Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  The United States was shifting tactics. With the Saleh regime severely weakened, the Obama administration calculated that it had little to gain from that alliance at this stage. The United States would double down on its use of air power and drones, striking in Yemen at will to carry on its campaign against AQAP. The Obama administration began quick construction of a secret air base in Saudi Arabia, closer than its base in Djibouti, that could serve as a launching pad for expanded drone strikes in Yemen. Target number one remained the same: Anwar Awlaki.

  THE KEY TO ACCOMPLISHING ANYTHING in Yemen is navigating its labyrinthine tribal system. For years, a tribal patronage network helped bolster Saleh’s regime. Many tribes had a neutral view of AQAP or saw it as a minor nuisance; some fought against al Qaeda forces, though others gave them safe haven or shelter. The stance of many tribes toward al Qaeda depended on how they believed AQAP could forward or hurt their agendas.

  But the Obama administration’s Yemen policy had enraged many tribal leaders who could potentially keep AQAP in check and, over the course of three years of regular bombings, had taken away the motivation for many leaders to do so. Several southern leaders angrily told me stories of US and Yemeni attacks in their areas that killed civilians and livestock and destroyed or damaged scores of homes. If anything, the US air strikes and support for Saleh-family-run counterterrorism units had increased tribal sympathy for al Qaeda. “Why should we fight them? Why?” asked Ali Abdullah Abdulsalam, a southern tribal sheikh from Shabwah who adopted the nom de guerre Mullah Zabara, out of admiration, he told me, for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. “If my government built schools, hospitals and roads and met basic needs, I would be loyal to my government and protect it. So far, we don’t have basic services such as electricity, water pumps. Why should we fight al Qaeda?” He told me that AQAP controlled large swaths of Shabwah, conceding that the group did “provide security and prevent looting. If your car is stolen, they will get it back for you.” In areas “controlled by the government, there is looting and robbery. You can see the difference.” Zabara added, “If we don’t pay more attention, al Qaeda could seize and control more areas.”

  Zabara was quick to clarify that he believed AQAP was a terrorist group bent on attacking the United States, but that was hardly his central concern. “The US sees al Qaeda as terrorism, and we consider the drones terrorism,” he said. “The drones are flying day and night, frightening women and children, disturbing sleeping people. This is terrorism.” Zabara told me that several US strikes in his region had killed scores of civilians and that his community was littered with unexploded cluster bombs, which at times detonated, killing children. He and other tribal leaders asked the Yemeni and US governments for assistance in removing them, he said. “We did not get any response, so we use our guns to explode them.” He also said the US government should pay money to the families of civilians killed in the missile strikes of the past three years. “We demand compensation from the US for killing Yemeni citizens, just like the Lockerbie case,” he declared. “The world is one village. The US received compensation from Libya for the Lockerbie bombing, but the Yemenis have not.”

  I met Mullah Zabara and his men at the airport in Aden, along the coast where the USS Cole was bombed in October 2000, killing seventeen US sailors. Zabara was dressed in black tribal clothes, complete with a jambiya, the traditional dagger, at his stomach. He was also packing a Beretta on his hip. Zabara was a striking figure, with leathery skin and a large scar that formed a crescent moon along his right eye. “I don’t know this American,” he said to my Yemeni colleague. “So if anything happens to me as a result of this meeting—if I get kidnapped—we’ll just kill you later.” Everyone laughed nervously. We chatted for a while on a corniche, a cliff-side road along the coast, before he drove us around the city for a tour. About twenty minutes into the tour, he pulled over on the side of the road and bought a six-pack of Heineken from a shanty store, tossing one to me before cracking open a can for himself. It was 11:00 a.m.

  “Once I got stopped by AQAP guys at one of their checkpoints, and they saw I had a bottle of Johnnie Walker,” he recalled as he guzzled his second Heineken in ten minutes and lit a cigarette. “They asked me, ‘Why do you have that?’ I told them, ‘To drink it.’” He laughed heartily. “I told them to bother another guy and drove off.” The message of the story was clear: the al Qaeda guys don’t want trouble with tribal leaders. “I am not afraid of al Qaeda. I go to their sites and meet them. We are all known tribesmen, and they have to meet us to solve their disputes.” Plus, he added, “I have 30,000 fighters in my own tribe. Al Qaeda can’t attack me.” Zabara served as a mediator with AQAP for the Yemeni government and was instrumental in securing the release of three French aid workers held hostage by the militant group for six months. Zabara was also asked by the Yemeni minister of defense to mediate with the militants in Zinjibar on several occasions, including to retrieve bodies of soldiers killed in areas held by Ansar al Sharia. “I have nothing against al Qaeda or the government,” he told me. “I started the mediation in order to stop bloodshed and to achieve peace.” In Zinjibar, his efforts were unsuccessful. He told me that while mediating, he met AQAP operatives from the United States, France, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  I asked him if he ever met with top AQAP leaders. “Fahd al Quso is from my tribe,” he replied with a smile, referring to one of the most wanted suspects from the Cole bombing. “I saw [Said] al Shihri and [Nasir] al Wuhayshi five days ago in Shabwah,” he casually added, referring to the two senior AQAP leaders, both of them US-designated terrorists. “We were walking, and they said, ‘Peace be upon you.’ I replied, ‘Peace be upon you, too.’ We have nothing against them. In the past, it was unthinkable to run into them. They were hiding in the mountains and caves, but now they are walking in the streets and going to restaurants.” “Why is that?” I asked. “The regime, the ministers and officials are squandering the money allocated to fight al Qaeda, while al Qaeda expands,” he replied. The United States “funds the Political Security and the National Security [Forces], which spend money traveling here and there, in Sana’a or in the US, with their family. All the tribes get is air strikes against us.” He added that counterterrorism “has become like an investment” for the US-backed units. “If they fight seriously, the funds will stop. They prolonged the conflict with al Qaeda to receive more funds” from the United States. In January 2013, Zabara was assassinated in Abyan. It is unknown who killed him. That same month, the Yemeni government announced that Shihri had died “after succumbing to wounds received in a counter terrorism operation.”

  THERE IS NO DOUBT that when President Obama took office, al Qaeda had resurrected its shop in Yemen. But how big a threat AQAP actually posed to the United States or Saleh at that historical moment was the subject of much debate. What went almost entirely undiscussed in the US discourse on AQAP and Yemen was whether US actions—the targeted killings, the Tomahawk and drone strikes—might backfire, handing AQAP an opportunity to recruit and provoking the group to escalate its own violence. “We are not generating good will in these operations,” Emile Nakhleh, the former senior CIA officer, told me. “We might target radicals and potential radicals, but unfortunately...other things and other people are being destroyed or killed. So, in the long run, it is not necessarily going to help. These operations will not necessarily help to deradicalize potential recruits. To me the bigger issue is the whole issue of radicalization. How do we pull the rug from under it?” He added: “These operations might be successful in specific cases, but I don’t think they necessarily contribute to a deradicalization of certain segments of those societies.”

  Colonel Patrick Lang, who spent his entire career in covert operations leading sensitive missions, including in Yemen, told me that the threat posed by AQAP had been “greatly exaggerated as a threat to the United States. In fact, most Americans think that anything that might kill you personally, in an airplane or walking down Park Avenue or something, is the
biggest threat in the world, right? Because they’re not accustomed to dealing with conditions of danger as a standard of life, you know? So to say, ‘Is AQAP a threat to the United States?’ Yeah. They could bring down an airliner, kill a couple hundred people. But are they an existential threat to the United States? Of course not. Of course not. None of these people are an existential threat to the United States. We’ve gone crazy over this. We had this kind of hysterical reaction to danger.”

  IN THE SAME WAY that Afghanistan and Iraq provided a laboratory for training and developing a whole new generation of highly skilled, seasoned special operators, Yemen represented a paradigm that is sure to permeate US national security policy for decades to come. It was under the Bush administration that the United States declared the world a battlefield where any country would be fair game for targeted killings, but it was President Obama who put a bipartisan stamp on this worldview that will almost certainly endure well beyond his time in office. “This is going to go on for a long time,” said Lang. “The Global War on Terror has acquired a life of its own. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone. And the fact that this counterterrorism/counterinsurgency industry evolved into this kind of thing, involving all these people, the foundations, and the journalists and the book writers, and the generals, and the guys doing the shooting—all of that together has a great, tremendous amount of inertia that tends to keep it going in the same direction.” Lang added: “It continues to roll. It will take a conscious decision, on the part of civilian policy makers, somebody like the president, for example, to decide that ‘OK, boys, the show’s over.’” But Obama was far from deciding the show was over.

  The Pink House

  WASHINGTON, DC, AND SOMALIA, 2011 —A month after the bin Laden raid, Admiral McRaven was still the toast of Washington. In June 2011, he appeared before Congress for his confirmation hearings to become head of the US Special Operations Command. The new post was a promotion from the commander in chief and would officially put McRaven in charge of the military’s global targeted killing program. As he sat before the Senate Armed Services Committee, praise was heaped upon McRaven by Republicans and Democrats alike for his running of the bin Laden raid and his role in other operations. “I salute you and your colleagues in the SEALs for extraordinary operations,” said Democratic senator Jack Reed. “I think your decisiveness and your feel for every level of the conflict, from the villages of Afghanistan and Pakistan all the way up here to the more complicated rooms in Washington, was amply demonstrated.” Republican John McCain echoed those comments, telling McRaven, “What you had achieved in your distinguished career is already extraordinary before May 2, 2011. But on that day, by leading the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, you and your men won an enduring place in American military history.”

  But then the real focus of the hearings unfolded: Were McRaven and his Special Ops Forces “prepared and capable to expand” their “operations at a moment’s notice worldwide?” Reed asked. McRaven told the senators that because of the dramatically increased deployment of Special Ops in the widening global battle space, more resources would be required and a new generation of operators had to be trained. Then the admiral zeroed in on the current prime targets. “From my standpoint as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and Somalia,” he declared. McRaven said that in order to expand successful “kinetic strikes” there, the United States would have to increase its use of drones, as well as on-the-ground intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations. “Any expansion of manpower is going to have to come with a commensurate expansion of the enablers,” McRaven declared.

  When I flew into Mogadishu in the month McRaven was promoted, a rather large symbol of the not-so-quiet presence of American “enablers” was in full view from the moment I landed. Nestled in a back corner of Aden Adde International Airport was a sprawling walled compound. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looked like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. I later learned from multiple Somali and US intelligence sources that it was a new counterterrorism center run by the CIA and used by JSOC operators. Somalis called it the “Pink House” because of its color. Others simply called it “Guantánamo.” Adjacent to the compound were eight large metal hangars, and the CIA had its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources said was completed in early 2011, was guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans controlled access. At the facility, the CIA ran a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against al Shabab.

  As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also utilized the secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being al Shabab members or of having links to the group were held. Some of the prisoners, like al Qaeda leader Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan’s alleged right-hand man, had been seized off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. Others had been yanked off commercial flights after landing or taken from their homes in Somalia and brought to the dungeon. Although the underground prison was officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel paid the salaries of local agents and also directly interrogated prisoners. Among the sources who provided me with information on the prison and the CIA counterterrorism center were senior Somali intelligence officials, senior members of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, former prisoners held at the underground prison and several well-connected Somali analysts and militia leaders, some of whom worked with US personnel, including from the CIA. A US official, who confirmed the existence of both sites, told me, “It makes complete sense to have a strong counterterrorism partnership” with the Somali government.

  The elevated CIA presence in Mogadishu was part of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which included targeted strikes by JSOC, drone attacks and expanded surveillance operations. The US agents “are here full time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told me. At times, he said, there were as many as thirty of them in Mogadishu, but he stressed that those working with the Somali NSA did not conduct operations. Rather, they advised and trained Somali agents. “In this environment, it’s very tricky. They want to help us, but the situation is not allowing them to do [it] however they want. They are not in control of the politics, they are not in control of the security,” he added. “They are not controlling the environment like Afghanistan and Iraq. In Somalia, the situation is fluid, the situation is changing, personalities changing.”

  According to well-connected Somali sources, the CIA was reluctant to deal directly with Somali political leaders, who, despite public praise, were regarded by US officials as corrupt and untrustworthy. Instead, the United States put Somali intelligence agents directly on its payroll. Somali sources with knowledge of the program described the agents as lining up to receive $200 monthly cash payments from Americans, in a country where the average annual income was about $600. “They support us in a big way financially,” said the senior Somali intelligence official. “They are the largest [funder] by far.”

  It was unclear how much control, if any, Somalia’s president had over this counterterrorism force or if he was even fully briefed on its operations. The CIA personnel and other US intelligence agents “do not bother to be in touch with the political leadership of the country and that says a lot about the intentions,” Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, the al Shabab researcher who also had extensive sources within the Somali government, told me. “Essentially, the CIA seems to be operating, doing the foreign policy of the United States. You should have had State Department people doing foreign policy, but the CIA seems to be doing it across the country.” The Somali officials I interviewed said the CIA was the lead US agency on the Mogadishu counterter
rorism program, but they also indicated that US military intelligence agents are at times involved. When asked if they are from JSOC or the Defense Intelligence Agency, the senior Somali intelligence official responded, “We don’t know. They don’t tell us.”

  As the CIA built up its Somali intelligence agency, CIA Director Leon Panetta appeared before Congress and was asked about the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa. “Our approach has been to develop operations in each of these areas that will contain al Qaeda and go after them so that they have no place to escape,” he said. “So we are doing that in Yemen. It’s obviously a dangerous and uncertain situation, but we continue to work with elements there to try to develop counterterrorism. We’re working with JSOC as well in their operations. Same thing is true for Somalia.”

  After I broke the story of the CIA’s counterterrorism program in Somalia for the Nation, one Somali official told the New York Times that the CIA-backed spy service was becoming a “government within a government.” “No one, not even the president, knows what the N.S.A. is doing,” he said. “The Americans are creating a monster.”

  According to former detainees, the NSA’s underground prison, which was staffed by Somali guards, consisted of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February 2011, he saw two white men wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air as thick, moist and foul-smelling. Prisoners, they said, were not allowed outside. Many developed rashes and scratched themselves incessantly. Some had been detained for a year or more without charges or access to lawyers or family. According to one former prisoner, inmates who had been there for long periods would pace around constantly, while others leaned against walls, rocking.