Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

31. Blowback in Somalia

SOMALIA AND WASHINGTON, DC, 2009—As summer 2009 began, JSOC was well aware of the fact that the men they had identified as the most dangerous threats to US interests in East Africa, Saleh Ali Nabhan and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, were still at large. The latter was believed to have undergone plastic surgery, and intelligence analysts could only guess his exact whereabouts. The trail on both men had gone largely cold as al Shabab spread its areas of control in Somalia, giving them more options to hide or operate discreetly.

US intelligence believed that Nabhan had become more deeply embedded within al Shabab’s operations since the overthrow of the ICU and was running three training camps that produced several suicide bombers, including a US citizen. A secret diplomatic cable from the Nairobi Embassy noted, “Since Nabhan’s selection as senior trainer for al-Shabab’s training in summer 2008, the flow of foreigners to Somalia has broadened to encompass fighters from south Asia, Europe, and North America, Sudan, and East Africa, particularly trainees from Kenya.” Those fighters would, according to the cable, travel to Mogadishu to fight against the US-backed African Union and Somali government forces. The “camps continue to generate increasing quantities of foreign graduates,” it concluded.

Washington was desperate to take Nabhan out and in July 2009, US intelligence facilitated a potential breakthrough. That month, Kenyan security forces burst through the door of the home of a young Kenyan of Somali descent named Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, who was living in Eastleigh, the congested Somali slum in Nairobi. The next night, Hassan’s captors took him to Wilson Airport: “They put a bag on my head, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands behind my back and put me on a plane,” Hassan recalled, according to a statement from Hassan provided to me by a human rights investigator. “In the early hours we landed in Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of the sea—the runway is just next to the sea-shore.” From there, Hassan was taken to a secret prison in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency, where he was interrogated by US intelligence officials. An intelligence report leaked by the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit alleged that “Ahmed Abdulahi Hassan aka Anas” was a “former personal assistant to Nabhan” and “was injured while fighting near the presidential palace in Mogadishu in 2009.” He was viewed as a high-value prisoner. “I have been interrogated so many times,” Hassan alleged in the statement, which was smuggled from the prison and provided to me. “Interrogated by Somali men and white men. Every day new faces show up.”

On the campaign trail and after becoming president, Barack Obama pledged that the United States would no longer use certain Bush-era torture and detention tactics. CIA director Leon Panetta had stated in April 2009 that the “CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites” and announced a “plan to decommission the remaining sites.” Yet three months later, Hassan found himself in a secret prison being interrogated by Americans.

According to a US official who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, Hassan was not directly rendered from Kenya to Somalia by the US government. But, the official said, “The United States provided information which helped get Hassan—a dangerous terrorist—off the street.” That description supported the theory that Kenyan forces were rendering suspects on behalf of the United States and other governments. Another well-informed source said that Hassan had been targeted in Nairobi because of intelligence suggesting that he was the “right-hand man” of Nabhan, then the presumed head of al Qaeda in East Africa.

Two months after Hassan was rendered to the secret prison in Mogadishu, on September 14, 2009, a JSOC team took off in helicopters from an aircraft carrier positioned off the Somali coast and penetrated Somali airspace. The man they were stalking, they learned from recently obtained “actionable” intelligence, had been making regular trips between the port cities of Merca and Kismayo, near the Kenyan border. On this day, their target was traveling in a Land Cruiser, supported by several technicals. According to witnesses, the helicopters “buzzed” over a rural village en route to the convoy. In broad daylight, the JSOC team attacked the convoy from the helicopters, gunning down the people inside. The American commandos then landed and collected at least two of the bodies. One of them was later confirmed to be that of Saleh Ali Nabhan. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman would not comment on “any alleged operation in Somalia,” nor would the White House. That day, when al Shabab confirmed that Nabhan, five other foreigners and three Somali al Shabab fighters had been killed in the attack, there was little room for doubt. JSOC had taken down their most-wanted man in East Africa in the first known targeted killing operation inside of Somalia authorized by President Obama.

To veteran counterterrorism operators, like Malcolm Nance, the Nabhan hit was an example of what the United States should have done instead of backing the Ethiopian invasion. “I am a firm believer in targeted assassinations when they are people who are no longer of value to your collection processes. If they are too strong for your ability to negate their capacity in the battlefield, then you are just going to have to put a Hellfire in ’em,” Nance told me. “We were much more successful using the surgical strikes, where we went in—to tell you the truth, very Israeli-like—and we did the drone strike, and/or Hellfire strike and we blasted the individual car of a known guy who was known to be in that vehicle. We flew in, we snatched his body, we confirmed it, we got the intelligence and went away. That’s the way we should be doing it. We could have been doing that for the [preceding] ten years.”

The Nabhan strike won Obama much praise from the counterterrorism and Special Ops community, but in other circles it raised serious questions about the emerging bipartisan consensus on assassinations, renditions and secret prisons. “These are like summary executions,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staffer who worked on oversight for SOCOM from 2001 to 2008. “Who’s giving authority? Who’s making the [target] lists? Is it a kill or capture [mission], or is it a kill mission?” Candidate Obama laid out a vision of how he would radically depart from the policies of the Bush era, but in the Nabhan case he relied on some of the most controversial of them. “Has our policy shifted at all since the previous administration?” Farkas asked. “My sense is ‘no.’”

Jack Goldsmith, who served as an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, said that the belief that “the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric.”

While declaring an end to the secret prisons, Obama and his counterterrorism team found a backdoor way of continuing them. In Somalia, the CIA had begun using the secret underground prison where Hassan was held as a center to interrogate suspected al Shabab or al Qaeda prisoners there. Although not technically run by the United States, American agents would be free to interrogate the prisoners. Lawyers retained by the family of Hassan, the alleged right-hand man of Nabhan, saw his case as showcasing a slightly cleaned-up continuation of Bush’s detention policies. “Hassan’s case suggests that the US may be involved in a decentralized, out-sourced Guantánamo Bay in central Mogadishu,” his family’s Kenyan legal team asserted, noting that Hassan had not been provided access to lawyers, his family or the Red Cross. It would also soon be clear that Hassan was not the only prisoner being held in Somalia’s underground secret prison—and that Washington’s role in that prison was not limited to occasional interrogations of high-value detainees.

With Nabhan gone, Fazul became the most senior al Qaeda figure known to be operating in Somalia. Although al Shabab had suffered two major blows at the hands of JSOC, it was hardly undeterred. Its asymmetric battle was just beginning. Nabhan’s death, like so many of Washington’s most passionately embraced “strategic” victories in Somalia, would result in blowback. Even when perfectly executed, targeted strikes had the potential to help bolster the ranks of insurgent groups and provide them with martyrs to be emulated. By the end of 2009, at least seven US citizens had died fighting on behalf of al Shabab and scores of others were believed to be among the group’s ranks and in its training camps preparing for future action. Although al Shabab was unable to strike directly at the United States, it was showing that it could recruit American citizens and wreak havoc on its puppets and proxies in Mogadishu. In the process, al Shabab would draw the United States, the African Union and the Somali government into a potentially disastrous replay of the CIA warlord era, mixed with the worst excesses of the Ethiopian occupation period.

OF COURSE, the Obama administration saw developments in Somalia differently. Following the perfectly executed assassination of the Somali pirates, President Obama’s relationship with JSOC and its commander, Admiral McRaven, deepened. The administration carefully reviewed the existing orders issued by President Bush that authorized US military forces to strike at terrorists wherever they resided, the “world is a battlefield” doctrine developed by Stephen Cambone and other architects of the war on terror. They decided that they wanted such authority expanded. Defense Secretary Gates and Obama’s newly appointed CIA Director, Leon Panetta, worked diligently to bridge the CIA-JSOC divide, which, fueled by Rumsfeld and Cheney, had persisted during the Bush administration. Obama wanted a seamless counterterrorism machine. After the Nabhan strike, then–CENTCOM commander David Petraeus issued his update to the AQN-Execute Order, giving US military forces, particularly those from JSOC, far greater latitude to operate in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Asymmetric attacks that had been relatively infrequent during the Bush administration—with Iraq as a draining focus of counterterrorism attention—would become the focal point of Obama’s rebranded global war.

During his first year in office, President Obama and his advisers endeavored to reframe US counterterrorism policy as a more comprehensive, full-spectrum effort to reduce extremism, largely based on regional security. Defense Secretary Gates summed up the purported stance of top civilian and military officials in the Obama administration when he stated in April 2009 that there would not be a “purely military solution” to piracy or civil war in Somalia. The US approach to Somalia would have to shift away from containment. “The National Security Council has brought together the Department of State, the Department of Defense, USAID, the intelligence community, and a variety of other agencies to work to develop a strategy that is both comprehensive and sustainable,” noted Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson on May 20, 2009, during an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Increasing assistance to the Somali government and AMISOM would be priorities, but the major focus remained targeting the leadership of al Shabab and al Qaeda.

The priorities laid out in Obama’s first annual budget request earlier in May were telling: the president continued the arc of a militarized Africa policy, while increasing security assistance to African states. The budget, noted Daniel Volman, director of the African Security Research Project, showed “the administration is following the course laid down for AFRICOM by the Bush administration, rather than putting these programs on hold until it can conduct a serious review of US security policy towards Africa.” The US request for arms sales to Africa went up to $25.6 million, from $8.3 million in fiscal year 2009, including $2.5 million set aside for Djibouti, $3 million for Ethiopia, and $1 million for Kenya. Military training programs to those countries expanded as well. Further spending was proposed for Camp Lemonnier, as well as naval assets for security operations in the Indian Ocean. In addition to the drone capability at Camp Lemonnier, the Obama administration reached a deal with the government of the Seychelles to position a fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones there beginning in September 2009. Although the stated purpose of the drones was for unarmed surveillance to support counterpiracy operations, US counterterrorism officials began pushing for the drones to be weaponized and used in the hunt for al Shabab. “It would be a mistake to assume that Obama will not take further military action if the situation in Somalia escalates,” Volman concluded. He was right.

As Obama’s national security team began mapping out a new, lethal strategy to deal with al Shabab in Somalia and AQAP in Yemen, al Shabab was also reorganizing. Fazul had taken over for Nabhan and was deeply embedded within the al Shabab leadership structure. By late 2009, al Shabab had benefited tremendously from the Ethiopian invasion. “Now we are dealing with a group that’s in there and they are entrenched,” Nance told me. By September 2009, the AMISOM force in Mogadishu had expanded to 5,200 troops from just over 1,700, thanks in large part to increased funding and support from Washington. In the aftermath of Nabhan’s death, there were rumors that the AMISOM force was preparing for a post-Ramadan offensive against al Shabab later in the year.

After Nabhan was killed, al Shabab operatives stole two UN Land Cruisers from central Somalia and brought them to Mogadishu. On September 17, the al Shabab agents drove the vehicles up to the gates of Mogadishu’s international airport, where the AMISOM forces were meeting at their base with Somali security officials. They positioned the Land Cruisers outside the offices of a US private security contractor and a fuel depot. The UN vehicles exploded in a spectacular, stealth suicide bombing. In the end, more than twenty people were killed in the attack, seventeen of them African Union troops. Among the dead was the deputy commander of the AMISOM force, Major General Juvenal Niyoyunguruza of Burundi. “This was very tactical,” an AMISOM official told the New York Times. “It’s like these guys had a map of the place.” It was the single deadliest attack against AMISOM since it arrived in Somalia in 2007.

Al Shabab’s spokesperson, Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage, claimed credit for the strike and said it avenged the death of Nabhan. “We have got our revenge for our brother Nabhan,” Rage declared. “Two suicide car bombs targeting the AU base, praise Allah.” He added: “We knew the infidel government and AU troops planned to attack us after the holy month. This is a message to them.” Rage said that, in all, five al Shabab agents participated in the suicide mission. Soon after the attack, witnesses who saw the Land Cruisers being prepared for the suicide mission said they heard two of the bombers speaking English. “They spoke English and identified themselves as being from the United Nations,” said Dahir Mohamud Gelle, the Somali information minister. A Somali news site, known to be reliable, later reported that one of the attackers was a US citizen. While the US was celebrating the takedown of Nabhan, al Shabab had launched its own targeted killing campaign.

ON DECEMBER 3, 2009, dozens of proud young Somalis poured into the Shamo Hotel in Mogadishu wearing blue-and-yellow graduation caps and gowns. In a city that desperately needed doctors, they would literally become lifelines. All of them were to receive their medical degrees that day from Benadir University, which was established in 2002 by a group of Somali doctors and academics. In a video of the ceremony, which was given to me in Mogadishu, the young graduates-to-be smiled as they posed for pictures, their friends and families looking on with pride. As the ceremony began and people took their seats, dignitaries settled into the front row. Among them were five Somali government ministers, including those from the departments of education, sports and health. Three of the five were diaspora Somalis, who had returned to try to help rebuild the Somali government. The higher education minister, Ibrahim Hassan Addou, was a US citizen, and the health minister, Qamar Aden Ali, was a British Somali woman. Cameramen lined the perimeter of the stage, as they would for a high-profile press conference. The graduation was to be a message to Somalia and the world: this is our bright future.

Among those who filed into the meeting hall at the Shamo Hotel that day were several women wearing burkas or abayas—which cover much of the head and body. Former minister of health Osman Dufle welcomed the crowd and was beginning the proceedings when one of the burka-clad figures stood up, addressed the dignitaries in the front row and, in a distinctly male voice, said, “Peace.” Before anyone could react, the man under the burka blew himself up. The camera filming the proceedings went blank for a moment. When the video resumed, the smoke-filled room had become a grisly panorama. Severed limbs laid next to the bodies they were once connected to, and three of the government ministers were dead.

“Suddenly, the hall shook and I heard a PAW! sound from the front of the ceremony, where most government officials and dignitaries were sitting. I got down on the ground and looked back. Dozens of people were on the ground under a huge cloud of smoke. Others were stampeding to the exit for safety,” recalled Somali journalist Abdinasir Mohamed, who was stepping out for a drink of water when the bomber struck. “I looked to my right and saw one of my colleagues dead and bleeding. I couldn’t help him. I saw the government officials’ chairs empty and bloody, and many people badly wounded. The ceremony hall became very dark, and seemed like a slaughterhouse” with “blood flowing on the ground.”

In all, twenty-five people were killed that day: among them would-be doctors and their family members as well as journalists. A fourth government minister later died from his injuries. Some fifty-five others were wounded. What had been planned as a message of hope had been transformed into a “national disaster,” in the words of Somalia’s information minister. President Sheikh Sharif blamed the attack on al Qaeda and desperately pleaded for outside aid. “We beg the world to help defend us from these foreign fighters,” he implored. The bomber was later identified as a Danish citizen of Somali descent.

As word of the massacre spread across the world, al Shabab denied it had carried out the attack. “We declare that al-Shabab did not mastermind that explosion,” said Sheikh Rage. “We believe it is a plot by the government itself. It is not in the nature of al-Shabab to target innocent people.” Although attacks against the US-backed, foreign forces from AMISOM may not have sparked outrage among ordinary Somalis—and were quite possibly quietly supported by a significant portion of the population in Mogadishu—blowing up a medical school graduation was indefensible. Perhaps al Shabab wanted to distance itself from the bombing for that reason, or maybe it was a unilateral al Qaeda operation carried out by a foreign operative. No matter who planned the attack, though, it struck fear into Somalis of all walks of life.

IN EARLY DECEMBER, President Obama delivered a major address at West Point Military Academy in New York. Although the speech was focused on the coming surge of US troops in Afghanistan, the president hinted at the ongoing and broadening asymmetric wars his administration was waging behind the scenes. “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Obama declared. “It will be an enduring test of our free society, and our leadership in the world. And unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the 20th century, our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies.” He added: “We’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power. Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold—whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere—they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”

A week after his West Point speech, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. His remarks would win praise from hawkish Republicans for his forceful defense of the projection of US power across the globe and for his assertion that the wars America was waging were “just wars.” “Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars,” Obama said. Obama praised the legendary nonviolent activists Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.—a previous recipient of the prize—in his speech before laying out why he disagreed with their pacifism.

“As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King,” Obama said. “But as a head of state, sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

Karl Rove, the former senior adviser to President Bush, called the speech “superb,” “tough” and “effective,” while a slew of neoconservatives also heaped praise on Obama. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, praised the fact that a “liberal president” went “to Oslo on behalf of a peace prize and reminds the committee that they would not be free, they wouldn’t be able to have a peace prize, without having force.” Noting the praise from hawkish Republicans for Obama’s speech, columnist Glenn Greenwald dubbed it “the most explicitly pro-war speech ever delivered by anyone while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.” When Obama returned from Oslo with his Peace Prize, his administration was about to initiate a new, covert US war and herald an era in US foreign policy that would put at its center the expansion of the US global assassination program.