Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

54. “Total Savagery Throughout the Country”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In response to al Shabab’s tactical shift and recent attacks, a Burundian-led AMISOM force launched an offensive to push al Shabab from Daynile, a crucial al Shabab stronghold north of Mogadishu. The offensive, while partially successful, resulted in scores of Burundian troops being killed—as many as seventy-six, by some estimates, which would have made it the greatest loss of AMISOM lives in a single battle ever. After what al Shabab dubbed the “Battle of Daynile,” its fighters piled up the bodies of Burundian soldiers onto trucks and paraded them through town. Dozens of people lined the roads cheering them on and chanting, “Allah u Akbar!” and shouting praise for al Shabab. The trucks eventually pulled into an open field, where they dumped the bodies. Some residents prostrated themselves before the fighters. Mukhtar Robow and other Somali al Shabab leaders examined the dead Burundians—still wearing their combat fatigues. In one of the uniformed corpses of an AMISOM soldier, an al Shabab fighter’s machete remained driven into the chest.

“We want to tell the Muslim people to rejoice in the fact that the ones who have displaced you from your homes, caused you so much trouble and violated the honor of your women—today Allah has humiliated them too,” said al Shabab’s Sheikh Rage. Holding up a crucifix and a Bible he said was seized from one of the soldiers, Rage continued. “We also want to let the Muslims know that this is a war between…Islam and Christianity…. This is also a stern warning to the Kenyans who are entering our Muslim land: This will be the end that awaits your sons, by the will of Allah the Almighty. The disbelievers have sustained heavy losses, but we’ve only managed to carry seventy-six of their corpses. And these were the original disbelievers, particularly those from Burundi.”

“Claims of al-Shabab’s imminent collapse,” observed Christopher Anzalone, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, whose work focused on al Shabab, “are exaggerated and belied by the movement’s continued ability to launch major attacks inside Mogadishu as well as inflict significant numbers of casualties on AMISOM and [Somali government] forces.” Al Shabab was fighting for its survival—and not just on the battlefield. It appeared to realize that no matter how many military victories it achieved, it would ultimately need popular support—the kind that brought the Islamic Courts to power and chased out the CIA warlords—to survive. It needed its own version of the US counterinsurgency doctrine. Forced to relinquish military control of certain areas, al Shabab redoubled its political efforts.

Al Shabab organized a series of meetings with clan elders from various regions in an effort to mend relations with them and negotiate agreements. A month after it killed the Burundian troops, al Shabab allowed reporters access to one of its own aid camps for internally displaced people, Ala-Yasir camp in southern Somalia. Although part of the point was to push back against claims that al Shabab was responsible for the humanitarian disaster and had prevented aid from reaching Somalia, a special guest was also there. Introduced as the al Qaeda envoy to the humanitarian crisis in Somalia, a white man with a keffiyeh wrapped around his face was identified as Abu Abdullah al Muhajir. Local al Shabab leaders said he was an American citizen. Journalists watched as Muhajir and his allies distributed food, Islamic books and clothes at the camp, which housed more than 4,000 people. The al Qaeda delegation also brought an ambulance. “To our beloved brothers and sisters in Somalia, we are following your situation on a daily basis,” Muhajir declared in English. “And, though we are separated by thousands of kilometers, you are consistently in our thoughts and prayers.” Journalists reported that the man handed out bags full of Somali shillings, equaling about $17,000.

Perhaps al Shabab was truly on the ropes, as the Somali government and AMISOM claimed. Or maybe the group had begun to implement Fazul’s vision of a guerrilla terror campaign that gave up territory in favor of sowing fear throughout the country, while effectively exposing the Somali government’s inability to bring stability. Al Shabab certainly faced an uphill battle in reasserting its control over territory it won as a result of the disastrous US-backed Ethiopian invasion and the overthrow of the Islamic Courts, but its future could well be determined—as so much of modern Somalia’s has been—by foreign intervention.

The United States may have killed a slew of prominent al Qaeda and al Shabab figures, but in doing so it had simultaneously inspired successors to those militants—including US citizens—to rise up and continue the fight. Unlike AMISOM’s forces or any other foreign troops, the members of al Shabab were largely Somali and could reintegrate into society or rebrand themselves and regroup. “Whoever thinks today that a government other than that of Islam will rule Somalia, he is indeed deluding himself and is not following the affairs of the world,” Ahmed Abdi Godane, the emir of al Shabab, declared in late 2011. “A time will come in the very near future, when the Shariah of Allah rules the entire country—from one corner to the other, and Somalia becomes the foundation of the Islamic Caliphate, upon the methodology of the Prophethood. And our Jihad will continue until we reach the objective that has been defined by Allah.”

AL SHABAB’S METEORIC RISE IN SOMALIA, and the legacy of terror it wrought, was a direct response to a decade of disastrous US policy, which had strengthened the very threat it was intended to crush. The multi-pronged US operations in Somalia, in the end, may have given the greatest boost to warlords, including those who once counted al Shabab among their allies and friends. “They are not fighting for a cause,” Mohamed Ahmed Nur, the Mogadishu mayor, told me. “And the conflict will start tomorrow, when we defeat Shabab. These militias are based on clan and warlordism and all these things. They don’t want a system. They want to keep that turf as a fixed post—then, whenever the government becomes weak, they want to say, ‘We control here.’”

Washington seemed to have cast history aside and, with it, the hard work of supporting indigenous Somali movements that could potentially stabilize their country, opting instead to wage a war of attrition. Under President Obama, the large-scale conventional military deployments of Iraq and Afghanistan were replaced by an expansion of drone strikes and Special Ops teams conducting targeted killings. President Obama seemed intent on a strategy that presumed peace would come by killing the bad guys. But, as happened in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, this strategy appeared to fuel the movements that created those “bad guys” in the first place. “If you use the drone, and the selected killings, and do nothing else on the other side, then you get rid of individuals. But the root causes are still there,” observed the former Somali foreign minister, Ismail Mahmoud “Buubaa” Hurre. “The root causes are not security. The root causes are political and economic.”

The history of Somalia has been marred by extreme violence and social division. But the country has also displayed a capacity to unite in the face of foreign intervention. Although al Shabab may have been a severely weakened movement, the conditions that turned it into a Frankenstein remained. The end result of US policy from 1991 through the first term of the Obama administration was to ensure that warlordism would continue and that Somalia would remain a breeding ground for violent jihadists and an enduring interest for al Qaeda. Together, the Bush and Obama administrations managed to rewind the clock of history to the time US troops withdrew from Somalia after Black Hawk Down and abandoned the country to gangsters and warlords. From there, the hellish realities of Somalia grew even worse. Nonetheless, by late 2011, the Obama administration had established a new drone base in Ethiopia in addition to the ones in the Seychelles and Saudi Arabia.