Perhaps al Shabab was truly on the ropes, as the Somali government and AMISOM claimed. Or maybe the group had begun to implement Fazul’s vision of a guerrilla terror campaign that gave up territory in favor of sowing fear throughout the country, while effectively exposing the Somali government’s inability to bring stability. Al Shabab certainly faced an uphill battle in reasserting its control over territory it won as a result of the disastrous US-backed Ethiopian invasion and the overthrow of the Islamic Courts, but its future could well be determined—as so much of modern Somalia’s has been—by foreign intervention.
The United States may have killed a slew of prominent al Qaeda and al Shabab figures, but in doing so it had simultaneously inspired successors to those militants—including US citizens—to rise up and continue the fight. Unlike AMISOM’s forces or any other foreign troops, the members of al Shabab were largely Somali and could reintegrate into society or rebrand themselves and regroup. “Whoever thinks today that a government other than that of Islam will rule Somalia, he is indeed deluding himself and is not following the affairs of the world,” Ahmed Abdi Godane, the emir of al Shabab, declared in late 2011. “A time will come in the very near future, when the Shariah of Allah rules the entire country—from one corner to the other, and Somalia becomes the foundation of the Islamic Caliphate, upon the methodology of the Prophethood. And our Jihad will continue until we reach the objective that has been defined by Allah.”
AL SHABAB’S METEORIC RISE IN SOMALIA, and the legacy of terror it wrought, was a direct response to a decade of disastrous US policy, which had strengthened the very threat it was intended to crush. The multi-pronged US operations in Somalia, in the end, may have given the greatest boost to warlords, including those who once counted al Shabab among their allies and friends. “They are not fighting for a cause,” Mohamed Ahmed Nur, the Mogadishu mayor, told me. “And the conflict will start tomorrow, when we defeat Shabab. These militias are based on clan and warlordism and all these things. They don’t want a system. They want to keep that turf as a fixed post—then, whenever the government becomes weak, they want to say, ‘We control here.’”
Washington seemed to have cast history aside and, with it, the hard work of supporting indigenous Somali movements that could potentially stabilize their country, opting instead to wage a war of attrition. Under President Obama, the large-scale conventional military deployments of Iraq and Afghanistan were replaced by an expansion of drone strikes and Special Ops teams conducting targeted killings. President Obama seemed intent on a strategy that presumed peace would come by killing the bad guys. But, as happened in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, this strategy appeared to fuel the movements that created those “bad guys” in the first place. “If you use the drone, and the selected killings, and do nothing else on the other side, then you get rid of individuals. But the root causes are still there,” observed the former Somali foreign minister, Ismail Mahmoud “Buubaa” Hurre. “The root causes are not security. The root causes are political and economic.”
The history of Somalia has been marred by extreme violence and social division. But the country has also displayed a capacity to unite in the face of foreign intervention. Although al Shabab may have been a severely weakened movement, the conditions that turned it into a Frankenstein remained. The end result of US policy from 1991 through the first term of the Obama administration was to ensure that warlordism would continue and that Somalia would remain a breeding ground for violent jihadists and an enduring interest for al Qaeda. Together, the Bush and Obama administrations managed to rewind the clock of history to the time US troops withdrew from Somalia after Black Hawk Down and abandoned the country to gangsters and warlords. From there, the hellish realities of Somalia grew even worse. Nonetheless, by late 2011, the Obama administration had established a new drone base in Ethiopia in addition to the ones in the Seychelles and Saudi Arabia.
Abdulrahman Vanishes
YEMEN, 2011 —Abdulrahman Awlaki, the oldest son of Anwar Awlaki, was born in Denver, Colorado. Like his father, he spent the first seven years of his life in the United States, attending American schools. When he returned to Yemen, his grandparents—Anwar’s mom and dad—played a huge role in his upbringing, particularly after Anwar went underground. Anwar “always thought that it is best for Abdulrahman to be with me,” Nasser told me. Anwar believed that his wife and children “should not be involved at all in his problems.” Nasser knew that Anwar would never return to the United States and that he was on a collision course with the US government. But still, he had hopes for his grandson. Nasser wanted Abdulrahman to excel in school and he had dreams of sending his grandson back to the United States for a college education.
Abdulrahman looked just like his father when he was a young boy, but with long wavy hair. “We were pressuring him to go to the mosque, and to perform the prayers on time, things like that,” recalled Nasser, adding that Abdulrahman was not particularly religious and preferred to hang out with his friends. “His hair was very long, and his mother wanted him to have a haircut. I mean, he was as normal as anybody. He was acting like other American” teens. “Anwar used to have adventures, do things like that. Abdulrahman was not that kind,” he added. “He was just from school, to the house, and then to go and play with his friends. And they go to the pizza parlors, to all kinds of places. I always tell him, ‘When you grow up, I want you to study in the United States.’”
It was difficult for Abdulrahman and his siblings to grow up without their father around, but as a teenager, Abdulrahman was old enough to understand why he couldn’t see his father. And it was frightening. “Definitely, he was mad about the targeting, what is happening to his father,” Nasser added. “He was really concerned about his father.”
Abdulrahman’s aunt, Abir—Anwar’s younger sister—was extremely close to him. “Abdulrahman was one of the closest people to my heart. I loved him so much and everybody did because Abdulrahman made it very easy for all of us to just adore him,” she told me. “He had somehow filled his father’s vacuum for me and became a brother, a really dear one.” Abdulrahman admired his father and had even chosen as his Facebook username “Ibn al Shaykh,” Son of the Shaykh. But Abdulrahman was not his father.
Abdulrahman loved hip-hop music and Facebook and hanging out with his friends. They would take pictures of themselves posing as rappers, and when the Yemeni revolution began, Abdulrahman wanted to be a part of it. As massive protests shook Yemen, he would spend hours hanging out in Change Square with the young, nonviolent revolutionaries who had vowed to change their government through peaceful means. He would spend nights there with his friends, sharing his vision for the future and, at times, just goofing off. But as the revolution continued and the government was brought to the verge of collapse, Abdulrahman decided to follow his urge to see his father.
In early September, Abdulrahman woke up before the rest of the house. He tiptoed into his mother’s bedroom, went into her purse, took 9,000 Yemeni rials—the equivalent of about $40—and left a note outside of her bedroom door. He then snuck out the kitchen window and into the courtyard. Shortly after 6:00 a.m., the family’s guard saw the boy leave but didn’t think anything of it at the time. It was Sunday, September 4, 2011, a few days after the Eid al-Fitr holiday marked the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Nine days before, Abdulrahman had turned sixteen.
A short while later, Abdulrahman’s mother woke up. She started to rouse Abdulrahman’s siblings for the morning prayers and then went to find Abdulrahman. He was not in his bedroom. She called for him, and while searching the house, she found the note. “I am sorry for leaving in this kind of way. I miss my father and want to see if I can go and talk to him,” the note read. “I will be back in a few days. I am sorry for taking the money. I will pay you back. Please forgive me. Love, Abdulrahman.” Nasser said they were all shocked. “He would talk sometimes about his father and he wanted to see him, but nothing really which would indicate that he one day will leave us like that
. He never told his mother or me or his grandmother that he would like to go and look for his father,” Nasser recalled. “Because his father always thought that it is best for him to be with me. And that he should not be involved at all in his problems.”
When they searched Abdulrahman’s room, they determined that he had only taken a backpack. He clearly was planning a short trip. “When his mother told me about the letter, it was just like a shock for me,” Abdulrahman’s grandmother, Saleha, told me. “I said, ‘I think this will be just like bait for his father.’” The CIA, she feared, “might find his father through him.” The family called around to Abdulrahman’s friends. Someone told Nasser that a teacher at the school had recently gotten close to Abdulrahman, and Nasser believed the teacher had been encouraging Abdulrahman to find his father and to reconnect with him, that it would be good for the boy. “He had influence on him, and they used to go to a pizza parlor to eat pizza,” Nasser said. When Nasser tried to find the teacher to ask him if he had any information about Abdulrahman’s whereabouts, the teacher had “vanished.”
Abdulrahman had already boarded a bus at Bab al Yemen, in the old city in Sana’a. His destination was Shabwah, the family’s home province and the scene of repeated US air strikes aimed at killing his father.
Hellfire
WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2011 —On September 6, 2011, General David Petraeus was sworn in as the director of the CIA. A decade after 9/11, the Agency had been transformed as a result of its behind-the-scenes turf war with JSOC. And for some veteran intelligence officials, Obama’s selection of Petraeus was an ominous symbol. “The CIA has become more militarized, and is working very closely with JSOC, to the extent that they’re even using CIA cover, which would have been unimaginable ten years ago,” former CIA case officer Phil Giraldi told me. “A considerable part of the CIA budget is now no longer spying. It’s supporting paramilitaries who work closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program.” The CIA, he added, “is a killing machine now.”
A State Department liaison who worked extensively with JSOC described Petraeus’s vision for running the CIA as transforming the Agency into “a mini-Special Operations Command that purports to be an intelligence agency.” For all the praise Petraeus won for his counterinsurgency strategy and the “surge” in Iraq, the liaison told me, Petraeus’s most significant contribution was as a “political tool,” an enabler of those within the national security apparatus who wanted to see a continuation and expansion of covert global small wars. Pointing to the “mystique that surrounds JSOC” and Admiral William McRaven, the liaison said, “Petraeus was trying to implement that kind of command climate at the CIA.”
Colonel Patrick Lang told me that once Petraeus arrived at Langley, he “wanted to drag them in the covert action direction and to be a major player.”
FOR TWO YEARS, the US efforts to assassinate Anwar Awlaki were based on intelligence that he was hiding in his tribal areas around Shabwah and Abyan. But the interrogation sessions with Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame—the young Somali snatched by JSOC and held for months on board a US Navy vessel—had indicated that Awlaki had relocated to the northern Yemeni governate of Jawf, far from the scene of most of the strikes aimed at killing him. The United States had long assumed Awlaki was in Shabwah and had repeatedly conducted operations there in an effort to get him. Yemeni intelligence on the ground had corroborated the information that Warsame had given US interrogators when JSOC held him. By early September, US surveillance aircraft had pinpointed Awlaki’s location at a small house in Khashef, a village in Jawf about ninety miles northeast of Sana’a. Jawf, which borders Saudi Arabia, was rife with informants on the kingdom’s payroll.
Local villagers in Khashef began seeing drones hovering in the skies above. Washington’s drone war had kicked into full gear in Yemen, so the presence of the aircraft was not particularly out of the ordinary, but what the villagers did not know was that the White House’s counterterrorism teams were watching one specific house. Watching and waiting. Once they got a lock on Awlaki’s coordinates, the CIA quickly deployed several armed Predator drones from its new base in Saudi Arabia and took operational control of some JSOC drones launched from Djibouti, as well.
The plan to assassinate Awlaki was code-named Operation Troy. The very name implied that the United States had a mole who was leading its forces to Awlaki.
As the Americans surveilled the house where Anwar Awlaki was staying in Jawf, Abdulrahman Awlaki arrived in Ataq, Shabwah. He was picked up at the bus station by his relatives, who told him that they did not know where his father was. The boy decided to wait in the hope that his father would come to meet him. His grandmother called the family he was with in Shabwah, but Abdulrahman refused to speak to her. “I called the family house and they said, ‘He’s OK, he’s here,’ but I didn’t talk to him,” she recalled. “He tried to avoid talking to us, because he knows we will tell him to come back. And he wanted to see his father.” Abdulrahman traveled with some of his cousins to the town of Azzan, where he planned to await word from his father.
At the White House, President Obama was faced with a decision, not of morality or legality, but of timing. He had already sentenced Anwar Awlaki, a US citizen, to death without trial. A secret legal authorization had been prepared and internal administration critics sidelined or brought on board. All that remained to sort out was the day Awlaki would die. Obama, one of his advisers recalled, had “no qualms” about this kill. According to leaks from the Obama administration about the operation, US officials knew there were women and children in the house where Awlaki was staying. Although scores of US drone strikes had killed civilians in various countries around the globe, it was official policy to avoid such deaths if at all possible. When Obama was briefed on Awlaki’s location in Jawf and was told that children were in the home, he was explicit that he did not want any options ruled out. Awlaki was not to escape again. “Bring it to me and let me decide in the reality of the moment rather than in the abstract,” Obama told his advisers. “In this one instance,” an Obama confidant recalled, “the president considered relaxing some of his collateral requirements.”
Awlaki had evaded US drones and cruise missiles for at least two years. He rarely stayed in one place more than a night or two. This time was different. For some reason, he had stayed in the same house in Khashef much longer, all the while being monitored by the United States. Now the Americans had him cleanly in their sights. “They were living in this house, for at least two weeks. Small mud house,” Nasser was later told by local people. “I think they wanted to make some videotape. Samir Khan was with him.” On the morning of September 30, 2011, Awlaki and Khan finished their breakfast inside the house. US spy cameras and satellites broadcast images back to Washington and Virginia of the two men and a handful of their cohorts piling into vehicles and driving away from the house. They began heading toward the province of Marib. As the vehicles made their way over the dusty, unpaved roads, US drones, armed with Hellfire missiles, were dispatched to hunt them down. The drones were technically under the command of the CIA, though JSOC aircraft and ground forces were poised to jump in should the operation require their assistance. A team of commandos stood at the ready to board V-22 helicopters and take action. For extra measure, US Marine Harrier jets scrambled in a backup maneuver.
Six months earlier, Awlaki had narrowly missed death by US missiles. “This time eleven missiles missed its target but the next time, the first rocket may hit it,” he had said. As the cars sped down the road, Awlaki’s prophecy came true. Two of the Predator drones locked onto the car carrying Awlaki, while other aircraft hovered as backup. A Hellfire missile fired from a drone slammed into his car, transforming it into a ball of flames. A second missile hit moments later, ensuring that the men inside would never escape if they had managed to survive. “Just a few minutes after they left the house, they were going to a wadi, somewhere they can make this film, and they were targeted,” said Nasser. “The car was
completely destroyed. And [Anwar’s] body was cut out of the car.” The Yemeni government sent out a text message to journalists. “The terrorist Anwar Awlaki has been killed along with some of his companions,” it read. It was 9:55 a.m. local time. When villagers in the area arrived at the scene of the missile strikes, they reported that the bodies inside had been burned beyond recognition. There were no survivors. Amid the rubble, they found a symbol more reliable than a fingerprint in Yemeni culture: a charred rhinoceros horn handle of a jambiya dagger. There was no doubt it belonged to Anwar Awlaki.
ON SEPTEMBER 30, during a visit to Fort Myer in Virginia, President Obama stepped up to a podium and addressed reporters. “Earlier this morning Anwar Awlaki, a leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed in Yemen,” Obama declared. “The death of Awlaki is a major blow to al Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate.” The president then bestowed upon Awlaki a label that had never been attached to him before, despite all his reported associations with al Qaeda. “Awlaki was the leader of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In that role, he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans,” Obama asserted. “The death of Awlaki marks another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates,” adding that the United States “will be resolute in our commitment to destroy terrorist networks that aim to kill Americans, and to build a world in which people everywhere can live in greater peace, prosperity and security.” Obama made no mention of the fact that Awlaki was a US citizen.
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