somalia campaign was laying the groundwork for a spectacular series of events that would lead to an almost unthinkable rise in the influence of al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa. But it wasn’t the CIA’s warlord program alone that would spur a major uprising in Somalia. The civilian tolls the wars were taking in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, gave credence to the perception that the United States was waging a war against Islam. While the United States backed its own warlords in Mogadishu, Washington’s post-9/11 actions led to the formation of a coalition of former warlords and religious movements that would challenge the rule of the US proxies in Somalia. It was blowback sparked by US policies in Somalia and abroad.
Yusuf Mohammed Siad told me he was first approached by the CIA in Dubai in 2004. The notorious Somali warlord, who goes by the nom de guerre Indha Adde, or White Eyes, was—like Mohamed Qanyare—among the thugs who divided and destroyed Somalia during the civil war that raged through the 1990s. Indha Adde violently took control of the Lower Shabelle region, appointing himself governor of a reportedly brutal paramilitary occupation, earning him the moniker “The Butcher.” He ran drug and weapons trafficking operations from the Merca port and cashed in on the lawlessness. Like Qanyare, he controlled a sizable militia and an array of technicals—weaponized pickup trucks. But unlike Qanyare, Indha Adde maintained a friendly relationship with the small group of Islamic radicals who dotted the chaotic Somali landscape of the 1990s. He openly admitted to providing shelter and protection to some of the very men Washington was hunting. That made him an attractive potential asset for the CIA. In Dubai, he said, he met the CIA’s chief of East Africa operations. “They offered me money, they offered funding for the region I was controlling, they offered me influence and power in Somalia through US cooperation,” he recalled when I met him at one of his homes in Mogadishu in June 2011. “The CIA was always telling me that the men I was protecting were criminals who bombed the US embassies, who were also a threat to the world. They told me they wanted me to hand these guys over to them.”
But Indha Adde had watched the CIA-backed warlord alliance in action and wanted nothing to do with it. As he saw it, they were killing Somalis in the service of a foreign power. “They were contracted to hunt down anyone who was wanted by the Americans. Their prisoners were all mistreated—they were stripped naked and had their mouths taped,” he remembered. “The warlords would kill the prisoners who the Americans released, to keep them from talking about their imprisonment.”
Moreover, Indha Adde was in the midst of a personal conversion from a heavy-drinking gangster to what he saw as a real Muslim. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Indha Adde—like many Muslims around the globe—viewed the United States as “arrogant” and on a crusade against Islam. “The US president’s words against Islam, the Iraq invasion and the Afghanistan war inspired me personally not to cooperate with the CIA,” he recalled. “I refused all of their offers.” Instead, Indha Adde made a decision to commit his forces to defeating the CIA’s warlords. “The Bush administration overstated the st
rength of Al Qaeda and Osama [Bin Laden]. But when he invaded Iraq, we all thought that Islam was under attack. That was al Qaeda’s biggest victory, and that is why we supported them.”
When al Qaeda figures would seek his support or sanctuary in the areas he controlled, Indha Adde obliged. To him, the men were on the right side of history, fighting crusaders and their proxy warlords and defending Islam. “Personally, I thought of even Osama himself as a good man who only wanted the implementation of Islamic law,” he remembered. “If there was accountability, Bush would have been executed like Saddam Hussein. But no one is powerful enough to hold the US to account.”
While Qanyare worked with the Americans, Indha Adde soon became one of al Qaeda’s key paramilitary allies and a commander of one of the most powerful Islamic factions to rise up in Somalia after 9/11. American activities that had started with a discreet meeting with Qanyare in a Nairobi hotel room in 2002 with the aim of killing or capturing five specific terrorists had transformed into death squads roaming Somalia, killing with impunity and widely viewed as being directly supported and encouraged by the United States. In a meeting with US officials in early 2006, according to a diplomatic cable, the internationally recognized Somali president “wondered aloud why the U.S. would want to start an open war in Mogadishu.”
It was this horrific era that gave birth to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which would rise up against the US-backed proxies. The ICU was not a plot organized by al Qaeda, but rather an indigenous response to the lawlessness and brutality of the warlords, particularly those backed by the CIA. As Somalia disintegrated, small, regional Islamic courts began rising up. They created local justice systems based on Sharia law and sought to bring some level of stability. For several years, the courts were largely autonomous, clan-based entities. In 2004, the twelve courts united to become the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts of Somalia, known as “the Courts.” Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed (known simply as Sheikh Sharif), a former schoolteacher and cleric from the Middle Shabelle region, was elected its leader. Indha Adde would eventually serve as its defense minister. “When the Islamic Courts Union formed, there was a civil war in Somalia. There was murder, robbery and rape. The powerless were victimized. Everyone suffered, but the weakest clans were the hardest hit,” recalled Indha Adde. “Warlords ruled, and we searched for a way to unite and save our people. It is Islam that unites us, so we formed the Islamic Courts Union.”
In 2005, foreign weapons and money poured into Somalia. Indha Adde and other Courts figures began receiving shipments of heavy weapons and ammunition, flown into private airstrips from Eritrea. Ethiopia, meanwhile, joined with the United States in supporting the CIA’s warlords with finances, weapons and ammunition. Somalia’s prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, an Italian-educated veterinarian, watched as the CIA bankrolled and armed Qanyare and the other warlords, some of whom were actually ministers in his own government. “I was following very closely those warlords and particularly Qanyare, who was misleading the US intelligence organizations by saying, ‘I can defeat this terrorist, this Islamist. Yes, I will catch them tomorrow, the next day.’ And they were paying him,” Gedi told me. The CIA, he charged, undermined his government and “encouraged the mushrooming of the Islamic Courts and their strength. [The United States] stimulated the Islamic Courts people by supporting the warlords and the ‘antiterrorism group’ at that time. So the whole mess started from that point.”
In February 2006, as the Islamic Courts Union grew in strength, Qanyare and the CIA’s warlord network went public, officially announcing the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism and calling on Somalis to join them in defeating the “jihadists.” In March, at the White House, the National Security Council officially endorsed the US campaign to fund and support the warlords. State Department spokesman Sean Mc-Cormack said the US strategy was to “work with responsible individuals... in fighting terror. It’s a real concern of ours—terror taking root in the Horn of Africa. We don’t want to see another safe haven for terrorists created. Our interest is purely in seeing Somalia achieve a better day.” Washington “chose to view the situation only through the prism of its ‘war on terror,’” observed Salim Lone, a former UN official. “The Bush Administration supported the warlords—in violation of a UN arms embargo it helped impose on Somalia many years ago—indirectly funneling them arms and suitcases filled with dollars.” Qanyare and his allies suddenly appeared far better armed than before. “To war with [al Qaeda], you need very well-trained forces. And enough numbers, and enough weapons, and enough logistics. And enough reinforcements,” Qanyare told me. With no sense of the irony that his alliance had given rise to the ICU, Qanyare told his American handlers, “This war is easy, it will not take time.” It would not even take six months, he predicted. He was right about the timeline, but not its outcome.
After the warlords openly declared war on the Islamic Courts, Mogadishu was rocked by its worst fighting in more than a decade. By May, the Washington Post was reporting battles that “were some of the most violent in Mogadishu since the end of the American intervention in 1994, and left 150 dead and hundreds more wounded.” The UN Monitoring Group, in its report to the Security Council, cited “clandestine third-country” support for the warlords. It did not specify which country, but everyone knew. US diplomats in the region soon found themselves besieged by their colleagues from other nations, including European Union officials. According to one US cable from the Nairobi Embassy, some European governments, “having concluded that the U.S. is supporting individual warlords as a means to prosecute the GWOT, tell us they are concerned that such actions now may set back both CT and democratization objectives in Somalia.” The EU, the cable noted, was preparing to release a report that would state bluntly: “There are worrying signs that the general population—riled by overt support of the United States for the warlords—is increasingly rallying to the cause of the jihadis.” Some US officials were clearly irked by the CIA’s warlord program. They privately told the New York Times that “the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.”
The once disparate Islamic Courts Union, at the urging of and with strong backing from local businessmen in Mogadishu and other cities, began a concerted mobilization to defeat the CIA’s warlords. Indha Adde would lead its military campaign. The ICU called on Somalis to “join the jihad against the enemies of Somalia.”
But it wasn’t simply a religious cause. The warlords had been a disaster for business in Mogadishu. The “killing [of] prayer leaders and imams in local neighborhoods, and school teachers, really sparked a much-needed anger,” said Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, the Somali terrorism scholar. But, from a financial perspective, he said, the warlords “had been holding Mogadishu hostage for sixteen years. They failed to open the airport, the seaport; they all had small airstrips beside their houses—literally, their houses. And so they were holding people hostage.” In late 2005, businessmen had begun funneling money to the ICU to buy heavy weapons to take on the CIA warlords. Somalis from all walks of life began signing up to fight alongside the ICU. “People would leave their jobs at 5 pm at the Bakaara Market, take their weapon and join the fight against the warlords,” recalled Aynte. “And the next morning they would report back to their shop, or whatever. I mean, it was stunning.”
THE ISLAMIC COURTS UNION was not a homogenous bunch. Many of the Courts’ leaders and rank and file had no connection to al Qaeda, knew little of bin Laden and had an agenda that was squarely focused internally. Their meteoric rise in popularity had everything to do with hatred for the warlords, combined with a fierce desire for stability and some degree of law and order. “We deployed our fighters to Mogadishu with the intent of ceasing the civil war and bringing an end to the warlords’ ruthlessness,” said Sheikh Ahmed “Madobe” Mohammed Islam, whose Ras Kamboni militia, based in Jubba in southern Somalia, joined the ICU in 2006. He told me, “Those of us within
the ICU were people with different views—liberals, moderates and extremists.” Other than expelling the warlords and stabilizing the country through Sharia law, he said, there was “no commonly shared political agenda.”
There were certainly elements of the ICU that had a Taliban-like vision for Somalia. But the regionally based courts were largely used to govern their specific clans or subclans, rather than as a national justice system. Although Somalia is an almost exclusively Muslim nation, it also has a strong secular tradition that would have come into direct conflict with a Taliban-style agenda imposed nationally. “The courts’ promise of order and security appeals to Somalis across the religious spectrum. Their heterogeneous membership and the diversity of their supporters mean that attempts to label the Shari’a system ‘extremist’, ‘moderate’ or any other single orientation are futile. In reality, the courts are an unwieldy coalition of convenience, united by a convergence of interests,” the International Crisis Group noted in its 2005 report “Somalia’s Islamists.” The ICG asserted that only two of the courts had been “consistently associated with militancy” and that they were counterbalanced by other courts. It concluded, “[M]ost courts appear to exist for chiefly pragmatic purposes. Rather than imposing an Islamist agenda on a new Somali government, most are likely to be absorbed willingly into any future judicial system.”
That did not mean that extremists did not view the Courts as a vehicle to implement their radical agenda. “We share no objectives, goals or methods with groups that sponsor or support terrorism,” declared Sheikh Sharif, the head of the ICU, in an appeal to the international community. “We have no foreign elements in our courts, and we are simply here because of the need of the community we serve.” Sharif’s declaration may have been technically true, but that is only because the Harakat al Shabab al Mujahideen was not officially one of the Courts.
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