Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

19. “America Knows War. They Are War Masters.”

SOMALIA, 2004–2006—While JSOC came to dominate the expanding killing fields in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Somalia continued its descent into chaos. The murderous warlords who were running the CIA’s targeted kill/capture operations were widely feared and reviled. By 2004, the Agency’s outsourced Somalia campaign was laying the groundwork for a spectacular series of events that would lead to an almost unthinkable rise in the influence of al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa. But it wasn’t the CIA’s warlord program alone that would spur a major uprising in Somalia. The civilian tolls the wars were taking in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, gave credence to the perception that the United States was waging a war against Islam. While the United States backed its own warlords in Mogadishu, Washington’s post-9/11 actions led to the formation of a coalition of former warlords and religious movements that would challenge the rule of the US proxies in Somalia. It was blowback sparked by US policies in Somalia and abroad.

Yusuf Mohammed Siad told me he was first approached by the CIA in Dubai in 2004. The notorious Somali warlord, who goes by the nom de guerre Indha Adde, or White Eyes, was—like Mohamed Qanyare—among the thugs who divided and destroyed Somalia during the civil war that raged through the 1990s. Indha Adde violently took control of the Lower Shabelle region, appointing himself governor of a reportedly brutal paramilitary occupation, earning him the moniker “The Butcher.” He ran drug and weapons trafficking operations from the Merca port and cashed in on the lawlessness. Like Qanyare, he controlled a sizable militia and an array of technicals—weaponized pickup trucks. But unlike Qanyare, Indha Adde maintained a friendly relationship with the small group of Islamic radicals who dotted the chaotic Somali landscape of the 1990s. He openly admitted to providing shelter and protection to some of the very men Washington was hunting. That made him an attractive potential asset for the CIA. In Dubai, he said, he met the CIA’s chief of East Africa operations. “They offered me money, they offered funding for the region I was controlling, they offered me influence and power in Somalia through US cooperation,” he recalled when I met him at one of his homes in Mogadishu in June 2011. “The CIA was always telling me that the men I was protecting were criminals who bombed the US embassies, who were also a threat to the world. They told me they wanted me to hand these guys over to them.”

But Indha Adde had watched the CIA-backed warlord alliance in action and wanted nothing to do with it. As he saw it, they were killing Somalis in the service of a foreign power. “They were contracted to hunt down anyone who was wanted by the Americans. Their prisoners were all mistreated—they were stripped naked and had their mouths taped,” he remembered. “The warlords would kill the prisoners who the Americans released, to keep them from talking about their imprisonment.”

Moreover, Indha Adde was in the midst of a personal conversion from a heavy-drinking gangster to what he saw as a real Muslim. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Indha Adde—like many Muslims around the globe—viewed the United States as “arrogant” and on a crusade against Islam. “The US president’s words against Islam, the Iraq invasion and the Afghanistan war inspired me personally not to cooperate with the CIA,” he recalled. “I refused all of their offers.” Instead, Indha Adde made a decision to commit his forces to defeating the CIA’s warlords. “The Bush administration overstated the strength of Al Qaeda and Osama [Bin Laden]. But when he invaded Iraq, we all thought that Islam was under attack. That was al Qaeda’s biggest victory, and that is why we supported them.”

When al Qaeda figures would seek his support or sanctuary in the areas he controlled, Indha Adde obliged. To him, the men were on the right side of history, fighting crusaders and their proxy warlords and defending Islam. “Personally, I thought of even Osama himself as a good man who only wanted the implementation of Islamic law,” he remembered. “If there was accountability, Bush would have been executed like Saddam Hussein. But no one is powerful enough to hold the US to account.”

While Qanyare worked with the Americans, Indha Adde soon became one of al Qaeda’s key paramilitary allies and a commander of one of the most powerful Islamic factions to rise up in Somalia after 9/11. American activities that had started with a discreet meeting with Qanyare in a Nairobi hotel room in 2002 with the aim of killing or capturing five specific terrorists had transformed into death squads roaming Somalia, killing with impunity and widely viewed as being directly supported and encouraged by the United States. In a meeting with US officials in early 2006, according to a diplomatic cable, the internationally recognized Somali president “wondered aloud why the U.S. would want to start an open war in Mogadishu.”

It was this horrific era that gave birth to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which would rise up against the US-backed proxies. The ICU was not a plot organized by al Qaeda, but rather an indigenous response to the lawlessness and brutality of the warlords, particularly those backed by the CIA. As Somalia disintegrated, small, regional Islamic courts began rising up. They created local justice systems based on Sharia law and sought to bring some level of stability. For several years, the courts were largely autonomous, clan-based entities. In 2004, the twelve courts united to become the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts of Somalia, known as “the Courts.” Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed (known simply as Sheikh Sharif), a former schoolteacher and cleric from the Middle Shabelle region, was elected its leader. Indha Adde would eventually serve as its defense minister. “When the Islamic Courts Union formed, there was a civil war in Somalia. There was murder, robbery and rape. The powerless were victimized. Everyone suffered, but the weakest clans were the hardest hit,” recalled Indha Adde. “Warlords ruled, and we searched for a way to unite and save our people. It is Islam that unites us, so we formed the Islamic Courts Union.”

In 2005, foreign weapons and money poured into Somalia. Indha Adde and other Courts figures began receiving shipments of heavy weapons and ammunition, flown into private airstrips from Eritrea. Ethiopia, meanwhile, joined with the United States in supporting the CIA’s warlords with finances, weapons and ammunition. Somalia’s prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi, an Italian-educated veterinarian, watched as the CIA bankrolled and armed Qanyare and the other warlords, some of whom were actually ministers in his own government. “I was following very closely those warlords and particularly Qanyare, who was misleading the US intelligence organizations by saying, ‘I can defeat this terrorist, this Islamist. Yes, I will catch them tomorrow, the next day.’ And they were paying him,” Gedi told me. The CIA, he charged, undermined his government and “encouraged the mushrooming of the Islamic Courts and their strength. [The United States] stimulated the Islamic Courts people by supporting the warlords and the ‘antiterrorism group’ at that time. So the whole mess started from that point.”

In February 2006, as the Islamic Courts Union grew in strength, Qanyare and the CIA’s warlord network went public, officially announcing the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism and calling on Somalis to join them in defeating the “jihadists.” In March, at the White House, the National Security Council officially endorsed the US campaign to fund and support the warlords. State Department spokesman Sean Mc-Cormack said the US strategy was to “work with responsible individuals… in fighting terror. It’s a real concern of ours—terror taking root in the Horn of Africa. We don’t want to see another safe haven for terrorists created. Our interest is purely in seeing Somalia achieve a better day.” Washington “chose to view the situation only through the prism of its ‘war on terror,’” observed Salim Lone, a former UN official. “The Bush Administration supported the warlords—in violation of a UN arms embargo it helped impose on Somalia many years ago—indirectly funneling them arms and suitcases filled with dollars.” Qanyare and his allies suddenly appeared far better armed than before. “To war with [al Qaeda], you need very well-trained forces. And enough numbers, and enough weapons, and enough logistics. And enough reinforcements,” Qanyare told me. With no sense of the irony that his alliance had given rise to the ICU, Qanyare told his American handlers, “This war is easy, it will not take time.” It would not even take six months, he predicted. He was right about the timeline, but not its outcome.

After the warlords openly declared war on the Islamic Courts, Mogadishu was rocked by its worst fighting in more than a decade. By May, the Washington Post was reporting battles that “were some of the most violent in Mogadishu since the end of the American intervention in 1994, and left 150 dead and hundreds more wounded.” The UN Monitoring Group, in its report to the Security Council, cited “clandestine third-country” support for the warlords. It did not specify which country, but everyone knew. US diplomats in the region soon found themselves besieged by their colleagues from other nations, including European Union officials. According to one US cable from the Nairobi Embassy, some European governments, “having concluded that the U.S. is supporting individual warlords as a means to prosecute the GWOT, tell us they are concerned that such actions now may set back both CT and democratization objectives in Somalia.” The EU, the cable noted, was preparing to release a report that would state bluntly: “There are worrying signs that the general population—riled by overt support of the United States for the warlords—is increasingly rallying to the cause of the jihadis.” Some US officials were clearly irked by the CIA’s warlord program. They privately told the New York Times that “the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.”

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.

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.”

Malcolm Nance, a twenty-five-year veteran of the US intelligence community’s Combating Terrorism Program, spent the bulk of his professional career working covert ops in the Middle East and Africa. He studied the rise of al Qaeda and al Shabab and was familiar with the leadership of both organizations. Nance told me he believed that the United States dramatically mishandled its counterterrorism approach in Somalia. Prior to the rumors of an Ethiopian intervention, he said, al “Shabab was a sideline organization, they were fringe.” Nance believed the United States should have tried to work with the ICU and work toward isolating the foreign al Qaeda operatives. “As an intelligence guy, here is what I would have done [with an al Qaeda figure]: Leave him there. Get as many assets as close to him as possible. Put resources on him and all of his lieutenants there. Find out as much as possible. Find out what the real depth of al Qaeda is there. Then he will have an unfortunate accident on the road—you know, a lorry hits him from the front.”

Nance believed that, given the clan-based power structure that ruled Somalia—and its repeated marginalization of foreign agents and widespread rejection of foreign occupation—the United States could have waged a propaganda war against the relatively small number of al Qaeda operatives around the Courts to “break their mindset, break their reason for being.” “Wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to brand al Qaeda as a non-Islamic cult? And to the point where people won’t sell them bread, to where when they go out in a battlefield, people will fight against them.” US intelligence, he asserted, should have run disinformation ops to portray them as “Satanists or people who are anti-Islam.” He added: “We should have gone after them that way, and that would have helped every dimension of breaking the organization.” The potential for any success from Nance’s proposed strategy is debatable, given the clan system in Somalia and the fierce opposition to outside influence. But it was never put to the test. He called the actual US strategy that followed, “absolutely mind-boggling.”

Like JSOC and the CIA, al Qaeda was closely monitoring events in Somalia. As rumors of outside intervention spread, Osama bin Laden released a statement that made clear al Qaeda had no illusions that Ethiopia was making its own military decisions. “We warn all the nations of the world not to agree to America’s request to send international forces to Somalia. We swear to Allah that we will fight its soldiers on Somali soil, and we reserve the right to punish on their own soil, or anywhere else, at the appropriate time and in the appropriate manner,” he declared. “Take care not to wait and tarry, as some of the Muslims did when they tarried in saving the Islamic government in Afghanistan. This is a golden opportunity and a personal obligation upon everyone who is capable, and you must not miss this opportunity to establish the nucleus of the Caliphate.”

THE ISLAMIC COURTS UNION—and the first period of relative peace to come to Mogadishu—lasted just six months. While US diplomats in the region privately warned their superiors of potentially dire consequences of an Ethiopian invasion and sought to identify paths to reconciliation between the ICU and the internationally recognized transitional government, the Bush administration’s national security team was gearing up for a war to take down the ICU. By late 2006, Ethiopian forces were massing along various points of the Somali border. Although US diplomats expressed concern over the buildup, they seemed unaware that the US military was deeply involved in it.

The ICU saw the writing on the wall. Both Sheikh Sharif, who just months earlier pledged to cooperate with the United States and the United Nations, and Aweys called on Somalis to wage a “jihad” against any invading Ethiopian forces. Dressed in combat fatigues, Sharif would sometimes hold an AK-47 as he made his public pronouncements. “I want to tell the Somali people that they have to protect their country, and their religion,” Sharif declared. “Somalia’s ancient enemy has returned, and therefore I give my order to Islamic Courts soldiers: We are calling you for Jihad in Allah’s way.” In November, as Ethiopia began pushing US officials to back an invasion to unseat the ICU, US officials obtained an “executive order” written in Arabic and purportedly issued by Aweys, who had recently taken on the role of chairman of the ICU. It called for the assassination of sixteen officials of the Somali government in exile, including the president, Mohammed Yusuf, and Prime Minister Mohamed Gedi. Specifically, it called for “martyrs” from al Shabab to “execute the operations using the most deadly suicide methods carried out by mujahidin fighters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and other countries of the world.”

By December, the United States had developed a strategy to partner with the Ethiopian military and Somalia’s government in exile to drive the Courts from Mogadishu. The plan was to install the weak, but official, Somali government, which would be secured by Ethiopian-trained Somali forces and the Ethiopian military. As for the ICU leaders and foreign fighters, Task Force 88, based out of Manda Bay, would develop a plan to hunt them down and kill them.

On December 4, 2006, CENTCOM commander general John Abizaid touched down in Addis Ababa for a meeting with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Officially, it was a routine visit with a US ally. Behind the scenes, it was clear that war was imminent. “We saw what was happening as the chance of a lifetime,” a Pentagon officer told Time magazine, “a very rare opportunity for the U.S. to move directly against al-Qaeda and get these terrorists.”

Days after Abizaid’s meeting in Ethiopia, the US State Department significantly escalated its rhetoric and began publicly characterizing the ICU as an al Qaeda front. “The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by Al-Qaeda cell individuals, East Africa Al-Qaeda cell individuals,” declared Jendayi Frazer, US assistant secretary of state for African affairs and the top US official on Africa. “The top layer of the courts are extremist to the core. They are terrorists and they are in control.” Much like the buildup to the 2003 Iraq invasion, major US media outlets began hyping the al Qaeda connection, printing the views of anonymous US officials as verified facts. Sensational headlines began appearing, warning of a “Growing Al-Qaeda Menace in Africa.” Corporate TV reporters breathlessly offered up revisionist history of the Somalia conflict, conveniently omitting the US role in creating the crisis. On CBS, veteran correspondent David Martin declared, “Somalia has been a safe haven for Al-Qaeda ever since the U.S. military pulled out of the country following the infamous Black Hawk Down firefight.” CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr practically sounded like a Bush administration spokesperson: “Today, here in East Africa, the concern remains that unless Somalia is shut down as a terrorist safe haven, the threat of another attack remains very real.”

While the Bush administration and some prominent media outlets hyped the Somali threat, not everyone was playing along. Even as the US military prepared for direct action, the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, expressed skepticism about claims the Courts were run by al Qaeda. “I don’t think there are hard and fast views,” Negroponte said. Somalia “has come back on the radar screen only fairly recently,” he observed, adding that the key question was whether the ICU “is the next Taliban.” He concluded, “I don’t think I’ve seen a good answer.” John Prendergast, who served as an Africa specialist in the Clinton administration’s NSC and State Department, labeled the Bush administration’s Somalia policy “idiotic,” charging that backing an Ethiopian invasion would make “our counterterrorism agenda nearly impossible to implement.”

Then-Senator Joe Biden, who at the time was preparing to take over the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, spoke out forcefully and displayed a keen historical knowledge of the timeline of events leading up to the ICU coming to power. “By making a bad bet on the warlords to do our bidding,” Biden charged, “the administration has managed to strengthen the Courts, weaken our position and leave no good options. This is one of the least-known but most dangerous developments in the world, and the administration lacks a credible strategy to deal with it.”

Credible strategy or not, the administration had committed itself to taking down the Courts.

On December 24, 2006, Ethiopian warplanes began bombing runs, as tanks rolled across the Somali border. It was a classic proxy war run by Washington and staffed by 40,000–50,000 troops from Somalia’s widely despised neighbor. The ICU’s defense minister, Indha Adde, held a press conference and publicly invited foreign Islamists to come fight. “Let them fight in Somalia and wage jihad, and, God willing, attack Addis Ababa,” he said.

As fighter jets bombarded Somalia and Ethiopian forces made their way toward Mogadishu, Frazer and other US officials denied Washington was behind the invasion. The claims were demonstrably false. “The US sponsored the Ethiopian invasion, paying for everything, including the gas that it had to expend, to undertake this. And you also had US forces on the ground, US Special Operations forces. You had CIA on the ground. US airpower was a part of the story as well. All of which gave massive military superiority to the Ethiopians,” said Gartenstein-Ross. “The Ethiopians were not able to come in without the support of the US Government,” recalled Gedi, who was then the prime minister in exile and worked with US intelligence and the Ethiopian government in planning the invasion. “American air forces were supporting us.”

Qanyare watched while the Ethiopians replaced his CIA-backed alliance as Washington’s newest proxy. To him, it was an incalculable disaster. The “international community brought [the Ethiopians], in the pretext of that they are fighting with al Qaeda,” Qanyare alleged. “They kill the people, because of a grudge of the 1977 war. They finish the people, and they kill the women and children. Elimination. Under the pretext that they are fighting al Qaeda. I should believe if America knew their character, they’d never call them.”

By New Year’s Day, exiled prime minister Gedi was installed in Mogadishu. “The warlord era in Somalia is now over,” he declared. In a sign of what was to come, demonstrations broke out against the forces that had installed him as people swiftly and angrily began to denounce the Ethiopian “occupation.” The events of 2007 would send Somalia on a trajectory toward more horror and chaos, leading to a stunning rise in strength and size of the very forces Washington sought to combat. “Ethiopia and Somalia were archenemies, historical enemies, and people felt that this was adding insult to the injury,” said Aynte. “An insurgency was born out of there.”

“If there’s one lesson in terms of military operations of the past ten years, it’s that the US is a very effective insurgent force,” said Gartenstein-Ross. “In areas where it’s seeking to overthrow a government, it’s good at doing that. What it’s not shown any luck in doing is establishing a viable government structure.” The US and Ethiopian actions, Buubaa, the former foreign minister, said, would end up “driving Somalia into the al Qaeda fold.”

Nance, the veteran intelligence operative, agreed that the US-backed Ethiopian invasion was a boon for al Shabab: “The Shabab existed in a very small warlord-like infrastructure, prior to that, but once Ethiopia went in there—it’s pretty obvious that they were acting as a [US] surrogate—al Qaeda said, ‘Great! New full-on Jihadi battlefront. We’ve got ’em here. We’ve got the Christian Ethiopians, we’ve got American advisers. Now we just create a new battlefront and we will reinvigorate East Africa’s al Qaeda organization.’ And that is exactly what happened.”