Dirty Wars (39 page)

In Mogadishu, Fazul hooked up with Aweys and Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, a Somali militant who had trained in Afghanistan with al Qaeda, and other former comrades from Al Itihaad, as they began building up al Shabab. He and Nabhan served as al Qaeda's chief emissaries to the group. At that point US intelligence was not even aware of the group's name and referred
to it simply as “
the special group
.” Al Shabab's training base, the Salahuddin Center, was situated on the grounds of a former
Italian cemetery
that had been rather gruesomely desecrated. It was heavily fortified and offered recruits the opportunity to watch jihadist videos from Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya, as well as videos featuring bin Laden. “Once the Salahuddin Center was established by al Shabab, they provided the training and the know-how, they brought in the experience that was needed,” said Aynte.

When the Islamic Courts Union began to emerge as a force that could expel the warlords, Fazul ensured that al Qaeda would be a part of it. “Fazul and Nabhan, all of the foreigners were with us,” recalled Madobe. “At the time they were engaged in making connections and coordination which we believed to be part of the jihad, and we knew that they were members of al Qaeda.” Madobe said he was not concerned about Fazul and the other al Qaeda figures when they began appearing around the ICU. Al Shabab, he asserted, had very little backing from Somalia's biggest clans and were minor players compared to the more powerful Courts. “They were out numbered by those within the Courts who had positive agendas,” he said. “But I can say the US actions helped boost them.”

AL SHABAB
began making a name for itself in 2005 by carrying out a spate of “
headline-grabbing assassinations
and cemetery desecrations in Mogadishu and other regions,” according to Aynte. In his paper, “The Anatomy of al Shabab,” Aynte alleged that after al Shabab formed “more than [one] hundred people, mostly former military generals, professors, businessmen, journalists and activists were quietly assassinated over the next few years.” He noted that a former al Shabab field commander “said the objectives of the assassinations were twofold: First, it was a deliberate, preemptive attempt to eliminate dissent and potential roadblocks. Second, it was designed to inject fear and terror in the hearts of the elite class in Mogadishu, who at the time wielded significant influence by their sheer domination of the business, media and academia.”

While the CIA obsessed over the relatively small number of foreign fighters among the ICU in Somalia, many within the Courts did not see them as a problem. If they did become trouble for the ICU, most of its leaders were confident they could be kept in check by the clans that were supremely important in Somalia's power structure. But it was Washington's own actions that would soon make al Shabab and its al Qaeda allies more powerful in Somalia than it—or the CIA—could ever have imagined.

Backed by overwhelming public support, it took the Courts just four months to drive out the CIA's warlords, sending Qanyare and his strongmen
fleeing. “We have been defeated because of a lack of logistics, the kind a militia needs to live: ammunition, superior weapons, coordination. This is what was needed,” Qanyare recalled. He claimed that the United States only gave him “pocket money.” Despite this, Qanyare's faith in his CIA partners was unshaken. “America knows war. They are war masters. They know better than me. So when they fight a war, they know how to fund it. They know very well. They are teachers, great teachers.” As the Courts pummeled Qanyare's forces, he claimed, the CIA refused to increase its support for him and the other warlords. “I don't blame them, because they were working under the instruction of their bosses,” he said, adding that if the United States had provided more funding and weapons at that crucial moment when the ICU was besieging Mogadishu, “We should win. We should defeat them.” As he prepared to flee Mogadishu, he said he warned Washington. “I told them it would be too expensive to defeat [al Qaeda and al Shabab], for you, in the future, in the Horn of Africa. Al Qaeda is growing rapidly and they are recruiting, and they have a foothold, a safe haven—vast land.”

JSOC had a limited presence in Somalia up to this point, with the CIA largely controlling counterterrorism operations there. But as the Agency's favored warlords were being driven out of power, JSOC began agitating to take a more active role. General McChrystal, JSOC's commander, had already started coordinating
video teleconferences
focused on the Horn of Africa and began pushing for a broadening of JSOC's role within counterterrorism operations there.

ON JUNE
5, 2006, the ICU's forces officially
took control of Mogadishu
. Some Somalia experts within the US government hailed the expulsion of the warlords as “a
wonderful piece of news
,” in the words of Herman Cohen, the former assistant secretary of state for African affairs. “The warlords have caused tremendous hardship.... People were permanently insecure under the warlords,” Cohen declared the day after the ICU took the capital. “It's very important to keep those warlords from coming back into Mogadishu.” In backing the warlords, like Qanyare, Cohen said, “I think the U.S. government panicked. They saw an Islamic group; they said, ‘Taliban is coming.'” As for the risk that Somalia would become an al Qaeda safe haven, Cohen said, “I think it's minor, because the people in the Islamic movement saw what happened to the Taliban and they don't want the same thing to happen to them.”

The ICU's chair, Sheikh Sharif, immediately penned a letter to the United Nations, the US State Department, the Arab League, the African
and European Unions and other international institutions denying that the ICU had any connection to terrorists and declaring that the Courts wanted to “
establish a friendly relationship
with the international community that is based on mutual respect and interest.”

“The present conflict has been fueled by the wrong information given to the U.S. Government by these warlords,” he wrote. “Their expertise is to terrorize people and they were able to use it and terrorize the American government by misinforming them about the presence of terrorists in Somalia.” In a subsequent letter to the US Embassy in Nairobi, Sharif pledged his support in fighting terrorism and said the ICU wanted to “
invite an investigative team
from the United Nations to make sure that international terrorists do not use the region as a transit route or hiding ground.”

The United States was not impressed with the letter. “While we are prepared to find positive elements within the ICU,” one diplomatic cable from Nairobi declared, “acknowledgement of the foreign al Qaida presence will serve as a
litmus test
for our engagement with any of its leaders.”

In general, the US view of the Islamic Courts taking power was not a unified one. Scores of US diplomatic cables from that period portray a confused and contradictory assessment from US officials. Sharif was consistently characterized as a “
moderate
” within the cables sent from the US Embassy in Nairobi. Yet, according to the
New Yorker's
Jon Lee Anderson, “The Bush administration had gone so far as to
contemplate killing Sharif
.” For its part, al Shabab viewed Sharif as a sellout whose attempts to curry favor with the West was apostasy.

US diplomats worked with the recognized government of Somalia to determine how to approach the ICU, but the US military and the CIA saw the Courts' taking of Mogadishu as a serious crisis. “Suddenly, this is becoming a major issue that people throughout government are concentrating on: Military analysts, intelligence analysts, all over. Somalia is suddenly catapulted
onto everybody's radar screen
,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a frequent consultant to the US military, including CENTCOM, who has advised US military forces deploying to the Horn of Africa. “The immediate concern is twofold: One, is the Islamic Court's connection to al Qaeda. And the second concern is possible emergence of a terrorist safe-haven inside of Somalia.” President Bush was in Laredo, Texas when word came that the ICU had chased the warlords from Mogadishu. “Obviously, when there's instability anywhere in the world, we're concerned.
There is instability in Somalia
,” he said. “We're watching very carefully the developments there. And we will strategize more when I get back to Washington as to how to best respond to the latest incident there in Somalia.”

While the White House strategized, the ICU did indeed implement a
radical agenda in Mogadishu—but one that virtually all Somalis viewed as being for the better. The Courts began dismantling the
insane maze of roadblocks
that separated one warlord's kingdom from another's, leading to a significant drop in food prices. They reopened the
ports and the airport
, facilitating a dramatic increase in the amount of humanitarian aid that was able to reach Mogadishu. Robbery and other crime dropped substantially, and many residents told journalists that they
felt safer
than they had at any point in sixteen years. The ICU “brought a modicum of stability that's unprecedented in Mogadishu,” recalled Aynte. “You could drive in Mogadishu at midnight, no problem, [with] no guards.”
US officials acknowledged
the improvement in aid shipments and credited the ICU with reducing piracy around Somalia. Even officials within the US-backed Somali government in exile acknowledged that the ICU had achieved something important. “The Islamic Courts brought about
some semblance of order
and stability to Mogadishu,” conceded Buubaa, the former foreign minister, who had opposed the ICU. “A lot of people in Mogadishu appreciated that.”

That was not the case within the US Special Operations community.

After 9/11, JSOC had been tasked with hunting down the most wanted terrorists in the world as identified by the White House. The Islamic Courts' social program would not change that fact. The CIA's warlord adventure had been a categorical failure and had actually resulted in even greater protection for the al Qaeda figures on JSOC's radar. The invasion of Iraq was, in many ways, an enormous distraction from JSOC's core mission. “There's no question about that. Iraq fucked everything up,” said Gartenstein-Ross. Somalia is a “country, which, relative to Iraq, would have been easier to stabilize. But resources were never devoted to that. The major problem is that no steps were taken to avert an insurgency—and indeed, very early on, you had an insurgency arise.” More to the point, Washington's own policies had directly sparked the insurgency. Following the CIA's failure in Somalia, the US military began preparing for a campaign to crush the Courts. But with Black Hawk Down still dominating the US view of boots on the ground in Somalia, the White House began considering using Somalia's reviled neighbor, Ethiopia, as a proxy force that could provide cover for US hit teams, primarily from JSOC, to covertly enter Somalia and begin hunting “High Value Targets.”

A UN cable from June 2006, containing notes of a meeting with senior State Department and US military officials from the Horn of Africa task force, indicated that the United States was aware of the ICU's diversity but would “not allow” it to rule Somalia. The United States, according to the notes, intended to “
rally with Ethiopia
if the ‘Jihadist[s]' took over.”
The cable concluded, “Any Ethiopian action in Somalia would have Washington's blessing.” Some within the US government called for dialogue or reconciliation, but their voices were drowned out by hawks determined to overthrow the ICU.

US Special Operations teams had long been in Ethiopia,
training its notorious Agazi
commando units. The country also had US air assets and small pop-up military facilities where the United States had access. But, although Ethiopia would play a huge role in the events to come, another of Somalia's neighbors would provide the launching pad for JSOC's forces. The US military began building up Camp Simba in Manda Bay, Kenya, which was created shortly after the Black Hawk Down disaster. Although its original intent was to train and assist Kenyan maritime forces along the Somali coast, as the ICU rose to power and the United States began drawing up contingency plans, the base at Manda Bay took on a different role. JSOC teams, particularly members of DEVGRU/SEAL Team 6,
began setting up shop
. Their presence was thinly masked by the US military's civil affairs units that mingled with the locals—rebuilding schools and creating water purification projects—and trained conventional Kenyan forces. It was from Manda Bay that elite US hit teams would stage any potential operations inside of Somalia. The men who would be tasked with this mission were classified as
Task Force 88
.

Almost from the moment the ICU took power, the Ethiopians were salivating over the possibility of intervening. Since the two countries had fought a nasty war in the 1970s, the Ethiopian military regularly crossed the border into Somalia, angering locals. Somali militants, who viewed the Ogaden region of Ethiopia as their own, conducted raids and attacks inside Ethiopia. After the ICU took power, Addis Ababa took the opportunity to
ratchet up its rhetoric
about the threat of Somali jihadists across the region. As Qanyare fled Mogadishu, he
went on national radio
to warn that the ICU's victory would result in an Ethiopian invasion, saying that Somalis were making a huge mistake by supporting the Courts. “I never, ever supported Ethiopia to land in Somalia,” Qanyare recalled. “Over my dead body, I never accepted that. Because I know who they are, what they want, what they are looking for.” A month after the ICU took power, US diplomats began noting reports of “clandestine” Ethiopian “
reconnaissance missions
in Somalia in preparation for possible future operations.”

The United States “had already misread the events by aiding heinous warlords. And they misread it again,” Aynte told me. “They should have taken this as an opportunity to engage the ICU. Because out of the thirteen organizations that formed the Courts, twelve were Islamic courts, clan courts who had no global jihad [agenda] or anything. Most of them never
left Somalia. These were local guys. Al Shabab was the only threat—that was it. And they could have been controlled. But again the situation was misread and Ethiopia was essentially being urged by the US to invade Somalia.” For al Qaeda, he said, “it was the break that they were looking for.”