Dirty Wars (51 page)

AWLAKI'S BLOG
had become far less active than it had been throughout 2008. With the US and Yemeni governments breathing down his neck, he had more pressing issues to deal with. Awlaki began moving throughout
his family's tribal areas, while keeping a low profile. When he could get access to an Internet connection, he would post an essay or two.

As Awlaki began preparing for a life underground, the Obama administration was ratcheting up the pressure on the Yemeni government to hunt down al Qaeda-linked militants in the country. On August 1, 2009, Awlaki posted an analysis of battles between the Yemeni government and “the Mujahideen” in Marib, writing, “
The first face to face fight
between the army and the mujahideen ended in a resounding victory for the mujahideen. May Allah bless them with further victories. The army pulled out after asking for a truce from the mujahideen.” Awlaki concluded: “May this be the beginning of the greatest Jihad, the Jihad of the Arabian Peninsula that would free the heart of the Islamic world from the tyrants who are deceiving the ummah and standing between us and victory.” For Awlaki, the jihad he had advocated in speeches over the years was becoming a reality. As he saw it, a war was now beginning in Yemen, and he would need to decide if the blog was mightier than the sword.

On October 7, Awlaki popped up again with an essay titled “Could Yemen be the Next
Surprise of the Season
?” He wrote:

The American people gave G.W. Bush unanimous backing to fight against the mujahedeen and gave him a blank check to spend as much as needed to fulfill that objective. The result? He failed, and he failed miserably. So if America failed to defeat the mujahedeen when it gave its president unlimited support, how can it win with Obama who is on a short leash? If America failed to win when it was at its pinnacle of economic strength, how can it win today with a recession—if not a depression—at hand?

The simple answer is: America cannot and will not win. The tables have turned and there is no rolling back of the worldwide Jihad movement. The ideas of Jihad are proliferating around the world, the mujahedeen movements are gaining strength and the battlefields are expanding with the mujahedeen introducing new fronts....

The Jihad of this era started in Palestine, followed by Afghanistan, then Chechnya, then Iraq, then Somalia, then the Maghreb, and the new front might very well turn out to be Yemen.

And when this new front of Jihad starts in Yemen it might become the single most important front of Jihad in the world.... The Arabian Peninsula has always been a land of mujahedeen even though there has been no fighting occurring on its soil. In Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Iraq the participation of mujahedeen from the Arabian Peninsula represented the largest block of foreign mujahedeen. When Jihad starts in the Arabian Peninsula, Jihad would be coming back to
its home.... The Arabian Peninsula is home to Makkah and Madinah [Mecca and Medina, the Islamic holy cities]. To free the Holy places from the rule of apostasy and tyranny is to free the heart of Islam....

America and its allies in the area are plotting against the mujahedeen, nevertheless their growth increases by the day. May Allah grant the true believers victory and grant them steadfastness on His path.

By accident or design, Anwar Awlaki found himself on the run just as al Qaeda in Yemen was growing into a real force with its core in Shabwah and Abyan, the Aulaq tribal areas. Fahd al Quso, who was still being hunted by the United States for his role in the 2000 USS
Cole
bombing, was a member of Awlaki's tribe, as were several other key figures in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Many Yemenis had fought the jihad elsewhere in the world, as Awlaki pointed out, but now Yemen would see the rise of an al Qaeda affiliate within its own borders. “
If we go back to 2001 or 2002
, Al Qaeda was not more than ten or twenty individuals in Yemen, and it was not an organization,” journalist Abdul Rezzaq al Jamal, an independent Yemeni reporter who interviewed many of the founding members of AQAP, told me. “It had no structure until 2009.” As AQAP formed, Awlaki believed it was his obligation to support his brother jihadists in their struggle against the Yemeni regime and what he believed would be a coming American war against them. “
I lived in the US
for twenty-one years. America was my home,” Awlaki later recalled. “I was a preacher of Islam, involved in non-violent Islamic activism. However, with the American invasion of Iraq, and continued US aggression against Muslims, I could not reconcile between living in the US and being a Muslim... and I came to the conclusion that Jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.”

Awlaki had long been viewed as a nuisance by the US government, and the US counterterrorism community wanted him silenced. But as AQAP rose in Yemen, the perception was that Awlaki was becoming an increasingly active threat. The events of the last two months of 2009 would seal Awlaki's fate. Awlaki's own words also crossed a line during this time, as he lent his powerful endorsement to specific acts of terrorism on US targets.

Less than a year into President Obama's term, Yemen would be catapulted to the top of the list of trouble spots on the US counterterrorism radar and Awlaki would become an epic figure, with senior US officials eventually comparing him to Osama bin Laden and labeling him one of the greatest terrorist threats facing the country.

SOMALIA, EARLY
2009—For the first year of the Obama presidency, much of the administration's foreign policy attention was directed at Afghanistan and the president's pledge to escalate the war there. Despite estimates that there were
fewer than one hundred
al Qaeda operatives remaining in the country, Obama was weighing a dramatic increase in the number of US troops he would deploy to Afghanistan, to continue an intervention Obama had characterized as the “right war” during his presidential campaign. But while Afghanistan was the administration's top international concern, the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula were experiencing a dramatic uptick in al Qaeda mobilizations.

With the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia decimated, al Shabab had become the dominant armed group in Somalia and was in control of substantial territory in Mogadishu and elsewhere. The United States and its African Union proxies were supporting a weak transitional government headed by Sheikh Sharif, the former chair of the ICU. In May 2009, fighting in the capital between Sharif's government and al Shabab-linked groups became so intense that the United Nations accused al Shabab of trying “to seize power by force” in “
a coup attempt
.”

Around that time, al Shabab released two
highly produced videos
featuring a young bearded American named Omar Hammami. The former University of South Alabama student declared himself a member of al Shabab and called on other Western Muslims to join him on the battlefield of Somalia. Hammami—whose name comes from his father, a
Syrian immigrant
—grew up as an average American in the South, playing soccer and chasing girls. In high school, he converted from Christianity to Islam. He eventually dropped out of college, married a Somali woman and had a child. Hammami had begun a process of radicalization and was speaking of wanting to fight jihad and frequenting Islamic web forums. In 2006, he visited Egypt, where he met Daniel Maldonado, another US citizen, whom he knew from online chat rooms. Maldonado persuaded Hammami to travel to Somalia to witness the Islamic revolution firsthand. So he headed
there, initially staying with his Somali wife's grandmother in Mogadishu. By December, the two men had hooked up with al Shabab on the eve of the Ethiopian invasion. “
I made it my goal
to find those guys should I make it to Somalia,” Hammami asserted, saying that he “signed up for training.”

Maldonado was eventually captured by “
a multinational counterterrorism team
” along the Kenya-Somalia border. He was extradited to the United States and indicted on federal
terror-related charges
in early 2007. But Hammami evaded capture and remained among the ranks of al Shabab. According to US counterterrorism officials, he caught the eye of al Qaeda leaders Fazul and Nabhan, who viewed him as
a potential asset
because of his American citizenship. In late 2007, a year after he first arrived in Somalia, Hammami appeared on Al Jazeera—with a keffiyeh covering much of his face, explaining why he had joined al Shabab. “
Oh, Muslims of America
, take into consideration the situation in Somalia,” he declared, using the nom de guerre Abu Mansoor al Amriki, or the American. “After fifteen years of chaos and oppressive rule by the American-backed warlords, your brothers stood up and established peace and justice in this land.”

Hammami would become al Shabab's most prominent online recruiter for young, Western Muslims. He grew closer to Nabhan and Fazul and eventually became one of al Shabab's key foreign operatives. By that point, Somali officials estimated that more than
450 foreign fighters
had come into Somalia to join al Shabab in its struggle. “
The only reason
we are staying here, away from our families, away from the cities, away from—you know—ice, candy bars, all these other things, is because we're waiting to meet with the enemy,” Hammami said, in the first video al Shabab released about him, as he sat dressed in camouflage and wearing a keffiyeh on his head in a tree-lined area. “
If you can encourage
more of your children, and more of your neighbors, and anyone around you to send people...to this Jihad, it would be a great asset for us.”

In Hammami's video, another English speaker—this one masked and wielding an AK-47—calls on other Western youth to join al Shabab, saying, “
We're calling all the brothers
overseas, all the Shabab, wherever they are, to come and live the life of the mujahid. They will see with their own eyes, and they will love it.” In other videos, Hammami is seen with
key al Shabab leaders
reviewing maps and helping to plan operations. In 2008, another US citizen,
Shirwa Ahmed
, blew himself up in a suicide attack in Northern Somalia, making him the first known American suicide bomber to hit in Somalia. He wouldn't be the last.

The increasing number of cases in which American Muslims traveled to the Horn of Africa to join al Shabab ranked high among the Somalia threat assessments awaiting Barack Obama after he won election in November
2008. Obama had said little about Somalia on the campaign trail, though he did refer obliquely to the growing national security imperative in Africa. There would, he said, be “situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to
fight terrorism with lethal force
.”

BY THE TIME PRESIDENT OBAMA TOOK OFFICE,
Somalia was becoming a mounting concern in the US counterterrorism community. When the Islamic Courts took power in 2006, al Shabab was a little-known militia on the outskirts of the movement with little clan power. Its foreign fighters, particularly Fazul and Nabhan, were dangerous people with a proven ability to plan and implement large-scale attacks. But they were not in a position to conquer Somalia or hold substantial territory. Now, though, thanks in large part to a backlash against US policy, al Shabab's ranks were growing and its territory expanding. Sheikh Sharif officially assumed the presidency in Somalia the same month Obama was sworn in, but Sharif could barely lay claim to being the mayor of Mogadishu. He loosely governed a small slice of territory in the capital—with the authority of a city council member surrounded by far more powerful enemies who wanted to kill him.

“The idea that Somalia is
just a failed state
somewhere over there, where people are fighting with one another over heaven knows what, is a construct that we adopt at our peril,” declared Hillary Clinton during her Senate confirmation hearing to become secretary of state. “The internal conflict within the groups in Somalia is just as intense as it's ever been, only now we have the added ingredient of al-Qaida and terrorists who are looking to take advantage of the chaos.”

The Obama administration increased funding and
arms shipments
to the African Union Mission in Somalia, the peacekeeping force known as AMISOM. The Ugandan military, supported by Burundi, effectively took over where the Ethiopians had left off and began expanding its military base adjacent to Mogadishu's international airport. By this point, al Shabab had the Somali government and the African Union forces surrounded at the airport and in the Green Zone-like Somali government complex known as Villa Somalia. Al Shabab forces were
better paid
than the Somali army and were far more willing to die than the AMISOM peacekeeping troops, who had no personal stake in the conflict. In February 2009, al Shabab operatives carried out
double-suicide attacks
, killing eleven Burundian troops. AMISOM commanders found their base under constant mortar attack and acknowledged the bombardment was reaching an “
unprecedented level
.” A retaliatory attack aimed at al Shabab sparked an exchange of fire that resulted in fifteen deaths in Mogadishu, and more than sixty others
wounded, many of them from a stray mortar that slammed into a civilian area. The
New York Times
called the fighting “the
heaviest of its kind
since Ethiopian troops withdrew from Somalia.”

A few months into Obama's presidency, top officials had begun to debate military strikes against al Shabab camps, despite the absence of a concrete threat outside of Somalia. The
Washington Post
reported a divide between DoD officials critical of a perceived “failure to act” and reticent civilian officials heavily influenced by the disastrous Bush policies of the previous few years. The Obama administration was “
walking slowly
, and for the players with continuity, the frustration continues to grow,” one official said. “There is increasing concern about what terrorists operating in Somalia might do,” a US counterterrorism official told the
Post.
By that point, the FBI had already been investigating
at least twenty cases
of young Somali Americans leaving the United States to join the Somali insurgency.