Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  More commonly known by its abbreviated name, al Shabab, or The Youth, the group of young Islamist militants had joined forces with the ICU during the war against the warlords. There are varying accounts of when al Shabab officially formed, ranging from the late 1990s to 2006. Based on his interviews with insiders, Aynte concluded it was sometime in 2003. Al Shabab was initially organized by Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, who the United States alleged trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and was behind the killing of foreign aid workers in Somalia. Another influential leader was Ahmed Abdi Godane, a well-known jihadist from Somalia’s relatively peaceful north. The men began training a cadre of young Somalis for a holy war. “They were extremely secretive, and many people who were part of that training were not widely accepted in the society. They were not Islamic scholars, they were not clan elders,” said Aynte. “They were looking for legitimacy, so they joined the Islamic Courts Union, and they were not going to lose anything. If the ICU morphed into a central government for Somalia, it was a great deal. If it disbanded, they knew they would capture the essence of it. They had foresight.” Eventually, al Shabab would win a powerful ally in Hassan Dahir Aweys, a former Somali army colonel turned military commander of Al Itihaad al Islamiya (AIAI), following the overthrow of Barre’s regime.

  IN AL SHABAB, al Qaeda saw opportunity: the chance to actually penetrate a Somali political landscape that it had long struggled—and largely failed—to exploit. Among al Shabab’s closest allies in those early days was Indha Adde, at the time a key member of Aweys’s faction of the ICU. “I was protecting all of these people,” he recalled of the foreigners who had begun appearing amid al Shabab. “I thought of them as good people.” Among those he harbored was Abu Talha al Sudani, an alleged explosives expert and a key figure in the world of financing al Qaeda’s East Africa operations. Indha Adde also sheltered the Comoro Islands–born Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 1998 embassy bombings. “At the time, Fazul appeared to me as a stable man,” Indha Adde recalled. “Actually he told us that he had nothing to do with the bombings.” When the war against the CIA-backed warlords began, Indha Adde realized that Fazul “had great military experience. He and other [foreign fighters] were trained by Osama personally.” To Indha Adde, the CIA and the US government were the aggressors, and the foreign fighters increasingly popping up in Somalia were part of a growing struggle to reclaim the country from the warlords. Backed by al Qaeda, al Shabab forces began using Qanyare and the other warlords’ own tactics against them, assassinating figures associated with the CIA’s warlord alliance.

  Fazul may have convinced Indha Adde that he had nothing to do with terrorism. But in the chambers of the US counterterrorism community, Fazul had become Washington’s number-one HVT in East Africa. Fazul was not just a terrorist; he was a believer. And, by all accounts, he was brilliant. Born in 1972 or 1974, depending on which of his many passports or ID cards you look at, Fazul grew up in a stable, economically viable family in the extremely unstable cluster of islands that make up the Comoros. The political backdrop of his childhood was filled with coups or attempted coups—at least nineteen in all—after the Comoros declared independence from France in 1975. As a kid, Fazul liked to pretend he was James Bond as he played spy games with his friends. He enjoyed mimicking Michael Jackson’s dance steps and was, according to his teachers, an extremely bright child. By the age of nine, he had memorized much of the Koran and could be heard reciting its verses on national radio. As he grew older, Fazul began studying under preachers who subscribed to a Saudi Wahabist worldview.

  By the time he arrived in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1990, Fazul was already fully radicalized. Originally enrolled as a medical student, he soon transferred to Islamic studies and was recruited to train with the mujahedeen, which had just expelled the Soviets from Afghanistan. It was in Peshawar, Pakistan, that he first heard Osama bin Laden preach. Soon thereafter he arrived in Afghanistan to receive training in guerrilla warfare, surveillance evasion, the use of various small and heavy weapons and bomb-making. In 1991, he wrote to his brother Omar that he “got confirmed” in al Qaeda. His first mission, in 1993, would be to travel to Somalia to help train the small groups of Islamic militants who had joined in the insurrection against the US and UN forces. He worked under Abu Ubaidah al Banshiri, whom bin Laden had placed in charge of al Qaeda’s Somalia operations. For Fazul, it was the beginning of a long terrorist career in East Africa. It was there that he first hooked up with Aweys and members of Al Itihaad, the people who would later bring him into the fold of the Islamic Courts Union.

  Fazul claimed that his team participated in the downing of the Black Hawks in 1993, but al Qaeda failed to entrench itself in Somalia as the warlords divided up the country. Most of them had no use for bin Laden or foreigners. “The primacy of tribalism in Somalia ultimately frustrated al-Qa’ida’s efforts to recruit long term and develop a unified coalition against foreign occupiers. Al-Qa’ida mistook its call for jihad in Afghanistan as a universal motivator for which Muslims in Somalia would join at an equal rate,” noted a study conducted at West Point Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. “In 1993 Somalia, this call fell on somewhat deaf ears as survival against local competitors trumped jihad.”

  So Fazul turned his attention to Kenya.

  The embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania took five years of careful planning and preparation. Working with al Qaeda operative Saleh Ali Nabhan, Fazul directly coordinated the Nairobi bombing, renting the house that would serve as a laboratory to manufacture the explosives for the job. During this time, Fazul became a rising star within al Qaeda. He became one of its prized couriers, funding cells throughout East Africa and, for a period, relocated his family to Khartoum, Sudan, where bin Laden was building up al Qaeda and preparing to declare war on the United States. By 1997, when bin Laden officially announced al Qaeda would attack US interests, Fazul had already left Sudan and was outraged that he learned it from CNN. The announcement resulted in raids, including on the home of one of Fazul’s closest associates who was preparing the embassy bombing in Nairobi. In the end, despite several close calls with the Kenyan authorities, the embassy hits were a categorical triumph, catapulting bin Laden and al Qaeda to international infamy. It also put Fazul on a path to becoming the chief of al Qaeda’s East Africa operations.

  After the Nairobi bombings, the United States aggressively tried to freeze the assets of bin Laden and al Qaeda. In response, bin Laden sought new revenue streams and put Fazul in charge of an ambitious operation to penetrate the blood diamond market. From 1999 to 2001, Fazul would largely operate out of Liberia under the protection of its dictator, Charles Taylor. In all, al Qaeda took in an estimated $20 million in untraceable blood diamond money, much of it from the killing fields of Sierra Leone. By that point, Fazul was a wanted man, actively hunted by the US authorities, and al Qaeda spent huge sums of money to keep him safe. He had become a player.

  In 2002, Fazul was dispatched to Lamu, Kenya—ironically just a stone’s throw from the eventual JSOC base at Manda Bay. From there, he organized the Mombasa attacks on the Paradise Hotel and the Israeli aircraft. Some of the operatives for that mission began training in Mogadishu, and Fazul would regularly travel to Somalia to check in on their progress. During this period, he worked extensively with Nabhan. Following the Mombasa attacks, Fazul traveled discreetly between Kenya and Somalia. The CIA always seemed to be a step behind him. In 2003, they contracted Mohamed Dheere, who was part of the CIA’s warlord alliance, to hunt him down. Qanyare also told me that Fazul’s photo was shown to him as early as January 2003 by US intelligence agents. Qanyare claims that he showed US counterterrorism agents houses used by Fazul and Nabhan and gave them GPS coordinates, but that the US agents were reluctant to pull the trigger on any targeted killing operations in Mogadishu, saying they preferred for the warlords to capture them. “They were worried that innocent people would die because of their action,” Qanyare told me. “But, to arrest them is not easy
because they got protection from other local al Qaeda people.” The warlords failed to catch Fazul or Nabhan.

  In August 2003, while the CIA was deep in its hunt for Fazul and other suspected terrorists in East Africa, an e-mail address the Agency had linked to al Qaeda was traced to an Internet café in Mombasa. Working with a CIA case officer, Kenyan security forces raided the café and began to arrest two men who were at a computer and were logged in to the suspect e-mail account. As they led the men to a police wagon, the larger of the two suspects shoved the smaller one away, pulled out a grenade and blew himself up. Special Operations sources later told military journalist Sean Naylor that the larger man was a “suicide bodyguard” and that the smaller man, whom he was protecting, was in fact Fazul. “Security forces converged on the scene, but Fazul was too smart for them,” Naylor reported. “He ran into a mosque and emerged disguised as a woman, wearing a hijab or some other form of Islamic facial covering.” US intelligence later searched the apartment Fazul and his bodyguard were using in Mombasa and discovered an apparatus for forging passports and visas.

  In 2004, US intelligence claimed to have intercepted communications from Nabhan indicating that al Qaeda was, once again, planning to attack the US Embassy in Nairobi using a truck bomb and a chartered plane. By then, US counterterrorism officials had declared Fazul and other members of al Qaeda’s Somalia cell “among the most wanted fugitives on the planet,” saying Fazul was “a master of disguise, an expert forger and an accomplished bomb builder” who was “maddeningly elusive” and “the most dangerous and...most sought after” al Qaeda figure in Somalia.

  In Mogadishu, Fazul hooked up with Aweys and Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, a Somali militant who had trained in Afghanistan with al Qaeda, and other former comrades from Al Itihaad, as they began building up al Shabab. He and Nabhan served as al Qaeda’s chief emissaries to the group. At that point US intelligence was not even aware of the group’s name and referred to it simply as “the special group.” Al Shabab’s training base, the Salahuddin Center, was situated on the grounds of a former Italian cemetery that had been rather gruesomely desecrated. It was heavily fortified and offered recruits the opportunity to watch jihadist videos from Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya, as well as videos featuring bin Laden. “Once the Salahuddin Center was established by al Shabab, they provided the training and the know-how, they brought in the experience that was needed,” said Aynte.

  When the Islamic Courts Union began to emerge as a force that could expel the warlords, Fazul ensured that al Qaeda would be a part of it. “Fazul and Nabhan, all of the foreigners were with us,” recalled Madobe. “At the time they were engaged in making connections and coordination which we believed to be part of the jihad, and we knew that they were members of al Qaeda.” Madobe said he was not concerned about Fazul and the other al Qaeda figures when they began appearing around the ICU. Al Shabab, he asserted, had very little backing from Somalia’s biggest clans and were minor players compared to the more powerful Courts. “They were out numbered by those within the Courts who had positive agendas,” he said. “But I can say the US actions helped boost them.”

  AL SHABAB began making a name for itself in 2005 by carrying out a spate of “headline-grabbing assassinations and cemetery desecrations in Mogadishu and other regions,” according to Aynte. In his paper, “The Anatomy of al Shabab,” Aynte alleged that after al Shabab formed “more than [one] hundred people, mostly former military generals, professors, businessmen, journalists and activists were quietly assassinated over the next few years.” He noted that a former al Shabab field commander “said the objectives of the assassinations were twofold: First, it was a deliberate, preemptive attempt to eliminate dissent and potential roadblocks. Second, it was designed to inject fear and terror in the hearts of the elite class in Mogadishu, who at the time wielded significant influence by their sheer domination of the business, media and academia.”

  While the CIA obsessed over the relatively small number of foreign fighters among the ICU in Somalia, many within the Courts did not see them as a problem. If they did become trouble for the ICU, most of its leaders were confident they could be kept in check by the clans that were supremely important in Somalia’s power structure. But it was Washington’s own actions that would soon make al Shabab and its al Qaeda allies more powerful in Somalia than it—or the CIA—could ever have imagined.

  Backed by overwhelming public support, it took the Courts just four months to drive out the CIA’s warlords, sending Qanyare and his strongmen fleeing. “We have been defeated because of a lack of logistics, the kind a militia needs to live: ammunition, superior weapons, coordination. This is what was needed,” Qanyare recalled. He claimed that the United States only gave him “pocket money.” Despite this, Qanyare’s faith in his CIA partners was unshaken. “America knows war. They are war masters. They know better than me. So when they fight a war, they know how to fund it. They know very well. They are teachers, great teachers.” As the Courts pummeled Qanyare’s forces, he claimed, the CIA refused to increase its support for him and the other warlords. “I don’t blame them, because they were working under the instruction of their bosses,” he said, adding that if the United States had provided more funding and weapons at that crucial moment when the ICU was besieging Mogadishu, “We should win. We should defeat them.” As he prepared to flee Mogadishu, he said he warned Washington. “I told them it would be too expensive to defeat [al Qaeda and al Shabab], for you, in the future, in the Horn of Africa. Al Qaeda is growing rapidly and they are recruiting, and they have a foothold, a safe haven—vast land.”

  JSOC had a limited presence in Somalia up to this point, with the CIA largely controlling counterterrorism operations there. But as the Agency’s favored warlords were being driven out of power, JSOC began agitating to take a more active role. General McChrystal, JSOC’s commander, had already started coordinating video teleconferences focused on the Horn of Africa and began pushing for a broadening of JSOC’s role within counterterrorism operations there.

  ON JUNE 5, 2006, the ICU’s forces officially took control of Mogadishu. Some Somalia experts within the US government hailed the expulsion of the warlords as “a wonderful piece of news,” in the words of Herman Cohen, the former assistant secretary of state for African affairs. “The warlords have caused tremendous hardship....People were permanently insecure under the warlords,” Cohen declared the day after the ICU took the capital. “It’s very important to keep those warlords from coming back into Mogadishu.” In backing the warlords, like Qanyare, Cohen said, “I think the U.S. government panicked. They saw an Islamic group; they said, ‘Taliban is coming.’” As for the risk that Somalia would become an al Qaeda safe haven, Cohen said, “I think it’s minor, because the people in the Islamic movement saw what happened to the Taliban and they don’t want the same thing to happen to them.”

  The ICU’s chair, Sheikh Sharif, immediately penned a letter to the United Nations, the US State Department, the Arab League, the African and European Unions and other international institutions denying that the ICU had any connection to terrorists and declaring that the Courts wanted to “establish a friendly relationship with the international community that is based on mutual respect and interest.”

  “The present conflict has been fueled by the wrong information given to the U.S. Government by these warlords,” he wrote. “Their expertise is to terrorize people and they were able to use it and terrorize the American government by misinforming them about the presence of terrorists in Somalia.” In a subsequent letter to the US Embassy in Nairobi, Sharif pledged his support in fighting terrorism and said the ICU wanted to “invite an investigative team from the United Nations to make sure that international terrorists do not use the region as a transit route or hiding ground.”

  The United States was not impressed with the letter. “While we are prepared to find positive elements within the ICU,” one diplomatic cable from Nairobi declared, “acknowledgement of the foreign al Qaida presence
will serve as a litmus test for our engagement with any of its leaders.”

  In general, the US view of the Islamic Courts taking power was not a unified one. Scores of US diplomatic cables from that period portray a confused and contradictory assessment from US officials. Sharif was consistently characterized as a “moderate” within the cables sent from the US Embassy in Nairobi. Yet, according to the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson, “The Bush administration had gone so far as to contemplate killing Sharif.” For its part, al Shabab viewed Sharif as a sellout whose attempts to curry favor with the West was apostasy.

  US diplomats worked with the recognized government of Somalia to determine how to approach the ICU, but the US military and the CIA saw the Courts’ taking of Mogadishu as a serious crisis. “Suddenly, this is becoming a major issue that people throughout government are concentrating on: Military analysts, intelligence analysts, all over. Somalia is suddenly catapulted onto everybody’s radar screen,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a frequent consultant to the US military, including CENTCOM, who has advised US military forces deploying to the Horn of Africa. “The immediate concern is twofold: One, is the Islamic Court’s connection to al Qaeda. And the second concern is possible emergence of a terrorist safe-haven inside of Somalia.” President Bush was in Laredo, Texas when word came that the ICU had chased the warlords from Mogadishu. “Obviously, when there’s instability anywhere in the world, we’re concerned. There is instability in Somalia,” he said. “We’re watching very carefully the developments there. And we will strategize more when I get back to Washington as to how to best respond to the latest incident there in Somalia.”