Dirty Wars (38 page)

The once disparate Islamic Courts Union, at the urging of and with strong backing from local businessmen in Mogadishu and other cities, began a concerted mobilization to defeat the CIA's warlords. Indha Adde would lead its military campaign. The ICU called on Somalis to “
join the jihad
against the enemies of Somalia.”

But it wasn't simply a religious cause. The warlords had been a disaster for business in Mogadishu. The “
killing [of] prayer leaders
and imams in local neighborhoods, and school teachers, really sparked a much-needed anger,” said Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, the Somali terrorism scholar. But, from a financial perspective, he said, the warlords “had been holding Mogadishu
hostage for sixteen years. They failed to open the airport, the seaport; they all had small airstrips beside their houses—literally, their houses. And so they were holding people hostage.” In late 2005, businessmen had begun funneling money to the ICU to buy heavy weapons to take on the CIA warlords. Somalis from all walks of life began signing up to fight alongside the ICU. “People would leave their jobs at 5 pm at the Bakaara Market, take their weapon and join the fight against the warlords,” recalled Aynte. “And the next morning they would report back to their shop, or whatever. I mean, it was stunning.”

THE ISLAMIC COURTS UNION
was not a homogenous bunch. Many of the Courts' leaders and rank and file had no connection to al Qaeda, knew little of bin Laden and had an agenda that was squarely focused internally. Their meteoric rise in popularity had everything to do with hatred for the warlords, combined with a fierce desire for stability and some degree of law and order. “We deployed our fighters to Mogadishu with the intent of ceasing the civil war and bringing an
end to the warlords' ruthlessness
,” said Sheikh Ahmed “Madobe” Mohammed Islam, whose Ras Kamboni militia, based in Jubba in southern Somalia, joined the ICU in 2006. He told me, “Those of us within the ICU were people with different views—liberals, moderates and extremists.” Other than expelling the warlords and stabilizing the country through Sharia law, he said, there was “no commonly shared political agenda.”

There were certainly elements of the ICU that had a Taliban-like vision for Somalia. But the regionally based courts were largely used to govern their specific clans or subclans, rather than as a national justice system. Although Somalia is an almost exclusively Muslim nation, it also has a strong secular tradition that would have come into direct conflict with a Taliban-style agenda imposed nationally. “The courts'
promise of order and security
appeals to Somalis across the religious spectrum. Their heterogeneous membership and the diversity of their supporters mean that attempts to label the
Shari'a
system ‘extremist', ‘moderate' or any other single orientation are futile. In reality, the courts are an unwieldy coalition of convenience, united by a convergence of interests,” the International Crisis Group noted in its 2005 report “Somalia's Islamists.” The ICG asserted that only two of the courts had been “consistently associated with militancy” and that they were counterbalanced by other courts. It concluded, “[M]ost courts appear to exist for chiefly pragmatic purposes. Rather than imposing an Islamist agenda on a new Somali government, most are likely to be absorbed willingly into any future judicial system.”

That did not mean that extremists did not view the Courts as a vehicle to implement their radical agenda. “
We share no objectives
, goals or methods with groups that sponsor or support terrorism,” declared Sheikh Sharif, the head of the ICU, in an appeal to the international community. “We have no foreign elements in our courts, and we are simply here because of the need of the community we serve.” Sharif's declaration may have been technically true, but that is only because the Harakat al Shabab al Mujahideen was not officially one of the Courts.

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.