ow the US backs its old enemies
America left Somalia in 1993 when it lost 18 men while trying to snatch a warlord. Now, Aidan Hartley reveals, the US is back, this time siding with the warlords against al-Qa'eda Ridley Scott's bang-bang movie Black Hawk Down is a big hit these days in the pirate cinemas of Mogadishu, the world's most anarchic city. The Somalis roar with delight every time their militias shoot a US soldier. One show recently had to be aborted when a member of the audience became over-enthusiastic, produced an AK-47 and opened fire on the big screen.
For those who don't know, Black Hawk Down tells of a raid on Mogadishu by US Special Forces on 3 October 1993. The raid — whose purpose was to capture the warlord Mohamed Farah Aydiid — went catastrophically wrong. Two helicopters were shot down and 18 Americans were killed in the subsequent battle. A thousand Somalis were killed or wounded, most of them innocent city residents caught in crossfire. The death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan make the Somalia fiasco look like a minor skirmish, but at the time images of white corpses being dragged through the streets so horrified the American electorate that US forces withdrew from Somalia. and the UN was forced to abandon its attempt to get rid of the warlords and restore stable government in the country. As a result of the socalled 'Mogadishu effect' the US refused to intervene in any African conflict, no matter how appalling, from Rwanda in 1994 to Liberia this summer.
But now, for the first time in a decade, US forces are dipping their toes back in 'Skinnyland', as the troops used to call Somalia, only this time they are conducting top-secret missions with 'friendly' warlords against al-Qa'eda and its allies. Among their warlord allies is Hussein Aydiid, son of Mohamed Farah Aydiid. In other words, 9/11 has so changed American global priorities that it is now doing business with the forces that prevent Somalia emerging from darkness, in order to catch terrorists who find haven there. The reason they find haven there, of course, is that there is no government.
And there is no government because of the warlords. Al-Qa'eda has probably been in Somalia since 1993, when it formed an alliance with al Ittihad al Islamiya, a group that has sporadically held both towns and territory. These bases have provided staging posts for a series of attacks against Western interests, mainly in Kenya, starting with the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Next was the Thanksgiving Day 2002 suicide bombing in Mombasa, and the attempt that same morning to shoot down an Israeli charter plane as it took off. Kenyan police interrogations of terrorism suspects reveal that al-Qa'eda aborted a plan to blow up the newly constructed US embassy in Nairobi in June, using a truck packed with explosives and a small aircraft carrying a bomb.
Al Ittihad is linked with Islamic rebels opposing the Christian government of Metes Zenawi in neighbouring Ethiopia and was involved in the 1995 assassination attempt against Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia has invaded Somali soil several times since 1996, and created an alliance of warlords who willingly became its puppets. Following 9/11, it was these proxies who became America's off-the-peg allies when it found that it had few friends left in Somalia and had to turn to Ethiopia.
According to UN estimates, there are fewer than 50 Westerners in all of Somalia, and Mogadishu is largely offlimits to them. In late 2001, CIA operatives established their main base of operations in Baidoa, a godforsaken inland town and epicentre of the terrible 1992 famine. Aid workers have seen these spooks regularly arriving on charter flights from Nairobi and stalking around in aviator dark glasses and hunting jackets. At the same time, German and US navy aircraft and ships are patrolling Somali skies and coastline, conducting electronic surveillance, intercepting pirates and arms smugglers on timber dhows. In the French Foreign Legion stronghold of Djibouti, 1,800 US troops have been deployed to track down terrorists across Africa's Horn. The Djibouti base is part of the global reordering of US forces now under way, involving the creation of what General James Jones of the US European Command calls 'lily pad' bases to get closer to the action.
Early this year, the snatches began. The Americans, lubricating their Somali friends with plenty of cash, focused on Mogadishu. My sources cite two examples. In March the Americans used a minor freelance warlord known as `Mr Tall' to track down a man named Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, a Tanzanian of Yemeni Arab origin.
Abdalla hardly looked like an al-Qa'ecla terrorist. He was about 20 and was into hip-hop music and dancing; hence his nickname TravoEta'. But he is believed to have used boats from Somalia to import the explosives and missiles used in the Mombasa attacks, Mr Tall and his boys initially muffed the capture, got into a gunfight and injured Abdalla in the process. He escaped, but checked into a hospital, where he was sniffed out by Mr Tall, who dragged him out of bed and delivered him to the Americans at an airstrip outside the city.
On 24 July, the Americans returned to Mogadishu. Witnesses this time saw nine CIA or Special Forces arrive by aircraft outside the city. They were met by a convoy of battlewagons manned by militias of the Murosade clan warlord Mohamed Afrah Qanyare. The combined forces then drove into Mogadishu and surrounded a building near the Green Line, a part of town that was blown to smithereens during the civil war. Their target was a Yemeni known as Sheikh Jaylani, who was allegedly linked to the suicide boat bomb attack against the USS Cole in Aden some years ago. The Americans arrested him and whisked him away, probably to Djibouti.
Independent security sources have told me that the operations to capture Abdalla and Sheik Jaylani were devised as dry runs to see how easy it was to conduct more snatches in Mogadishu. Further operations are likely in and around the city. The challenge is how to capture the more important and betterprotected terrorists in Somalia, such as Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. Nabhan, another Yemeni, is linked to both last year's Mombasa attacks and to the plot to blow up Nairobi's new US embassy this June, but he is related by marriage to a warlord in Baidoa and has some well-armed friends in Mogadishu. Another alleged al-Qa'eda terrorist, who feels safe enough in Mogadishu to openly attend mosque prayers, is Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Comoros islander believed to have masterminded the 1998 US embassy bombings, as well as playing a role in the Mombasa attacks. Capturing men such as Nabhan and Fazul will need to involve a more overt American military operation along the lines of the 3 October 1993 plan before it went wrong. One presumes that this is why the bulk of US forces are waiting in Djibouti. But for now at least, the 'Mogadishu effect' still has the power to scare the Bush administration, especially in an election year and with the unfolding debacle in Iraq.
This is a pity because, thanks to the chaos in Somalia, al-Qa'eda's threat remains higher in East Africa than anywhere else outside the Middle East and Central Asia. A UN panel of experts investigating the illegal weapons trade in Somalia has reported that it had 'learnt of recent attempts by extremist groups to procure explosives on the Mogadishu arms market, as well as ongoing militia training in the use of explosives . , Transnational terrorists have been able to obtain not only small arms, but also man-portable airdefence systems, light anti-tank weapons and explosives.' Hussein Aydiid claims to have sold 41 missiles to the US. But UN sources privately express alarm over a report that a further seven sophisticated surface-to-air missiles were recently imported to Somalia for the purpose of carrying out fresh attacks in neighbouring states. Kenya is evidently the main target, where authorities have had only mixed success intercepting terrorist suspects. In August, Kenyan police arrested a man in Mombasa but failed to search him for weapons. He detonated a grenade in his pocket, killing himself and two security officers. A cache of surface-to-air missiles and guns was later discovered at the terrorist's home.
As is happening in Iraq, the terrorists are also lashing out inside Somalia itself by trying to kill or chase away the remaining handful of Western aid workers. The elderly British schoolteachers Richard and Enid Eyeington, shot last month through their living-room window as they watched television in their home in Sheikh, in the breakaway region of Somaliland, were almost certainly the victims of Islamic extremists. In the last few weeks, foreign-aid workers and their Somali friends or counterparts have been attacked repeatedly. Assassins murdered the Italian nun Annalena ToneIli in Boroma, again in the Somaliland region. A Kenyan working for a Christian charity was shot dead in a separate incident: a Somali former US embassy employee suffered gunshot wounds in Mogadishu, while in Mandera, a frontier town that has become a hotbed of Islamic extremism, a Kenyan died and a Dutch MSF doctor lost his leg in a grenade attack.
Annalena's murder hit me personally. This woman had tended TB sufferers and the poor in Kenya and Somalia for 30 years. I first heard about her from my father, who while working for Oxfam in 1983 flew into a place called Wajir, where Kenyan military forces had massacred 1,500 Degodir nomads by shooting or burning them alive. •The soldiers then poisoned their wells and machine-gunned or dispersed their livestock, My father came across Annalena caring for dozens of survivors, who apart from being wounded were dying of thirst and hunger. She was as close to a saint as ever I have met, choosing to operate 'without a name, without the security of a religious order, without membership of any organisation'. But she was famous among Somalis, and it was precisely this that made her a target.
I'd like to argue that the Americans shouldn't be hanging out with the warlords — the forces of darkness — and should instead be attempting to nationbuild again in Somalia. But in Nairobi, Somali armed factions are taking part in the 14th successive peace process — financed almost entirely by Western taxpayers — to restore peace and government for the first time since 1991. Conference delegates are having far too good a time on their per diems to agree on anything. They spend their days having punch-ups, walking out or complaining about their accommodation. This month a moderate delegate and his two employees were found dead on a forest road with bullets in their heads. Somalia's inhabitants have proved beyond doubt that they are incapable of ruling themselves. The West doesn't acknowledge this because nobody wishes to be accused of racism. Having wrecked itself, Somalia has become a bottomless pit for humanitarian aid a sink of refugees swarming for Western shores, a graveyard for foreign altruists, a bazaar for illegal weapons, narcotics and toxic waste — and now an al-Qa'eda sanctuary. If the lingering 'Mogadishu effect' causes the US and its allies to prevaricate any longer, fresh outrages are inevitable, while an entire region will be destabilised.
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