In 2008, al Shabab began targeting Ahlu Sunna leaders, carrying out assassinations and desecrating the tombs of ASWJ’s elders. Al Shabab considered ASWJ to be a cult whose practices of celebrating the dead and speaking in tongues were heresy. After much debate within the ASWJ community, militias were formed to take up arms against al Shabab. At the beginning, its fighting force of undisciplined clan fighters and religious scholars left much to be desired. Then, quietly, Ethiopia started arming and financing ASWJ, as well as providing its forces with training and, eventually, boots on the ground. By early 2010, ASWJ was widely seen as an Ethiopian—and therefore US—proxy. In March 2010, after heated debate within its community, ASWJ signed a formal cooperation agreement with the Somali government.
One of the prime beneficiaries of ASWJ’s new status as a paramilitary militia was Abdulkadir Moalin Noor, simply known as “the Khalifa,” or the successor. His father, a widely revered holy man, died in 2009 at the age of ninety-one and had designated Noor as the new spiritual leader of the movement. Noor was educated in London and managed his family’s business investments outside of Somalia. When his father died, he left his life of safety and comfort to return to Mogadishu, where he was given the title of minister of state for the presidency. Noor, however, still enjoyed the luxuries of the West. He rolled around Mogadishu in an armored SUV with animal skins over the seats. He set up a wireless Internet network in an ASWJ camp outside of the capital that didn’t have indoor plumbing and his Koran was housed in a shiny new iPad. He showed me an e-mail from Ethiopia’s minister of foreign affairs on his recently acquired white iPhone.
Noor, who regularly met with Western officials and intelligence agents, declined to outline who exactly was funding ASWJ from the outside, but he did single out the United States as Somalia’s “number one” ally. “I’m here to thank them, because they are helping us, fighting against the terrorists,” he told me. “What about on a military level?” I asked him. “I don’t want to mention a lot of things,” he replied. “But, they are in deep, deep. They are working with our intelligence, they are giving them training. They are working with the military personnel. They have special trained forces fighting against al Shabab here. I don’t want to disclose—but I know they’re doing a good job. They do have people here, fighting al Shabab. And by the help of Allah, we hope this mayhem will end soon.”
By mid-2011, the ASWJ militias had emerged as some of the most effective fighters battling al Shabab forces outside of Mogadishu, winning back territory in the Mudug region and several other pockets of the country. But, like most powerful paramilitary groups in Somalia, there was far more to the group than met the eye.
The UN Monitoring Group on Somalia declared that some ASWJ militias “appear to be proxies for neighboring States rather than emergent local authorities.” ASWJ also received support from Southern Ace, a private security firm. Technically registered in Hong Kong in 2007 and run by a white South African, Edgar Van Tonder, Southern Ace committed “egregious violations of the arms embargo” on Somalia, according to the United Nations, and “also began to explore prospects for arms trafficking and engaged in horticultural experiments aimed at the production of narcotic drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and opium.”
Between April 2009 and early 2011, according to the United Nations, “Southern Ace and its local associates recruited and operated a well-equipped, 220-strong militia...supervised by a dozen Zimbabweans and three Westerners, at an estimated cost of $1 million in salaries and at least $150,000 in arms and ammunition. The result was one of the strongest forces...with the potential to change the balance of power in the area.”
Southern Ace began acquiring arms from the weapons market in Somalia, including scores of Kalashnikovs, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and an antiaircraft ZU-23 machine gun with 2,000 rounds of ammunition. The company’s arms purchases “were so substantial” that local officials “noted a significant rise in the price of ammunition and a shortage of ZU-23 rounds.” Some of the weapons were mounted on four-wheel drive vehicles and pickup trucks. The company also imported to Somalia “Philippine army-style uniforms and bullet-proof jackets in support of their operations,” according to the United Nations.
Backed by Ethiopia and Southern Ace, ASWJ conducted a series of major offensives against al Shabab that the United Nations alleged were supported through violations of the arms embargo. Although Ethiopia and the United States undoubtedly saw ASWJ as the best counterbalance to the rhetoric of al Shabab and al Qaeda, in just three years they transformed a previously nonviolent entity into one of the most powerful armed groups in Somalia. “To a certain extent, the resort to Somali proxy forces by foreign Governments represents a potential return to the ‘warlordism’ of the 1990s and early 2000s,” a UN report soberly concluded. Such practices, it added, “historically proved to be counterproductive.”
SOUTHERN ACE WAS HARDLY the only mercenary company to intervene in Somalia. No modern US war would be complete without the involvement of Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Even though his company’s crimes and scandals were closely associated with the neoconservatives and the Bush era, Blackwater forces continued to play a significant role in the CIA’s global operations under the Obama administration. With Blackwater under intense investigation and his top deputies indicted on federal conspiracy and weapons charges, Prince left the United States in 2010 and relocated to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, a major hub for the mercenary industry and the war-contracting business as a whole. Prince had close ties to the royals, particularly the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. He said he chose Abu Dhabi because of its “great proximity to potential opportunities across the entire Middle East, and great logistics,” adding that it has “a friendly business climate, low to no taxes, free trade and no out of control trial lawyers or labor unions. It’s pro-business and opportunity.”
From his adopted home in the UAE, Prince continued his mercenary activities. He left the United States, he said, to “make it harder for the jackals to get my money,” adding that he wanted to explore new opportunities in “the energy field.” A few days before Christmas 2010, Prince landed at Mogadishu’s international airport, disembarked a private jet and was taken to the VIP lounge, where he met with unidentified individuals for an hour. He then got back aboard his jet and took off. “We have been hearing more and more about Blackwater’s ambitions to make its mark in Somalia,” a Western official told me at the time.
Prince had long been interested in building a privatized counterpiracy force that could deploy off the coast of Somalia. In late 2008, he was in talks with more than a dozen shipping companies about hiring Blackwater to protect their ships and vessels through the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden. In 2006, he had purchased a 183-foot vessel, the McArthur, and transformed it into an antipiracy mother ship that could be equipped with Little Bird helicopters, inflatable boats, thirty-five private soldiers and a .50-caliber machine gun. “We could put vessels out there and go and stop fishing boats the pirates are using a lot cheaper than the Navy could using a billion and a half to two billion dollar war ships,” Prince said. The European Union, he said, was “out there with 24 ships, trying to cover 2 million square miles of ocean in the Indian Ocean dealing with Somali pirates. That comes out to 80,000 square miles per vessel. That’s just not getting it done.”
Prince suggested that his force could operate like the privateers during the American Revolution. “A privateer was a private ship, with a private crew, with a private master and they would receive a hunting license. It’s called a Letter of Marque. It’s actually provided for in the Constitution,” Prince declared in a speech shortly before he left for the UAE. “They were allowed to go hunt enemy shipping and they did very well. Even General Washington was an investor in one of those privateer operations.”
There was no doubt that piracy was expanding off Somalia’s coast. Pirate attacks continued to climb during the second half of 2010—from September 2010 to January 2011, the n
umber of hostages held by pirates rose from 250 to 770. Pirates had begun demanding increasingly exorbitant ransoms and were using commandeered “mother ships” to carry out more ambitious attacks.
In January 2011, US soldiers conducted a counterpiracy incursion inland, snatching three young Somali men and bringing them aboard a ship for questioning. Soon after, the head of CENTCOM’s naval forces, Vice Admiral Mark Fox, suggested that the United States should employ counterterrorism measures in the fight against Somali piracy. Citing the increasing sophistication of the pirates’ technology, as well as their links to al Shabab, Fox spoke of countering nascent pirate attacks inland. “Al Shabab is responsible for a lot of training activity and camps and that sort of thing in Somalia,” he declared. “The pirates use these things. There cannot be a segregation between terrorist activity, in my mind, and counter-piracy.”
Although Fox may have been overstating links between al Shabab and the pirates—many accounts indicate that al Shabab was extorting from the pirates more than it was coordinating with them—he was correct that the pirates were becoming bolder.
On February 16, 2011, Abduwali Muse—the lone pirate prosecuted for the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, was sentenced to thirty-three years in prison. Two days later, an SOS was sent from a personal yacht, the SV Quest, owned by California residents Jean and Scott Adam. They were captured, along with Seattle-based crewmates Phyllis Macay and Robert Riggle, 275 miles from the coast of Oman. An ad hoc flotilla of naval vessels from the US 5th Fleet began trailing the Quest soon after its capture was reported, supported by helicopters and unarmed surveillance drones. The rescue mission caught up to the Quest in international waters between the northernmost tip of Puntland and the Yemeni island of Socotra.
By the next day, President Obama had authorized the use of lethal force. But in all the ways that the takedown of the pirates who took the Maersk Alabama was a success, the mission to liberate the passengers on board the Quest was a disaster.
An unusually large, unwieldy band of nineteen pirates had boarded the yacht, making the succinct “three shots, three dead pirates” conclusion of the Alabama rescue impossible to replicate. So the stalemate continued until two pirate representatives from the Quest willingly boarded one of the ships to negotiate with the FBI. The talks soon stalled, and FBI agents detained the pirates. The next morning, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at one of the Navy ships, before gunfire erupted within the yacht. Two pirates were killed. US forces then sprang into action: two motorboats carried fifteen Navy SEAL commandos to the yacht, where intense hand-to-hand combat ensued. Two pirates were killed by the SEALS, one shot and the other stabbed. It was already too late for the hostages. Two had died, and the others had suffered fatal gunshot wounds. It is unclear whether the hostages had been executed or caught in the crossfire.
In a telephone press conference, Admiral Fox stated that the hostages were shot prior to the boarding and violent clearing operation. A BBC correspondent who spoke with the pirates reported that they took credit for killing the captives but had done so only after the US Navy fired the first shots, which killed the first two pirates. The fifteen remaining pirates were taken into US custody, and fourteen were later indicted on charges of piracy and kidnapping (one was a juvenile and was determined not to have been a central player in the hijacking).
Manifesting one of the qualities that defined Blackwater’s ascent, Erik Prince again saw opportunity in crisis. In 2009, Blackwater had inked a deal with the government of Djibouti to operate the antipiracy ship McArthur from its territory (the ship was later sold to a Saracen International subsidiary). The arrangement was the result of a series of meetings between Djiboutian officials, Prince and Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who at the time was a senior executive at Blackwater. Initial estimates indicated that the company could make about $200,000 per escort job for shipping companies. The crew would consist of thirty-three US citizens, including three six-man shooter teams that would operate on a continual rotation. “Blackwater does not intend to take any pirates into custody, but will use lethal force against pirates if necessary,” according to a classified US diplomatic cable on the agreement, noting that Blackwater “has briefed AFRICOM, CENTCOM, and Embassy Nairobi officials.” The cable added that there was “no precedent for a paramilitary operation in a purely commercial environment.”
Somalia’s piracy industry was based in the semi-autonomous Puntland region, which had little interest in cooperating with the US-backed government in Mogadishu. The Puntland authorities were facing mounting pressure from the international community to crack down on the pirates, and a local Islamic militant movement was threatening its ability to sign lucrative oil and mineral exploitation contracts with large corporations. Somalia is home to significant deposits of “uranium and largely unexploited reserves of iron ore, tin, gypsum, bauxite, copper, salt, natural gas, likely oil reserves,” according to the CIA. In late 2010, Puntland’s government announced that it was creating its own counterpiracy/counterterrorism force, saying that it had received funding from an anonymous donor nation from the Gulf. It was later revealed that the anonymous donor country was none other than the UAE and that the company that had been contracted to train the security force was bankrolled by one of its newest residents, Erik Prince.
The company, Saracen International, was run by several veterans of the mercenary firm Executive Outcomes and had offices and shell companies in multiple countries, including South Africa, Uganda, Angola and Lebanon. Among the key figures in the company was Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in apartheid South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau, a notorious security force known for hunting down and killing opponents of the apartheid regime. According to a confidential intelligence report from AMISOM, Prince was “at the top of the management chain of Saracen” and “provided seed money for the Saracen contract.” According to the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, Prince and Luitingh met in Washington, DC, in October 2009, and the two then met with officials from Abu Dhabi. The UAE also hired a former US diplomat, attorney Pierre-Richard Prosper, who had served as the ambassador at large for war crimes issues under President Bush, and an ex-CIA officer, Michael Shanklin, the former CIA Mogadishu station chief. By late 2010, Saracen was training a 1,000-member counterpiracy force in northern Puntland. The force also began preparing to take on Islamic militants who were threatening big-business opportunities. The Islamic militants had complained that they had been “cut out of energy exploration deals” in their region. “You cannot have oil exploration if you have insecurity,” declared Mohamed Farole, the son and adviser of Puntland’s president, Abdirahman Mohamed Farole.
By May 2011, Saracen’s Puntland operations were well under way: at the Bandar Siyada base near Bosaso, 470 soldiers and drivers had completed training. Plans were in place to equip the force with three transport aircraft, three reconnaissance aircraft, two transport helicopters and two light helicopters. The projected force, according to the UN Monitoring Group, would be the best-equipped indigenous military force anywhere in Somalia and the second-largest externally supported military effort after AMISOM. Photographic evidence indicated that Saracen personnel had already been deployed for VIP security and humanitarian operations.
Saracen also brokered a deal with President Sheikh Sharif’s administration in Mogadishu to build a personal security detail for the president and other senior officials. Saracen’s Mogadishu operations were visible by October 2010. Luitingh, Shanklin and a small group of Saracen personnel traveled to Mogadishu on October 5. Over the next three weeks they received four armored vehicles, complete with machine-gun turrets, from the UAE. It seemed that President Sharif and his prime minister had been making secret deals with Saracen and at least five other private companies that had set up shop around Mogadishu’s international airport. These conspicuous activities quickly aroused the suspicions and concerns of AMISOM forces and Somali politicians. AMISOM’s commander, Major General Nathan Mugisha,
expressed concern about “unknown armed groups in the mission area,” in reference to Saracen’s operations. Meanwhile, Somali lawmakers announced at the end of 2010 that they were demanding the suspension of contracts with private security contractors, claiming that they had no idea what the contractors had actually been hired to do.
Just as Prince and Saracens’ latest private war was getting under way, scandal hit. The UN Monitoring Group declared that Saracen had been operating in flagrant violation of the arms embargo on Somalia, concluding in its report that “notwithstanding Southern Ace’s short-lived and unsuccessful attempts at arms dealing and drug trafficking, the most egregious violation of the arms embargo by a private security company during the course of the UN Monitoring Group’s mandate was perpetrated by Saracen International, in association with an opaque web of affiliated entities.” The UN Monitoring Group suggested that Saracen’s continued operations could actually increase support for local Islamist militias and, possibly, al Shabab. “Saracen’s presence has increased tension in north-eastern Somalia,” it concluded. A year later, in response to a subsequent UN report, Saracen’s lawyer accused the monitoring group of publishing “a collection of unsubstantiated and often false innuendo.”
In early 2011, when Prince’s involvement in Saracen became public, his spokesman, Mark Corallo, said that Prince was merely compelled by humanitarian imperative to help “Somalia overcome the scourge of piracy” and claimed he had no financial stake in Saracen’s work.
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