Dirty Wars (25 page)

As JSOC's resources were overwhelmingly dedicated to Iraq, the US approach in Somalia consisted of a covert CIA proxy war. And the United States made Mohamed Qanyare its man in Mogadishu. According to classified US diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Nairobi, US intelligence fiercely dismissed internal critics of its use of the alliance of warlords to carry out targeted kill and capture operations. “Arguments from diplomatic and NGO [nongovernmental organization] colleagues that a subtler approach...will help us address our CT concerns fail to take into account the immediacy of the threat,” read one cable. Certain individuals, the cables stated bluntly, “must be
removed from the Somali equation
.”

It was the beginning of a multiyear relationship among a network of murderous warlords and the CIA that would set Somalia on a course toward even further chaos and bloodshed. It would also result in the very Islamist militant forces Washington wanted crushed emerging more powerful than they had ever been before.

FOR MOST AMERICANS,
mention of the word
Somalia
evoked one of two images: a starving child or US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu following the infamous Black Hawk Down incident of 1993. Al Qaeda's alleged role in the Mogadishu battle was
included in a 1998 indictment
against bin Laden in the United States, which charged that al Qaeda had trained Somali clans to oppose the UN mission, culminating in the killing of eighteen US soldiers and the wounding of seventy-three others in Mogadishu. Bin Laden certainly helped bolster that narrative. He had issued a declaration that year, calling the United States “the snake” and exhorting his followers to “
cut the head off
and stop [it].” Bin Laden later boasted in an interview that the militants who brought down the Black Hawks were among
250 jihadists
sent by him to Somalia. He declared, “
The youth were surprised
at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat...dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.”

Nonetheless, many experts have cast doubt on al Qaeda's centrality to those events. Journalists interviewed Somalis who said they had “
never heard of bin Laden
until he began boasting about Somalia years later.” Undoubtedly,
during this period, bin Laden was seeking to make his mark, but Somali militias hardly needed his help to wreak havoc. The country had already descended into a perpetual state of civil war, with various warlords commanding militias that were terrorizing and destabilizing the country as they fought neighborhood to neighborhood for control. After the withdrawal of the UN force in 1994, Somalia plummeted deeper into chaos.

The “Battle of Mogadishu” was the bloody finale to a mission code-named
Operation Gothic Serpent
. Run by Major General William Garrison, then commander of JSOC, it went down as one of the greatest disasters for the US Special Operations community since the botched rescue mission in 1980 to free American hostages in Tehran. Many within the JSOC community did not see it that way. Lieutenant General Boykin, one of the original members of Delta Force, served alongside Garrison on the Somalia mission as the Delta contingent's commander. “
This ragged place
had just chewed up and spit out elite fighters from the most powerful army in the history of the world,” Boykin recalled thinking as he stood in Mogadishu after the battle. He blasted the Clinton White House for abandoning Somalia. In the aftermath of the disaster, Boykin and Garrison had pushed for more troops and called for
ramping up
the offensive, requests that were rejected. General Garrison
retired
from the military on August 3, 1996. It was
exactly two days
after Mohamed Farrah Aidid died in Somalia, having sustained injuries during a gun battle a few weeks earlier. Although Somalia would be largely ignored by the United States in the years to come, it was never far from the minds of the JSOC operators.

It was not until 1996, after bin Laden was expelled from Sudan, that al Qaeda began to make its presence felt in East Africa. In the summer of 1998, US agents in Albania facilitated the extraordinary rendition of
five members
of Islamic Jihad, Ayman al Zawahiri's organization. The men were transferred to Egypt, where some claimed they were tortured, including by
electric shock
to the genitals. On August 5, Zawahiri published a letter in a British paper vowing revenge against America in “
a language they will understand
.” Two days later, on August 7, 1998, al Qaeda cells, organized out of Nairobi, carried out simultaneous truck bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including twelve Americans, and injuring 5,000 more. It was the first time much of the world had ever heard of bin Laden, and the FBI put him on its
Ten Most Wanted List
. The al Qaeda leader, in taking responsibility for the embassy attacks, initially said that they were
payback
for the US “invasion” of Somalia, but the chosen date of the attacks also coincided with the
eighth anniversary
of US troops deploying to Saudi Arabia.

“We will use
all the means at our disposal
to bring those responsible to
justice no matter what or how long it takes,” President Clinton declared in the Rose Garden after the bombings. Clinton signed a secret finding authorizing the covert use of lethal force in hunting down those responsible; the White House had determined that a mission to kill bin Laden was “
not inconsistent
with the ban on assassinations.” While Clinton authorized the CIA to use lethal force against bin Laden, subsequent instructions issued to CIA station chiefs globally emphasized that arresting bin Laden was preferable. The option of using US Special Ops Forces was on the table, but the administration concluded it “
was much easier
and much less risky to fire off cruise missiles,” according to the Pentagon report commissioned by Rumsfeld that reviewed Clinton-era counterterrorism policy. General Downing, the former commander of JSOC and SOCOM, described the attitude he encountered from Clinton administration officials as: “
Don't let these SOF guys
through the door because they're dangerous.... They are going to do something to embarrass” the country.

Although some US intelligence indicated that
scouting missions
for the embassy bombings were coordinated in Somalia, the Clinton White House would not permit any incursions into Somalia. Instead, the US response was to strike suspected al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan and Sudan with long-range cruise missiles in a mission code-named
Operation Infinite Reach
. The target of the Sudan bombing, al Shifa factory, turned out to be a legitimate pharmaceutical plant, which produced
half of Sudan's medications
, and not, as the United States alleged, a facility for manufacturing nerve gas. Regardless, East Africa had been ripped wide open as a new front in what was rapidly becoming a covert US war against al Qaeda. “We are involved in a
long-term struggle
,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared. “This is unfortunately the war of the future.”

When the Bush administration came to power, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld agreed with Albright's assessment but viewed the Clinton administration's approach to fighting that “war of the future” with utter disdain. He came into office determined to put the darkest of the US military forces front and center in the US war machine, and 9/11 had accelerated his plans. But, in the early years after 9/11, Somalia was, at best, a third-tier concern for the Bush administration—behind the war in Afghanistan and, eventually, Iraq.

IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING
the US and UN withdrawal from Mogadishu, Somalia was further destroyed. The beautiful, Italian-influenced architecture of the capital was transformed into a skyline of bullet-pocked skeletons of once gorgeous buildings. Jobless youth—many addicted to khat—
joined up with clan-based militias and devoted their existence to the cause of the warlords. “Everyone was thinking in terms of creating a
small slice of Mogadishu
as his turf,” recalled Buubaa, the former foreign minister. “It was as if the Somali state was over and everybody wanted to create his little turf to collect money and to become powerful just for personal gains, not for national gains.” This was the Somalia that the Americans flew into in 2003 when they first approached Qanyare, one of the very people who had helped destroy the country.

General Downing argued that “
a low-to-invisible
American profile in the region” was crucial to the US strategy in Somalia, warning that the United States should be careful not to “inflate the appeal of [al Qaeda's] rhetoric or the resonance of their extremist ideology.” The Bush administration may have tried to follow the “low profile” part of Downing's advice, but its embrace of the warlords forcefully disregarded the second part.

Believing they had the support of Washington, Qanyare and his CIA-backed alliance soon morphed from thugs battling to control territory to paramilitary militias using the cover of the war on terrorism to justify their activities. CIA officers and Special Ops personnel would
fly from Nairobi
to Mogadishu, transporting cash and lists of suspects Washington wanted taken out. Initially, the focus was on rendition against foreign operatives. The CIA did not want the warlords to target Somalis for fear of further fueling the civil war. According to military journalist Sean Naylor, the head of the CIA's warlord program was John Bennett, at the time the Agency's Nairobi station chief. Bennett internally laid out ground rules for the program: “We will work with warlords. We don't play favorites. They don't play us. We don't go after Somali nationals, just [foreign] al-Qaida.” The warlords, however, had their own plans. Qanyare told me his CIA handlers were
reluctant to pull the trigger
on kill operations, fearing that an American could be killed or captured. Instead, they left the dirty work to him and his fellow warlords.

After making their deal with the CIA, Qanyare and his comrades engaged in an all-out targeted kill and capture campaign against anyone—Somali or foreign—they suspected of being a supporter of any Islamic movement. In a handful of cases, the warlords caught someone the United States considered to be of value, such as suspected al Qaeda operative Suleiman Ahmed Hemed Salim, captured in the
spring of 2003
. One of Qanyare's fellow warlords,
Mohamed Dheere
, seized Salim and rendered him into US custody. Salim was reportedly later held in
two secret prisons
in Afghanistan. In 2004, directly contradicting Bennett's supposed “rules” for the warlord game, Qanyare's men carried out a raid on a
home of a Somali militant
, Aden Hashi Farah Ayro. Ostensibly aimed at capturing Abu Talha al Sudani,
whom the United States was hunting in connection with the embassy attacks in Africa, they instead seized Ayro's brother-in-law, Mohamed Ali Isse, who was wanted in connection with a spate of assassinations in Somaliland in 2003-2004.
According to Isse
, he was taken aboard a US helicopter and transported to a US Navy vessel.
Chicago Tribune
journalist Paul Salopek tracked down Isse in a Berbera, Somaliland, prison years later. He told Salopek that once aboard the US ship, he was first treated for a gunshot wound and then detained and interrogated by US plainclothes agents for about a month. Then he was taken to Lemonnier, en route to a clandestine Ethiopian prison, where Isse contends he was tortured by US-trained Ethiopian military intelligence using electric shocks. He was then returned to the Somaliland gulag, where he would remain.

Scores of other “suspects” were abducted by the CIA-backed warlords and handed over to American agents. “
The scramble
by Mogadishu faction leaders to nab al Qaeda figures for American reward money has spawned a small industry in abductions. Like speculators on the stock market, faction leaders have taken to arresting foreigners—mainly, but not exclusively Arabs—in the hope they might be on a wanted list,” according to a report by the International Crisis Group in 2005. “According to one militia leader who has worked closely with the Americans in counter-terrorism operations, as many as seventeen suspected terrorists have been apprehended in Mogadishu alone since 2003—all but three apparently innocent.” In many cases, the United States would determine the prisoners had no intelligence value and
repatriate them
to Somalia. Sometimes, according to several former senior Somali government and military officials, the warlords would execute them to keep them from talking.

“These people were
already heinous warlords
, they were widely reviled in Mogadishu. And then they start assassinating imams and local prayer leaders,” said Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, a Somali analyst who has written extensively on the history of al Qaeda and warlord politics in Somalia. “They were either capturing them, and then renditioning them to Djibouti, where there is a major American base. Or in many cases, they were chopping their head off and taking the head to the Americans and telling them, ‘We killed this guy.'” He added: “The vast majority of people they killed had nothing to do with the War on Terror.”

In a diplomatic cable to the State Department from the Nairobi Embassy, US officials acknowledged that the use of the warlords and their militias to hunt down alleged terrorists “
may seem unpalatable
choices, particularly in light of civilian casualties in recent rounds of fighting in Mogadishu.” But, they explained, “These partners are the only means currently available to remove” the terrorists “from their positions in Mogadishu.”

When I met Qanyare, he denied that his forces were committing extrajudicial killings, or kidnapping and torturing prisoners, but when pressed on his operations, he acknowledged he was capturing people and interrogating them. Then he shot back. “When you are fighting an enemy, any option is open. If you want to fight al Qaeda, you have to fight them ruthlessly, because they are ruthless.” He paused, before putting a fine point on his sentiment. “
No mercy
.”