Dirty Wars (91 page)

Despite the increased role of the CIA and JSOC and the use of warlords-turned-generals and mercenary firms, the greatest tactical victory won in recent years in Somalia was delivered not by AMISOM, the CIA or JSOC, or by any US-backed indigenous forces, but by members of a militia fighting as part of the Somali government's chaotic local military. And it happened purely by accident.

SOMALIA,
2011—Fazul Abdullah Mohammed's world had grown very small. Almost all of his East African al Qaeda comrades had been assassinated by JSOC, and he lived life on the run. He had a
$5 million bounty
on his head, courtesy of the US government. Some intelligence reports indicated that he may have had plastic surgery, and there were periodic reports of him popping up throughout the Horn of Africa using aliases and fake passports. With many of the veteran al Qaeda leaders gone, Fazul was increasingly isolated and dealing with the complexities of Somalia's clan politics. Then, on May 2, Osama bin Laden was killed. “
We shall redouble our
jihad and we shall overpower our enemies,” al Shabab's spokesman, Sheikh Rage, declared after bin Laden's death. “We shall never divert from the path of Sheikh Osama and we shall continue the battle till we taste the death our brother Osama faced, or achieve victory and rule the whole world.”

Despite such declarations, al Shabab found itself in a weakened state. It had taken severe losses as a result of the AMISOM bombings, JSOC's targeted killings and various clan-based militias fighting to retake territory from al Shabab. If the group was to survive and continue its remarkable ascent in Somalia, it would need to adapt. By the time bin Laden died, Fazul had spent most of his adult life focused on Somalia and had grown frustrated with both al Qaeda and the al Shabab leadership. He wrote to Zawahiri complaining that al Shabab was not being sufficiently supported by al Qaeda central. “
He was criticizing them
for ignoring what he calls an organization that has proven its effectiveness,” said a Somali source with close connections to the Somali intelligence services that read the letter. Fazul, the source said, argued “that al Qaeda central is channeling resources to other AQ outfits, who are not as effective as al Qaeda in Somalia.” The source added: “He's right on that. Al Qaeda in East Africa has proven that it could actually manipulate an organization like al Shabab, connect with its leadership, be part of its highest command, and do whatever it wants with it.” But Fazul was
finding it increasingly difficult
to deliver adequate resources from al Qaeda to al Shabab, and al Shabab sought out different means of financing and support, instead making deals with powerful clans.

So Fazul found himself at odds with al Shabab's Somali leadership. My Somali source, who was given access to some of Fazul's writings from 2011, described growing “fissures,” revealing that “Fazul thought, essentially, that al Shabab is going the wrong way, that the traditional warfare that's going on between al Shabab and the government was not sustainable anymore, that al Shabab started to lose significant ground in Mogadishu, and that they had too little fighters, about 4,000 or so fighters, against about 8,000 African Union peacekeepers, and maybe 10,000 Somalis.” Fazul criticized the al Shabab leadership for failing to recruit young Somalis—ideally between the ages of thirteen and sixteen—and train them for a long-term struggle. Fazul alleged that al Shabab was recruiting young people, but then “in a few months they're just sending them as suicide bombers. And he thought that that was such a bad idea, and that in the long run would just erode fighters out of al Shabab.” The source added: “I mean this guy's looking way ahead, and he's accusing the al Shabab leadership of being shortsighted.”

A month after bin Laden died, al Shabab was in serious trouble. AMISOM had
increased the size of its forces
and its role shifted from a peacekeeping operation to one that increasingly involved offensive operations. US-trained Ugandan and Burundian troops began
pushing into al Shabab territory
on the outskirts of Mogadishu, including the Bakaara market. The United States was feeding AMISOM targeting data and providing it with
new technology
, including small Raven surveillance drones, night-vision and communications equipment and other surveillance gear. The pro-government militia ASWJ had routed al Shabab's forces in several key areas outside of the city, while other US-supported militias, including those of Indha Adde and Ahmed Madobe, fought them elsewhere. Al Shabab, as Fazul had warned, was relying too heavily on young, inexperienced recruits to fight on the front lines against far better trained and more experienced Somali militias and foreign-backed forces. It was a defining moment in the history of al Shabab, and also for Fazul.

LATE ON THE EVENING OF JUNE
7, 2011, a man whose
South African passport
identified him as Daniel Robinson was in the passenger seat of a Toyota SUV driving on the outskirts of Mogadishu when his driver, a Kenyan national, missed a turn and headed straight toward a checkpoint manned by some kids from a Somali militia. It was unheard of during this time for any vehicles to be on the streets of Mogadishu late at night, so the Somalis at the checkpoint, some of whom were
high on khat
, were immediately suspicious. After the men in the vehicle
refused to comply with instructions
to properly identify themselves and show their faces by turning on the lights of the car's cab, the militia guys sensed a threat and opened fire. A firefight broke out as the men in the vehicle shot back. By sunrise, the vehicle was pocked with bullet holes. When the Somali forces finally approached the vehicle,
they discovered
laptop computers, cell phones, documents, weapons and $40,000 in cash. The soldiers
promptly looted the car
and took their booty back to their villages. They left the passports and a few other items at the scene.

As soon as it was discovered that the men killed at the checkpoint were foreigners, CIA-funded Somali intelligence agents were dispatched to the scene to launch an investigation and recover the items that had been looted. “
There was a lot of English and Arabic stuff
, papers,” recalled a Somali intelligence official who helped lead the investigation that day. The papers, he said, contained “very tactical stuff” that appeared to be linked to al Qaeda, including “two senior people communicating.” The Somali agents “realized it was an important man” and informed the CIA in Mogadishu.
The men's bodies were taken
to the Somali NSA. The Americans took DNA samples and fingerprints, then flew them to Nairobi for processing.

Within hours, the United States confirmed that Robinson was in fact Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. At its facilities in Mogadishu, the CIA and its Somali NSA agents pored over the materials recovered from Fazul's car, which served as a mobile headquarters for the al Qaeda leader. Some deleted and encrypted files were recovered and decoded by US agents. The senior Somali intelligence official who reviewed the documents predicted the intelligence might prove more valuable on a tactical level than the cache found in Osama bin Laden's house in Pakistan, especially in light of the increasing US—and al Qaeda—focus on East Africa. The Americans, he said, were “unbelievably grateful.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Fazul's death “a
significant blow to Al Qaeda
, its extremist allies and its operations in East Africa. It is a just end for a terrorist who brought so much death and pain to so many innocents.”

According to Aynte, the al Shabab expert, al Shabab's leadership at the time was primarily concerned with tactics and operations that would allow the group “
to take over as much land as possible
.” But according to the source who reviewed Fazul's writings, Fazul advised the al Shabab leadership to instead “go back to their old ways of hit-and-run insurgency and underground operations, and to disband the areas that they control.” Fazul was “arguing that Al Shabab essentially give up the vast areas that they control in Somalia, in exchange for going underground across the country, including peaceful areas, in Somaliland and Puntland, and disrupting the whole country.” Fazul believed that al “Shabab simply cannot retain the
status quo, cannot retain 40 percent of Somalia under its domain; that it had better give those lands up, and just wreak havoc, carry out small operations, assassinations, throughout Somalia.” His vision was to allow the US puppet government to fail, while al Shabab “created a total savagery throughout the country.”

On June 23, the
United States carried out a strike
against alleged al Shabab members near Kismayo. As with the Nabhan operation, a JSOC team swooped in on helicopters and snatched the bodies of those killed and wounded. The men were taken to an undisclosed location. On July 6,
three more US strikes
targeted al Shabab training camps in the same area. When I met President Sheikh Sharif in Mogadishu just after that series of strikes, he denied any knowledge of the US attacks. I asked him if such strikes strengthened or weakened his government. “
Both at the same time
,” he replied. “For our sovereignty, it's not good to attack a sovereign country. That's the negative part. The positive part is you're targeting individuals who are criminals.”

A week after the June 23 strike, President Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, described an emerging US strategy that would focus not on “deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.” Brennan singled out al Shabab, saying, “From the territory it controls in Somalia, al Shabab continues to call for strikes against the United States,” adding, “We cannot and we will not let down our guard.
We will continue to pummel
Al Qaeda and its ilk.”

SINCE
1991, Somalis had been pounded by two powerful fists: the violence of civil war, foreign intervention and terrorism; and the punishing climate of their country. In 2011, the two hit them hard in tandem. A drought, combined with misused and mismanaged international aid programs, had taken an
extreme toll on Somali civilians
. Rural Somalis were so desperate that thousands began
flocking to the violence-rocked capital
, Mogadishu, seeking food. Others fled across the border to the massively overcrowded Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. When a famine was officially declared in July 2011, the monthly rate of refugees streaming across the border had tripled. Some 30,000
refugees had arrived
that month. By that time, al Shabab had lost a crucial funding source as a result of the AMISOM offensive at the Bakaara market. When al Shabab ceded control of the market—the most important commerce point in Mogadishu—to AMISOM, it also
lost its ability to collect taxes
from the businesses and residents. The drought, which crippled tax-paying farmers in the south, produced a similar loss of income for al Shabab. Then the
monsoon season hit
, severely limiting sea-based
trade and port activity. Al Shabab could literally no longer afford the war it had fought for years.

On Saturday, August 6, al Shabab fighters carried out a
well-organized retreat
from many of their main strongholds throughout Mogadishu. In the early morning, they left by the truckload, reportedly heading for their southern strongholds of Barawa and Merca. The retreat came after an
evening of attacks
on Somali government military bases and troop positions and fierce gun battles. As news of the al Shabab retreat spread, there were reports of celebrations in the street throughout the beleaguered capital. Al Shabab spokesman Sheikh Rage announced that the group had “
completely vacated Mogadishu
for tactical purposes” but that they “[would] be back soon. The retreat by our forces is only aiming to counter-attack the enemy. People will hear happy news in the coming hours.
We shall fight the enemy wherever they are
.”

The Somali government and the US-backed AMISOM forces celebrated the al Shabab retreat as a great victory and the beginning of the end of al Shabab. Somalia “welcomes the success by the Somali government forces backed by [AMISOM] who defeated the enemy of al Shabab,” President Sharif told reporters at Villa Somalia, and he called on Somalis to “
harvest the fruits of peace
.” AMISOM soon announced that its forces, together with those of the Somali government, were in control of
90 percent of the city
. In a sobering footnote, AMISOM noted that it would need
20,000 troops
to effectively secure Mogadishu. In September, US Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers—a key player in US covert ops and the targeting of al Qaeda's leadership—said that “
Al-Qaeda's elements in East Africa
continue to be a primary [counterterrorism] focus of the United States in light of clear indications of their ongoing intent to conduct attacks.” But Vickers added that he believed the United States had “decimated” the “leadership ranks” of al Shabab and al Qaeda in East Africa. That may have been true, but the victory declarations were premature.

IN THE FALL OF
2011, al Shabab carried out a series of major attacks in Somalia, including a massive strike in central Mogadishu, showing that despite its tactical retreat, al Shabab could still strike deep into government-controlled territory. Its operatives drove a
fifteen-ton truck
rigged with a bomb and positioned it outside a fortified government compound and detonated the vehicle, killing more than 100 people and injuring scores more. The scene of the attack, in the K-4 neighborhood, also housed an office of the Ministry of Education, where many students had come to check the results of a recent exam. K-4 was one of the few neighborhoods the government had claimed to fully control. “
This is the biggest attack
since al Shabab was defeated,” an AMISOM spokesman said, apparently with no sense of the irony of his statement.