Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

10. “Their Intention and Our Intention Is the Same”

SOMALIA, 1993–2004—In early January 2003, Mohamed Afrah Qanyare stood on the tarmac of the secluded airstrip he controlled just a few clicks north of Mogadishu. The tiny airport was a small fortress in a dangerous, lawless nation. Qanyare’s private security force guarded its perimeter and land mines were strategically scattered “in the bush,” making a sneak attack—or, for that matter, a casual visit—very risky. In the years following the fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre—who headed Somalia’s last stable government—Qanyare had emerged as one of the most powerful warlords who ravaged Mogadishu and laid claim to their own plots of territory. The Daynile airstrip was Qayare’s fiefdom. And it brought in money. A lot of money. For a decade, the airport’s profits overwhelmingly came from smuggling mira, or khat, the addictive, narcotic-like leaf that is chewed by millions throughout the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. It was the drug of choice among the thousands of militiamen who fought for Qanyare and his fellow warlords and a major factor in the insanity that had long gripped Somalia. But on this particular day—January 5, 2003—the aircraft that Qanyare awaited on the tarmac was not a Bluebird Aviation flight bringing in the foliage of chaos, but rather a small Gulfstream that carried a different kind of volatile cargo.

Qanyare said he couldn’t recall which government agency the white men who stepped off the plane that day worked for, but they were definitely Americans. “I believe they were special military intelligence and CIA,” Qanyare remembered. “But I really don’t know. That’s internal business for them. They were intelligence, American intelligence.”

A few weeks earlier, Qanyare had been approached by a trusted friend who told him the CIA wanted to meet with him in Nairobi, Kenya. The day after Christmas, Qanyare sat in a hotel room with a handful of white men. “They requested to get together and I accepted, because America is a world power,” he remembered. “We discussed intelligence business.” The business they discussed was Washington’s desire to track down and eliminate a small group of al Qaeda operatives on the CIA and JSOC radar. Among them, the Americans told Qanyare, were dangerous men who had planned and carried out the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people. Washington, they told Qanyare, was concerned that al Qaeda was planning to ratchet up its attacks in East Africa.

Indeed, on November 28, 2002, a month before Qanyare met the Americans in Nairobi, terrorists had carried out simultaneous attacks in Kenya. One was on a vacation resort in Kikambala, along the coast north of Mombasa; the other was on an Israeli jetliner at Mombasa’s Moi International Airport. In the first strike, three men drove a vehicle laced with explosives into the Paradise Hotel, killing themselves and thirteen others, and wounding eighty more. Minutes later, two men fired surface-to-air missiles at Arkia Israel Airlines Flight 582. Both narrowly missed the plane. Washington suspected that the men who plotted these attacks were part of the same cell that had hit its embassies in 1998.

After the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, several of the lead suspects ended up in Somalia—among them, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who was later indicted in the United States for his alleged role in the bombings. In late 2001, Fazul began assembling a team in Mogadishu that ultimately carried out the 2002 attacks in Kenya. Some of the weapons used in the Mombasa attacks were traced back to Somalia’s thriving weapons black market, including the two Strela-2 surface-to-air missiles used against the Israeli plane. The finances for the operation were handled by a Sudanese national, Tariq Abdullah, also known as Abu Talha al Sudani, who moved between Somalia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A previously unknown operative, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, came to the attention of US authorities when the car that blew up the Paradise Hotel was traced back to him. The Kenyan citizen of Yemeni descent was also accused of firing one of the rockets. Nabhan had supposedly been managing a Mombasa cell for years, perhaps serving as the principal intermediary between the Kenya cell and al Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan-Pakistan. After the November 2002 attacks, Nabhan, Fazul and their accomplices once again escaped to Somalia by boat.

These men were prominent on the list of High Value Targets that Washington wanted taken out, but there were larger, more systematic concerns, like the governmentless nation of Somalia being prime territory for al Qaeda to set down new roots, particularly as the US invasion of Afghanistan sent al Qaeda’s leadership there into flight.

MOHAMED QANYARE IS A STRIKING PRESENCE, both physically and intellectually. He is tall and his eyes, ringed with many wrinkles, have a surreal intensity. As he tells it, he grew up “in the bush” in Somalia and conned his way into an education by Mennonite missionaries, who taught him the trade of accounting. As a young man, Qanyare parlayed his education into keeping the books for the Somali secret police, which kicked off his career in the dark corners of Somali war politics. He speaks fluent English and often laughs at his own jokes, many of which are actually funny. He often dresses in guayabera outfits, perfectly pressed, though his unkempt mane speaks to his rougher edge.

Over the three years that followed the first visit by the US operatives to Qanyare’s airfield, the Americans would fly in once or twice a week. The US team often included a mixture of CIA operatives and “shooters” from JSOC. In the beginning, it was a CIA-led operation run out of the US Embassy in Nairobi. “The airport is inland, inside the bush. So the airport itself is very secretive,” Qanyare boasted. “We designed it not to expose or to see easily who is landing. The Americans, they enjoy that.” In one of the early visits, Qanyare drove the Americans to his villa. Over coffee, they placed a series of photos before the Somali warlord. He refused to say exactly what the Americans told him they wanted done with the men in the photos. “My agenda was to eliminate al Qaeda representatives in Somalia and whole East Africa,” Qanyare told me. “My intention was to fight with these people with the help and the knowledge, and knowing of Americans. That was my intention. I can say that their intention and our intention is the same, and they wanted to eliminate the al Qaeda representatives in the Horn of Africa.”

While CIA personnel worked with Qanyare and other warlords, members of JSOC’s intelligence division—the Activity—would sometimes break away. Independently, they began building a network of surveillance and eavesdropping equipment across Mogadishu. They were “preparing the battlefield,” not fighting on it. There was still no stomach in Washington for US boots on the ground in Somalia. But there was certainly an appetite for an old-fashioned proxy force, which Qanyare was happy to satisfy.

On average, Qanyare said, the Americans would pay him $100,000–$150,000 a month for his services and the use of his airport. Classified US diplomatic cables sent from the embassy in Nairobi detailed a plan to use “non-traditional liaison partners (e.g., militia leaders)” in Somalia. Its aim, according to the cables, was “locating and nullifying high value targets.” Thus was born a US-funded coalition of warlords who would serve as Washington’s men in Somalia. Its eventual name reeked of the Agency’s involvement: the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism. Inside the US intelligence community at the time, however, it was known as “Operation Black Hawk,” a clear reference to the disaster in 1993 that led to the withdrawal of US forces from Somalia. What started as a quiet intelligence-gathering operation against a handful of al Qaeda members would soon turn into a full-scale dirty war, reminiscent of the US support for the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

SOMALIA COULD HAVE TURNED OUT very differently from the country the United States and its warlords helped create after 9/11. Radical Islam was new to Somalia and was not widespread prior to the launch of the Global War on Terror. Many seasoned Somalia analysts believed that the handful of radicals in the country could have been contained and that the central aim of stabilizing the country should have been to disarm and disempower the warlords. Instead, Washington directly supported an expansion of their power and, in the process, caused a radical backlash in Somalia, opening the doors wide for al Qaeda to step in. While the CIA began cultivating its relationship with Qanyare and other warlords, the official government of Somalia watched from the sidelines. Made up of Western-educated technocrats, the “Transitional National Government” was little more than an idea that existed in hotel suites and coffee shops in Kenya and other neighboring countries. And Washington’s counterterrorism agencies treated it as such.

After the 9/11 attacks and President Bush’s “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” declaration, Somalia’s foreign minister, Ismail Mahmoud “Buubaa” Hurre, swiftly penned a letter to the US secretary of state. “We are with you, and we are as much concerned with the possibility of Al Qaeda moving into [Somalia] as you are,” Buubaa recalled writing. “But,” he told me over coffee at a posh hotel in Nairobi, “the response was lukewarm.” Instead of strengthening the Somali government, he said, “they started cooperating with the warlords, thinking that the best way to combat terrorism was to help the warlords become stronger, and chase away the fundamentalists from Somalia. That backfired.”

On September 23, 2001, President Bush had signed Executive Order 13224, designating more than twenty-five groups and individuals as terrorists that could be targeted in the Global War on Terror. Ultimately the list would grow to more than 180. The order was officially a means “to disrupt the financial support network for terrorists and terrorist organizations,” but it also revealed groups that could potentially be targeted militarily. Among the original targets was a Somali group, Al Itihaad al Islamiya (AIAI). Despite the fact that the group had largely disbanded prior to 9/11, it was often used as a generic umbrella under which to classify Islamist militants in Somalia. AIAI had participated in the insurrection against the UN peacekeeping force in Somalia in the 1990s and took credit for a series of terrorist attacks and assassinations in Ethiopia. Allegations of an al Qaeda connection to the Black Hawk Down incident were largely linked to AIAI. Its inclusion in 13224 was an indication that the Bush administration was considering striking inside Somalia.

US war planners believed that when American forces invaded Afghanistan, al Qaeda operatives and other jihadists would seek refuge elsewhere. Yemen and Somalia were among the presumed destinations, so Washington and its allies set up a flotilla, known as Task Force 150, charged with intercepting the jihadists headed there. Speaking from NATO headquarters on December 18, 2001—following a briefing Rumsfeld gave to the defense ministers of member nations—German defense minister Rudolf Scharping told reporters that a US incursion into Somalia was “not a question of ‘if,’ but of ‘how,’ and ‘when.’” Rumsfeld wasted little time denying what he called “a funny report about some German saying something,” telling reporters at a DoD press briefing the following day that “the German was wrong.” “He didn’t mean to be, and he’s probably sorry,” Rumsfeld continued. “But he was flat wrong.”

Although US forces did not immediately move into Somalia—with Afghanistan and Pakistan the top priorities—the expanded US base at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti was rapidly becoming a hub in the Horn of Africa for JSOC and the CIA. The base would be tasked with keeping watch over Somalia, along with Yemen, its neighbor across a narrow sliver of water. Scharping may have been wrong in the short term, but “flat wrong” would prove to be an exaggeration. A few days after Rumsfeld denied US plans to move on Somalia, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Somalia’s instability made it “ripe for misuse by those who would take that chaos and thrive on the chaos,” adding, “That’s why we’re really looking at Somalia—not to go after Somalia as a nation or a government, but to be especially sensitive to the fact where Somalia could be a place where people suddenly find haven.”

US officials in East Africa were also concerned that Kenya could potentially turn into a Pakistan of sorts, providing a hideout for an al Qaeda network they believed was “rebuilding its infrastructure in Kenya.” Some within the US military began agitating for a robust, full-time US military presence in the Horn of Africa, and the news media were rife with speculation about Washington’s agenda in Somalia. “The possibility of terror cells being in Somalia is real,” declared Walter Kansteiner, who headed up the Africa division at the State Department at the time. “Identifying Somalia as a terrorist base for bin Laden’s al Qaeda and other extremist organizations, U.S. reconnaissance planes…reportedly began surveying targets from the sky, while military and CIA agents contacted potential allies both inside Somalia and in neighboring Ethiopia,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said that in assessing terror threats in the Horn of Africa, “People mention Somalia for obvious reasons. It’s a country virtually without a government, a country that has a certain al-Qaeda presence already.”

Like the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, the ruling elites in Kenya and Ethiopia saw opportunity in the threat of terrorism after 9/11. Both governments welcomed increased US counterterrorism assistance, training of their forces and financial support in return for their assistance and allowing territorial access to US forces. Ethiopia, a longtime nemesis of Somalia, saw the country’s indigenous Islamists as a threat and aggressively pushed the line that al Qaeda was a creeping menace to its neighbor to the east. While regional stakeholders invoked a burgeoning terrorist threat and rumors spread about possible US operations in Somalia, eminent analysts of the country’s affairs were referring to the al Qaeda threat there as “small potatoes.” “There’s no need to be rushing into Somalia,” former US ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn said at the time. “If you think about military targets, I doubt they exist.” Davidson University professor Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia scholar who had written several papers on political Islamic tradition in Somalia prior to 9/11, estimated that the number of Somali nationals with “significant links” to al Qaeda was between ten and twelve. A few foreign fighters might also be holed up there, but because of a dearth of intelligence—Shinn referred to it as “abysmal”—“snatch and grab” type tactics would be ill-advised, he warned.

Although some within the military, CIA and Bush administration wanted to hit in Somalia, those plans would have to wait. The Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of Africa in Djibouti would largely take on a watch-and-wait posture, and many of the commandos, including JSOC and CIA assets, originally deployed to Camp Lemonnier post-9/11, would be refocused on the impending invasion and occupation of Iraq. As a former member of the Special Operations Command’s Horn of Africa Task Force told me, there was initially a determination to “bring the full resources of the United States military, and specifically the Special Operations Command to bear. And we were going to ensure that [al Qaeda] would not be able to reconstitute themselves, or use any part of the Horn of Africa as a safe haven, for operations against the United States.” However, he explained, “it did not turn out that way, to our detriment. At some point, the top policy makers made the decision that the preeminent national security threat to America was Iraq. And when the focus shifted to Iraq, the resources went with it. And that led to a lack of focus, and, more egregiously, a lack of resources within and around the Horn of Africa.” JSOC’s role in Somalia during the early years after 9/11 was relegated to in-country protection for the CIA, establishing surveillance equipment on the ground and having a team on standby in Djibouti, ready to swoop in if anything went wrong with the small CIA-led teams running the warlords.

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 codenamed 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 longrange 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.”

THE “US GOVERNMENT WAS NOT HELPING the [Somali] government, but was helping the warlords that were against the government,” Buubaa, the former foreign minister, complained. Washington “thought that the warlords were strong enough to chase away the Islamists or get rid of them. But it did completely the opposite. Completely the opposite. It was folly, you know, a foolish idea.”

As the CIA deepened its involvement with Somali warlords, most of the JSOC and US military assets in the Horn of Africa were refocused on the war Cheney and Rumsfeld had come into office dying to wage: Iraq. This was not going to be a CIA-led war like the early stages of Afghanistan. JSOC was going to be running the show. And it would have a new leader, a “rising star” and one of the “Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’”