Chapter 8
Two Steps Back
The U.S.-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001. Rather than diminishing, the threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates has grown, engulfing new regions of Africa, Asia and Europe and creating fear among people and governments from Australia to Zanzibar.
—Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos
Although Osama bin Laden left Tora Bora in December 2001 demoralized and injured, he didn’t stay that way for long. As America’s attention turned to Iraq, al Qaeda’s senior leadership experienced a remarkable regeneration in Pakistan.
It is clear in retrospect that General Tommy Franks’s decision not to commit additional troops to the Tora Bora operation in order to capture bin Laden and his top lieutenants was a costly mistake. As Peter Bergen notes, the American and allied presence in that battle was limited to “forty Delta operators from ‘black’ Special Forces, fourteen Green Berets from the less secretive ‘white’ Special Forces, six CIA operatives, a few Air Force signals operators, and a dozen British commandos from the Special Boat Service.”1
Because U.S. and allied soldiers were unavailable to intercept al Qaeda’s leaders as they fled across the border into Pakistan, the job fell to Pakistani forces. There were two major problems with this. First, after Pakistani militants attacked India’s parliament on December 13, tension between the two countries caused Pakistan to redeploy troops to the Indian border and left fewer military resources for intercepting al Qaeda’s fleeing leaders.
The second and more important concern was that perhaps the Pakistani military shouldn’t have been trusted with intercepting al Qaeda leaders at all. Although Pakistan’s military was secular and elitist in orientation at its founding, sympathy for Islamic militants eventually became a strong force within the institution.2 One reason is its long history of supporting religious militants who fought Pakistan’s rivals.
In the 1970s, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government adopted a “forward policy” of sponsoring violent Islamist groups in Afghanistan in response to that government’s support for Pashtun and Baloch separatist groups in Pakistan. (Afghanistan aided these groups because of a border dispute between the two countries.)
In the 1980s, Pakistan’s support for stateless militants intensified after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In supporting the Afghan mujahedin, Pakistan’s military intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), showed a distinct preference for fundamentalists. The major reason was strategic: the ISI perceived Islamists as fearless anti-Soviet fighters and thought they could be more easily transformed into a Pakistani proxy.
In the 1990s, the ISI sponsored Afghanistan’s Taliban for similar reasons, understanding that the Taliban were naturally hostile to Pakistan’s archrival India. As Pakistan’s military sponsored armed Islamist groups, personal bonds developed between Pakistani officers and the people they supported.
But Pakistan’s military also underwent a reorientation in organizational culture during these decades. General Muhammad Zia ul Haq, who executed a coup that toppled Bhutto in July 1977, embarked on an ambitious plan for the Islamization of Pakistan, including its military. Zia’s reforms included requiring standard military training to include Islamic teachings such as S. K. Malik’s The Qur’anic Concept of War, incorporating religious criteria into officers’ promotion requirements and exams (so that many skilled officers with secular outlooks were passed over for promotion while religious conservatives reached top levels), and mandating formal obedience to Islamic rules within the military.3
Zia required not only that soldiers attend Friday prayers at regimental mosques but also that units bring mullahs to the front lines of combat. At the same time that Zia implemented these policies, the demographics of the officer corps were shifting. The first generation of officers from the country’s urban elites was being replaced by junior officers from poorer northern districts who had more conservative religious views and were more prone to fundamentalist practice.4
Thus, because of a strategic doctrine embracing the sponsorship of Islamist militants, the personal relationships between Pakistani officers and these militants, and the Pakistani military’s evolving organizational culture, there were good reasons to question the choice to rely on Pakistan’s military as the last line of defense against fleeing al Qaeda leaders.
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan devastated al Qaeda’s safe haven and a significant portion of its military capabilities.5 But the group’s leadership survived. Although a few—such as Saif al Adel, Saad bin Laden (Osama’s son), and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith—fled to Iran, most relocated to Pakistan. During the flight into Pakistan, some Pakistani soldiers sympathetic to the militants’ cause allegedly looked the other way, thus allowing them to pass—and others may even have assisted them.6 In addition, journalist Ahmed Rashid reports that many Arabs who had been hunkered down in the mountains “were escorted out of Tora Bora by Pashtun guides from the Pakistani side of the border, at an average cost of $1,200 each.”7
Al Qaeda’s relocation to Pakistan was reported in the American media even before 2001 had ended. In a December 19 MSNBC broadcast, Chris Matthews said that although the Taliban had been battered in Afghanistan, “it looks increasingly like Osama bin Laden may have crossed the border to Pakistan.” He continued, “If bin Laden is in Pakistan, he could find haven with members of Pakistan’s intelligence service, which has long ties with al Qaeda.”8 Once in Pakistan, al Qaeda’s leadership set about rebuilding the organization.
With al Qaeda’s central leadership in disarray after the escape from Afghanistan, the organization’s regional nodes, and other more localized jihadi groups, took the lead in operations. For example, on October 8, 2002, two gunmen linked to al Qaeda opened fire on U.S. Marines on the island of Failaka off Kuwait’s coast while they were in the midst of a training exercise, killing one. Four days later, Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyya was responsible for a series of bomb blasts in the tourist district of Kuta on Indonesia’s Bali island, killing 202. On October 23, Chechen terrorists seized a Moscow theater packed with 850 people. The siege ended only after Russian special forces (spetsnaz) pumped a fast-acting sleeping gas through holes that had been bored into the theater’s auditorium in order to knock out the hostage takers. All fifty Chechen rebels were killed, along with more than ninety hostages.9
The United States continued to try to kill or capture top al Qaeda leaders during this period. But because the regional nodes took the lead, many observers concluded that al Qaeda’s central leadership must be dead. This conclusion was highly flawed. “For too long, we wanted to believe we had really killed off al Qaeda’s central leadership,” Bruce Hoffman, the director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University and one of America’s most distinguished scholars of terrorism, told me. “We believed that al Qaeda had progressed downward to clones and imitators. We deluded ourselves into thinking that al Qaeda had been weakened and diluted and the major threat now came from self-starters.”10
Partly because of the perception that al Qaeda was already beaten, the United States drew its military resources away from Afghanistan and Pakistan for use in Iraq. I have already detailed the impact this diversion of resources had on the war in Afghanistan, but it also helped to enable al Qaeda’s regeneration. “If we hadn’t gone into Iraq, we wouldn’t have so gleefully subcontracted the struggle in Pakistan to Pervez Musharraf,” Hoffman told me, referring to Pakistan’s former president. “We gave it to him and walked away. This was also the time when all of a sudden bin Laden went from being public enemy number one to ‘he doesn’t run things, he’s just a symbol.’ It was a complete 180, and all of it breathed new life into al Qaeda, giving al Qaeda the breathing space that it needed.”
Over time, al Qaeda’s central leadership began to again play a significant role in terrorist attacks. For example, on July 7, 2005, four British-born suicide bombers blew themselves up on London’s public transit system during rush hour, killing fifty-two. The authorities were hesitant to acknowledge that al Qaeda had played a role: two official British reports released the following year described the cell as autonomous and self-actuating rather than tied to al Qaeda.11
Even at the time of the reports’ release, there was reason to question this conclusion.12 There were, for example, connections between cell leader Mohammad Sidique Khan and Riduan Isamuddin, mastermind of the Bali bombings. Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani native living in Queens, New York, who pled guilty in U.S. federal court to smuggling military supplies to al Qaeda and assisting the London bombers, identified Khan as someone he’d met at one of al Qaeda’s training camps in Pakistan. And Haroon Rashid Aswat, who helped set up a training camp in Oregon, had contacted the London bombers by telephone hours before the attack.13
But the idea that the London bombings were completely unrelated to al Qaeda was definitively refuted by a commemorative video that the jihadi group released in July 2006. That video included not only praise for the attacks from bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri but also footage of a martyrdom tape recorded by Mohammad Sidique Khan. Al Qaeda’s leadership simply could not have obtained this footage had the plot proceeded completely independently of them.
Underscoring this point, Zawahiri claimed that Khan and fellow plotter Shehzad Tanweer had visited one of al Qaeda’s camps “seeking martyrdom,” an account that has been corroborated by Western intelligence agencies. Bob Ayers, a security expert at London’s Chatham House think tank, commented when the new video was released, “It makes the police look pretty bad. It means the investigation was either wrong, or they identified links but were reluctant to reveal them.”14
Bruce Hoffman told me that there were definitive reasons that officials were hesitant to link such attacks to al Qaeda. “One of the main rationales for the Iraq War was that we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” he said. “So there was a built-in desire to say this was something different: this wasn’t al Qaeda, because we had killed al Qaeda. It was also an attempt to cover up an enormous security lapse. Thus the reports said these were radicalized individuals, self-starters, who were hard to detect, rather than terrorists connected to a major network.”15
Furthermore, the plot that was disrupted on August 10, 2006, which was designed to blow up with liquid explosives seven planes bound for the United States from Britain, served as a powerful sign that al Qaeda was back. Although some initial reports hesitated to link the plot to the jihadi group’s senior leadership, the evidence soon left little doubt. Pakistani security sources confirmed that the attack was conceived by al Qaeda’s “top hierarchy.”16 Published reports stated that high-level al Qaeda operative Matiur Rehman had directed the plot from Pakistan.17 Officials believe that two suspects identified in the plot met with him there and later received a wire transfer from Pakistan to buy airline tickets for the would-be suicide bombers.18
There were at least four significant aspects of the strategy that al Qaeda’s senior leaders adopted to create a safe sphere for themselves in Pakistan’s tribal areas. (Even though Western intelligence services mistakenly believed that bin Laden remained in the tribal areas long after he had left, a fact that became obvious after his death, al Qaeda’s regeneration did begin there.)
First, al Qaeda took advantage of the hospitality offered under the Pashtunwali tribal code, which mandates protection for those who seek shelter in Pashtun territory, and the jihadis also benefited from relationships they had developed with local tribes during the Afghan-Soviet war.19 The combination of these factors impeded efforts by American special forces and CIA paramilitary officers to conduct cross-border raids into Pakistan targeting leaders of the jihadi group.
The second aspect of the strategy was intermarriage. Journalist Hamid Mir, who interviewed bin Laden multiple times, learned from one of bin Laden’s guards that “al Qaeda fighters married local women and by so doing ensured undying protection from the tribes they married into.”20 Indeed, Ayman al Zawahiri married a woman from Bajaur’s Mohmand tribe after the flight from Afghanistan, and al Qaeda leader Abu Ikhlas al Misri also married locally.21 Within South Asian tribal culture, not just in the Pashtun areas but also in the Punjab regions, intermarriage is an established way to resolve conflicts and to forge relationships. Hassan Abbas, a professor associated with the South Asia Institute at Columbia University and a leading scholar of Pakistan, told me that he thought this intermarriage may have been initiated at the urging of the Pashtuns rather than by al Qaeda’s leadership.22 Either way, the result was the same: it helped to build bonds and embed al Qaeda into the local tribal structure.
Third, Hassan Abbas told me that in his opinion, al Qaeda developed a better understanding of tribal politics than either Pakistan’s military or the Americans. The leaders of the jihadi group knew which tribes were most powerful in the various districts and agencies, which tribes were more influential historically, and which controlled important strategic locations.
Fourth, al Qaeda’s ideology, worldview, and objectives became popularized during this period. There were multiple reasons for this, including a backlash against U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. Because of this, Abbas said, “al Qaeda leaders never needed strong communications tools or a media network to explain their position. They jumped on the bandwagon.”
In 2002, Pakistani forces launched Operation Meezan (“Balance”) into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The operation, which targeted militants, was reportedly motivated by American pressure. Meezan was rather limited, with few forces on the ground.
There was more of a push against foreign jihadis after two assassination attempts targeted President Musharraf in December 2003. Although the subsequent investigation focused initially on junior air force officers, it soon homed in on a Rawalpindi mosque; the mullah preaching there came from the tribal belt and had met with Zawahiri. After statements from Zawahiri calling for Musharraf to be killed came to light, Musharraf became convinced of al Qaeda’s complicity in the assassination attempts and gave his military the green light to take action against al Qaeda.
A retired Pakistani army chief once commented that Musharraf “has brilliant tactics but no strategy.”23 This is a perfect description of how Musharraf led a series of assaults aimed at the religious militancy that had festered in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These actions were characterized by costly tactical successes, followed by ill-advised peace agreements that occurred when the Pakistani military did not enjoy the upper hand, in contravention of standard warfare principles.
The first of these was the Shakai Agreement in South Waziristan, in which Pakistan agreed to release 163 militants, pay compensation for those who were “martyred” or injured during the operation, and allow foreign fighters to remain in Waziristan.24 Such terms, unfavorable as they were to the government, allowed militancy to grow.
More flawed treaties followed. Pakistan signed a deal with militant leader Baitullah Mehsud in Sararogha, South Waziristan, on February 7, 2005. In an attempt to remedy the Shakai Agreement’s problems, it imposed more restrictions on Mehsud, but it also stated that the government would not take action against him and his followers for their previous transgressions and included a fifty-million rupee payment to the militants. The result was that this deal also strengthened the militants.25
After the Uthmani Wazirs revolted in North Waziristan, the government decided to cut a deal with them as well. Even the circumstances under which that agreement was made signaled Pakistan’s weakness in the face of a determined adversary. Taliban fighters searched government negotiators and military officers for weapons before allowing them to enter the meeting, which took place in a soccer stadium in the North Waziristan capital of Miranshah. Heavily armed Taliban were posted as guards around the ceremony, and the militants’ black flag (al rayah) hung over the scoreboard.
It was not just the circumstances of the signing that suggested Pakistani impotence. The accord itself was highly unfavorable to the government. It provided that Pakistan’s army would abandon outposts and border crossings throughout Waziristan, as well as cease military actions in the region. Pakistan agreed to return weapons and other equipment seized from militants during army operations, and as in previous peace deals, agreed to pay compensation for property destroyed during combat. Of particular concern to Western analysts was a provision allowing non-Pakistani militants to continue to reside in Waziristan as long as they made the unenforceable promise to “keep the peace.”26
Immediately after the Pakistani delegation left the stadium, the same black flag of the militants was run up the flagpole of abandoned military checkpoints. The Taliban began looting leftover small arms and held a parade in the streets of Miranshah. The militants clearly viewed this “truce” as a victory and were not inclined to respect its terms. Indeed, the Taliban used the ceasefire as an opportunity to erect a parallel system of government complete with sharia courts, taxation, recruiting offices, and its own police force. Al Qaeda in turn benefited from the Taliban’s expansion, building what U.S. intelligence analysts estimated to be twenty-nine training camps in North and South Waziristan alone.
Other peace deals followed, including in Swat and Mohmand. The net effect, one Pakistani writer noted, was to give “much-needed respite to the militants, enabling them to re-group and re-organize themselves.”27
As al Qaeda gained more of a foothold in Pakistan’s tribal areas and was definitively linked to plots against the West, it became difficult to deny the group’s recovery, even at an official level. Thus, although the April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate assessed that “the global jihadist movement is decentralized, lacks a coherent strategy, and is becoming more diffuse,” the July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate took a very different view, concluding that al Qaeda “has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability.”28
Bruce Hoffman told me that this official acknowledgement of al Qaeda’s regeneration was “a very important document.” He added, “It was a very brave document too, because it pushed back against the conventional wisdom.”29
Al Qaeda’s growth in Pakistan occurred while the surge in Iraq was at full force, so few American resources could be devoted to the problem. Near the end of President George W. Bush’s second term, the New York Times noted that even though Bush had made al Qaeda’s destruction his top priority, “it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.”30
Meanwhile, some two thousand miles away, further strategic problems were growing in the Horn of Africa.
The Case of the Disappearing Somalis
A curious piece of news from Minneapolis–St. Paul garnered national attention in December 2008. The authorities had discovered that more than a dozen young Somali men from the Twin Cities area had disappeared in recent months, and both community members and U.S. intelligence officials feared that they had left the country to join jihadi groups in Somalia. Like al Qaeda’s regeneration in Pakistan, the situation in Somalia markedly worsened while the United States was inexorably focused on Iraq.
Lending drama to the disappearances was a string of suicide bombings in Somalia on October 29, 2008, targeting U.N. offices, the Ethiopian consulate, and a presidential palace in Somaliland’s capital of Hargeisa. (Somaliland, an autonomous region of Somalia, has declared its independence but has received no international recognition.) These audacious attacks killed at least twenty-five people, including several U.N. employees. At the same time the Hargeisa attacks occurred, suicide bombers also hit police officers charged with a counterterrorism mission in the port city of Bosaso in Somalia’s autonomous Puntland region, resulting in at least six fatalities.31
The strikes were noteworthy because coordinated blasts were rare in the relatively stable regions of Somaliland and Puntland. They were also noteworthy because one of the suicide attackers, Shirwa Ahmed, was a naturalized American citizen and a graduate of Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School.
Ahmed thus became the first known American suicide bomber. The authorities were alarmed to learn that he was not the only member of Somalia’s diaspora to leave the United States to take part in combat in Somalia. By December 2008, the media in Minneapolis–St. Paul reported that a number of other young Somali men—estimates were as high as forty—had disappeared from the area. Members of the local Somali community and U.S. government analysts feared that these men had returned to Somalia to participate in combat against the country’s secular transitional federal government (TFG), or else to undertake training with al Shabaab (“the youth”), a jihadi group linked to al Qaeda.
Nor was this phenomenon confined to Minneapolis–St. Paul, which boasts the largest Somali population in the United States, at around seventy thousand. Federal investigations of similar disappearances have occurred in places ranging from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California, from Ohio to New England.32 Members of the Somali diaspora had also disappeared from other countries—that is, had suddenly and unexpectedly left those countries to return to Somalia—with similar intentions. This phenomenon has been noted in Australia, Britain, Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere. Even some non-Somalis have traveled to Somalia to join its jihadi groups.
As the authorities and analysts looked at the situation, they were concerned about what these young men might do while in Somalia: they could fight the TFG or else, like Shirwa Ahmed, become suicide bombers. But of greater concern was the possibility that they could take part in terrorist plots after returning to the countries in which they had been living.
Why was this happening? Why had jihadism grown in Somalia, and why were members of the diaspora returning to augment it?
Although the United States was successfully pursuing a surge strategy in Iraq, its bungled support of Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in December 2006 to topple an Islamist-dominated movement that had gained power there only magnified jihadism in Somalia. It also resulted in resentment and a growth in nationalist sentiment within the Somali diaspora, which greatly contributed to drawing members of the diaspora back. In turn, the fact that members of the Somali diaspora were returning to join jihadi groups increased the terrorist threat that Western countries faced, while bolstering al Qaeda’s goal of making the battlefield on which the United States had to fight as broad as possible.
I will now examine how this situation arose.
A Brief History of Islamism in Somalia
Since emerging from an era of colonialism under Italy and Britain, Somalia has passed through military dictatorship, famine, and civil war. The practice of Islam in Somalia has traditionally been dominated by apolitical Sufi orders.33 Islamist movements did not emerge until the late 1960s, when the Somalis gained greater exposure to less moderate currents of Islam. Saudi Arabia was central to these changes, but Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood also played a role.
In 1969, General Mohamed Siad Barre executed a military coup that made him president of the young state, which had won its independence nine years earlier. Some of Barre’s draconian tactics for dealing with Somalia’s fledgling Islamist movements caused the groups to consolidate and gave them momentum. When Muslim religious scholars denounced his reforms of Somali family law, for example, Barre executed ten of them and prosecuted hundreds more. Underground religious organizations opposing Barre’s regime proliferated in response.34 Although Barre ruled for more than twenty years, by the early 1990s he faced widespread opposition. His opponents forced him to flee the country, which collapsed into civil war and prolonged anarchy.
In these lawless conditions, an Islamist group called al Ittihad al Islamiya (the Islamic Union) became prominent. Although there is no firm date for al Ittihad’s birth, most credible accounts date it to around 1983. Ken Menkhaus, an associate professor of political science at Davidson College (North Carolina) and one of the top American experts on Islamism’s growth in Somalia, notes that al Ittihad was originally composed “mainly of educated, young men who had studied or worked in the Middle East.”35 It received significant funding and support from—and was in turn influenced by—the salafi movement and its Saudi-sponsored charity organizations.
At the group’s founding, al Ittihad members concluded that political Islam (Islamism) was the only way to rid their country of its corrupt leadership. Al Ittihad had two goals. First, it sought to defeat Barre’s regime and replace it with a theocratic state. Second, it wanted to incorporate what it regarded as Greater Somalia—including the majority-Somali areas of northeastern Kenya, Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, and Djibouti—into the existing Somali state.
In 1991, after warlords drove Barre into exile, al Ittihad attempted to take control of strategic sites throughout the country, including seaports and roads that were vital for commerce.36 It managed to hold the ports of Kismayo and Merka for almost a year but was quickly expelled from Bosaso. Al Ittihad did, however, manage to control one location for a sustained period: the town of Luuq near the border with Ethiopia. Consonant with its original aspirations, al Ittihad implemented a harsh version of sharia there, meting out punishments that included amputations.
Moreover, Luuq’s proximity to Ethiopia allowed al Ittihad to use violent means to agitate for Greater Somalia. The Islamist group stirred up separatist unrest in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region and carried out bombings and assassination attempts in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.37 In response, Ethiopian forces intervened in Luuq to destroy al Ittihad’s safe haven. After this defeat, al Ittihad declined in prominence and by 2004 was widely regarded as defunct.
However, the next Islamist group to control territory in Somalia proved to be more formidable. The Islamic Courts Union (ICU), whose core leadership included a number of holdovers from al Ittihad, was initially a loose confederation of judicial systems designed to provide stability in the face of the country’s anarchy. Within a couple of years, however, the ICU became the strongest fighting force in the country.
The ICU came to international attention on June 5, 2006, when after months of fighting for Mogadishu, the warlords who had ruled Somalia’s capital since Barre’s collapse were decisively defeated. As the ICU seized Mogadishu, one warlord reportedly fled to a hospital while other warlords’ forces were pushed from the city center to the outskirts. ICU chairman Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed told citizens in a radio broadcast, “We want to restore peace and stability to Mogadishu. We are ready to meet and talk to anybody and any group for the interest of the people.”38
After taking Mogadishu, the ICU won a rapid series of strategic gains throughout the country. It took control of critical port cities such as Kismayo, meeting with little resistance as it advanced. Typical of this period was the ICU’s capture of Beledweyne on August 9, 2006. The local governor fled to Ethiopia almost immediately after fighting broke out between his forces and ICU militiamen.
By late October 2006, the ICU controlled most of Somalia’s key strategic points, was able to move supplies from the country’s south to its north, and had effectively encircled the U.N.-recognized TFG in the south-central city of Baidoa. The ICU imposed a harsh version of sharia in the territory it controlled, with far-reaching restrictions. It conducted mass arrests of citizens watching movies, abolished live music at weddings, killed several people for watching soccer, and arrested a karate instructor and his female students because the lessons involved mixing of the sexes.
Strict implementation of sharia usually alienates local populations, so as the ICU gained power, it was determined to enhance its “soft power.” Somalia’s business community favored the ICU’s emphasis on stability and the rule of law over the previous anarchic conditions and saw the ICU’s rule as a means of reducing security costs. A 2006 report by the U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia noted that checkpoints established by warlords before the ICU’s rise cost businesses several million dollars a year, and the ICU’s elimination of certain extortionate checkpoints reduced these expenses, often by up to 50 percent.39 In addition to winning the business community’s sympathies, the ICU provided some benefit to citizens who previously had to live under insecure conditions in which crime was pervasive.
But Western analysts saw the ICU’s rise as a threat because of its hard-line Islamist beliefs and the connections of some of its leaders with al Qaeda. These analysts watched with trepidation as the ICU encircled Somalia’s TFG in Baidoa, putting it under siege. All that prevented the government’s destruction were Ethiopian soldiers manning roadblocks around the city.
In December 2006, the ICU had amassed, and it seemed to be preparing a final assault to wipe out the TFG. But as this attack on Baidoa began, Ethiopia responded with overwhelming force. Most accounts hold that Ethiopia launched an immediate invasion of Somalia with the intention of reversing the ICU’s countrywide gains, but Andre LeSage, a senior research fellow for Africa at National Defense University in Washington, D.C., is skeptical.
“Frankly, I don’t think anybody knows Ethiopia’s plans when it went into Somalia in December 2006,” he told me. “One of the assessments that I’ve heard is that when the Ethiopians wanted to push back against the ICU, they basically fell through the ICU forces and ended up on the outskirts of Mogadishu quickly. At that point, the elders in Mogadishu, who had basically kicked the ICU out, wanted the Ethiopians to come in.”40
Regardless of its initial intent, Ethiopia ended up sweeping through Somalia and reversing the ICU’s gains. The United States not only approved of Ethiopia’s advance but even provided it with military support. The perceived U.S. and Ethiopian interests in pushing back the ICU were clear. The United States was concerned about the ICU’s connections with al Qaeda, and Ethiopia’s primary concern was the terrorist attacks that had been carried out in its territory when al Ittihad controlled Luuq. Ethiopia assumed that the ICU would present an even larger security problem.
As the Ethiopian forces rolled into Somalia, the ICU could not match Ethiopian airpower. Moreover, U.S. air and ground forces, including the elite Task Force 88, supported Ethiopia’s intervention.41 The Ethiopians entered Mogadishu on December 28, 2006, and quickly reversed virtually all of the ICU’s strategic gains throughout the country.
The Ethiopian Invasion and Its Aftermath
The Ethiopian invasion did not turn out well. Before I turn to the mistakes and other problems related to the invasion, it is worth examining the security concerns that U.S. analysts had about the ICU’s rise. This is particularly pertinent because a revisionist scholarship has arisen arguing that the ICU should not have been viewed as a threat by American planners, that it was in fact a “relatively moderate” movement.42 This revisionist view is bolstered by the fact that the Ethiopian invasion has had dire consequences; many observers are thus eager to look back at the rationale for the invasion and discredit it entirely. But the fact that the invasion has been costly (not least for the Somali people) and poorly executed does not therefore mean that the initial perception of the ICU was exaggerated.
Well-known civilian military affairs analyst Bill Roggio, in a devastating response to one of pundit Matthew Yglesias’s contributions to this debate, argued that the ICU was properly viewed as a threat at the time of Ethiopia’s invasion.43 First, he noted that senior ICU leaders had trained in al Qaeda camps and were affiliated with al Qaeda. These leaders included Hasan Dahir Aweys, who led the ICU’s consultative council; his protégé, Aden Hashi Ayro, founded al Shabaab.
Second, Roggio highlighted the existence of numerous militant training camps in Somalia during the ICU’s rise and the fact that the ICU’s island fortress of Ras Kamboni served as “a major command, control, and communications hub for al Qaeda in East Africa.” Third, Roggio pointed to the presence of foreign fighters in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, often a key indicator of growing salafi jihadi movements, and the fact that the ICU used Arabic-language propaganda tapes that al Qaeda’s media outfit al Sahab helped to produce.
ICU spokesmen often denied the presence of foreign fighters during their rise. In a June 2006 press conference, for example, ICU leader Sheikh Yusuf Indohaadde said, “We want to say in a loud voice that we have no enemies; we have no enmity toward anyone. There are no foreign terrorists here.”44 Yet less than three weeks later, the Associated Press obtained a copy of an ICU recruitment video that showed Indohaadde himself north of Mogadishu alongside fighters from the Gulf Arab states.45
So there were legitimate reasons for analysts to be concerned about the advance of the ICU. But in addition to these dangers, the potential for an insurgency to break out was obvious at the time the Ethiopians rolled into Somalia. The month before the Ethiopian invasion, the U.N.’s Monitoring Group on Somalia warned that the ICU was “fully capable of turning Somalia into what is currently an Iraq-type scenario, replete with roadside and suicide bombers, assassinations, and other forms of terrorist and insurgent-type activities.”46
Shortly after the invasion, ICU chairman Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed called for an insurgency, and soon one was born. It consisted not only of those living in Somalia at the time of Ethiopia’s invasion; members of the diaspora and also some non-Somali foreigners bolstered the insurgents’ ranks. By May 2009, it was estimated that as many as a thousand foreign fighters may have traveled to Somalia.47
During the course of the insurgency, al Shabaab emerged as a distinct force. Previously it had been known as the ICU’s militant youth wing, but a definitive break between al Shabaab and other insurgent groups occurred after September 2007, when the ICU attended a conference of opposition factions in the Eritrean capital of Asmara. The ICU emerged from the Asmara conference known as the Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia (ARS). Al Shabaab boycotted the conference, and its leaders launched vitriolic attacks on the ARS soon after.
One important document explaining al Shabaab’s outlook was written by an American jihadi known as Abu Mansoor al Amriki (born Omar Hammami in Alabama).48 He gained notoriety in the United States in April 2009 after appearing in a jihadi propaganda video that featured, among other things, a very amateurish rap song about jihad. As journalist J. M. Berger has observed, “Only someone truly committed to the jihad could bear to listen to his attempts to sing for very long.”49
In January 2008, Amriki wrote a document titled “A Message to the Mujahedin in Particular and Muslims in General” that rapidly made its way around jihadi websites. In it, he explained that al Shabaab had boycotted the Asmara conference because the group refused to work with the non-Muslim Eritrean state. He wrote that cooperation with infidels would corrupt the jihad because Eritrea would cause them to turn to politics rather than armed resistance, thus leaving “members of the Courts [ICU] in the lands of the Kuffaar [infidels], underneath their control, sitting in the road of politics which leads to the loss and defeat they were running from.” Amriki also attacked the ICU, now the ARS, for having goals limited to Africa’s infidel-drawn borders, whereas al Shabaab’s goal was—like al Qaeda’s—to reestablish the caliphate. Indeed, Amriki’s message framed al Qaeda’s vision as central to al Shabaab. He wrote that al Shabaab’s manhaj, or religious methodology, was the same as that of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and AQI leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
Since then, other al Shabaab leaders have similarly clarified the group’s global outlook and allegiance with al Qaeda. Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, al Shabaab’s now-deceased chief military strategist, formally reached out to al Qaeda’s senior leadership in a twenty-four-minute video address titled “March Forth,” which circulated on jihadi websites beginning on August 30, 2008. In it, Nabhan offered salutations to bin Laden and pledged allegiance to “the courageous commander and my honorable leader.” Also in August 2008, al Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Mukhtar Robow acknowledged that al Shabaab was negotiating over becoming a part of al Qaeda, saying, “We will take our orders from Sheikh Osama bin Laden because we are his students.”
In November 2009, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, al Shabaab’s late intelligence chief, was named al Qaeda’s East African commander. Upon being appointed, he said, “After Somalia we will proceed to Djibouti, Kenya, and Ethiopia.”50 And in February 2010, al Shabaab issued a statement saying that it had agreed “to connect the Horn of Africa jihad to the one led by al Qaeda and its leader Sheikh Osama Bin Laden.”51
Although al Shabaab’s reaching out to al Qaeda is disturbing enough, of greater concern is the fact that al Qaeda leaders have been receptive to the group’s overtures. Al Qaeda leaders have simply ignored some other self-proclaimed al Qaeda affiliates, such as those that have popped up in Gaza.52 But in contrast to the way al Qaeda disregarded those groups, bin Laden originally gave several rhetorical nods to the ICU in 2006, after its capture of Mogadishu. Thereafter, when Ethiopia invaded in response to the ICU’s advance on Baidoa, Zawahiri appeared in a Web-based video in January 2007 calling for Muslims to fight the Ethiopians. “I appeal to the lions of Islam in Yemen, the state of faith and wisdom,” he said. “I appeal to my brothers, the lions of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula, the cradle of conquests. And I also appeal to my brothers, the lions of Islam in Egypt, Sudan, the Arab Maghreb, and everywhere in the Muslim world to rise up to aid their Muslim brethren in Somalia.”
Al Qaeda leaders have also lauded al Shabaab specifically. On November 19, 2008, Zawahiri responded to Nabhan’s video pledging allegiance to bin Laden and al Qaeda with one of his own, in which he called al Shabaab “my brothers, the lions of Islam in Somalia.” He urged al Shabaab’s leaders and fighters not to lay down their arms “before the mujahid state of Islam” has been established.
Bin Laden issued a video address devoted to al Shabaab in March 2009 titled “Fight On, Champions of Somalia,” in which he addressed “my patient, persevering Muslim brothers in mujahid Somalia.” He explicitly endorsed al Shabaab and denounced Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who had left the resistance to lead Somalia’s TFG. Bin Laden compared Sheikh Sharif to men like Ahmad Shah Masud, the Northern Alliance leader whom al Qaeda assassins killed just two days before the 9/11 attacks, saying that both Sheikh Sharif and Masud had “turned back on their heels”: that is, apostatized from Islam. He explained that Sheikh Sharif had left the faith when he “agreed to partner infidel positive law with sharia to set up a government of national unity.”
Al Shabaab became a powerful fighting force within Somalia, the dominant insurgent group. It is certainly more militarily capable than the TFG. The situation now is similar to that faced by the TFG in Baidoa in 2006: all that prevents its destruction is a foreign fighting force—no longer the Ethiopians, but the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM). In addition to its capabilities within Somalia, al Shabaab also has a definitive transnational reach.
On July 11, 2010, al Shabaab carried out an attack outside of Somalia’s borders for the first time, as twin bomb blasts rocked the Ugandan capital of Kampala while citizens gathered to watch the World Cup. Seventy-four people died, but the carnage could have been worse: the authorities disrupted two planned follow-up attacks. One of the disrupted attacks was meant for a Kampala nightclub, where an explosives-laden vest was found in a bag in the middle of the club.53 The bag came to the attention of witnesses when they heard a cell phone ringing inside it. After seeing the deadly contents, they called the police, who found that the vest was rigged to a cell phone detonator.
The second planned follow-up attack was uncovered after additional suspects were arrested in Kampala. During the course of the arrests, the police found explosives and a suicide belt.
The Uganda bombings represented a political calculation on al Shabaab’s part. After the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia in January 2009, Uganda was one of only two countries (the other being Burundi) to devote troops to AMISOM’s U.N.-sanctioned peacekeeping mission to stabilize the transitional government. The bombings were designed to make Uganda pay a price for this support.
Al Shabaab’s leaders made this calculation clear. Prior to the attacks, al Shabaab’s emir, Sheikh Muqtar Abdelrahman Abu Zubeyr, warned that the people of Uganda and Burundi would be targeted because of their countries’ role in AMISOM. “You should know that the massacres against the children, women and the elderly of Mogadishu will be revenged against you,” he said.54 And after the Uganda bombings, al Shabaab spokesman Ali Mohamoud Rage confirmed the political calculus. “We are sending a message to every country who is willing to send troops to Somalia that they will face attacks on their territory,” he said. “We will continue to retaliate against Ugandan and Burundian forces if they continue to stay here.”55
Many observers believed it was significant that al Shabaab had passed a threshold by carrying out a bombing outside Somalia, and they worried that it could be a harbinger of further attacks to come.
Looking back on 2006–2007, it is clear that significant strategic problems grew in Pakistan and Somalia while American resources and attention were devoted to the surge in Iraq. Nor was the growth in jihadi groups limited to these two countries; during the same period, al Qaeda’s affiliates in Yemen and in the Maghreb (northwest Africa) also grew stronger.
Thus, even as al Qaeda experienced what must be regarded as a major setback in Iraq—a broad-based resistance to its bloody agenda that discredited the group’s claims to speak for the Iraqi people—in other locations it was able to expand its capabilities and further its strategic objectives.
One of those objectives, economic warfare, was fulfilled because al Qaeda can undertake attacks on Western economic targets from these new safe havens (it has done just that from both Pakistan and Yemen) and because the new foothold that the jihadis have gained will force the United States to expend more resources trying to counter their influence.
The other strategic objective, broadening the battlefield, is also clearly satisfied. As al Qaeda gains a significant presence in more countries, the United States is spread thinner and thinner, trying to understand, and operate in, these unfamiliar environments.
The chapter epigraph is from Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), p. xxxviii.
1. Peter Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and al Qaeda (New York: Free Press, 2011), pp. 71–72.
2. See Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xxxi.
3. Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 19–20.
4. Ibid., p. 20.
5. Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of al Qaeda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 180.
6. Zahid Hussain, The Scorpion’s Tail: The Relentless Rise of Islamic Militants in Pakistan—and How It Threatens America (New York: Free Press, 2010), p. 27.
7. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, p. 98.
8. “Osama bin Laden Might Be in Pakistan,” Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC, Dec. 19, 2001.
9. Johanna McGeary and Paul Quinn-Judge, “Theater of War,” Time, Oct. 27, 2002; U.S. Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, “Country Reports on Terrorism, 2004,” Apr. 2005.
10. Bruce Hoffman, interview with author by phone, Mar. 25, 2011.
11. Stationery Office, Intelligence and Security Committee, “Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005,” May 11, 2006; British House of Commons, “Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005,” May 11, 2006.
12. One perceptive account written at the time the reports were released is Dan Darling and Steve Schippert, “British 7/7 Bombing Report Ignores al Qaeda,” Threats Watch, Apr. 10, 2006. Some of the subsequent evidence in this chapter was first compiled in their response to the reports.
13. Zahid Hussain et al., “Top al Qaeda Briton Called Tube Bombers before Attack,” Times (London), July 21, 2005.
14. Quoted in Sean Alfano, “Video: Two London Bombers Were al Qaeda,” Associated Press, July 7, 2006.
15. Hoffman, interview.
16. Ismail Khan, “Al Qaeda No. 3 U.K. Plot Mastermind,” Dawn (Pakistan), Aug. 16, 2006.
17. “The Pakistan Connection,” Ottawa Citizen, Aug. 31, 2006.
18. “Agent Infiltrated Terror Cell, U.S. Says,” CNN, Aug. 11, 2006.
19. Hassan Abbas, “An Assessment of Pakistan’s Peace Agreements with Militants in Waziristan (2004–2008),” in The Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater: Militant Islam, Security and Stability, ed. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Clifford D. May (Washington, DC: Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Press, 2010), p. 7.
20. Nic Robertson, “In Afghanistan bin Laden Using Culture to Buy Loyalty,” AC360 Blog, CNN, Sept. 11, 2008.
21. Anne Stenersen, “Al Qaeda’s Foot Soldiers: A Study of the Biographies of Foreign Fighters Killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2002 and 2006,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2011, p. 186.
22. Hassan Abbas, interview with author by phone, Mar. 26, 2011.
23. Quoted in Rashid, Descent into Chaos, p. 45.
24. Abbas, “An Assessment of Pakistan’s Peace Agreements,” p. 10.
25. Ibid., p. 12.
26. Ibid., pp. 12–14.
27. Sayed G. B. Shah Bokhari, “How Peace Deals Help Only Militants,” News (Karachi), July 31, 2008.
28. National Intelligence Council, “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” National Intelligence Estimate, Apr. 2006; National Intelligence Council, “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” National Intelligence Estimate, July 2007.
29. Hoffman, interview.
30. Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde, “Amid U.S. Policy Disputes, Qaeda Grows in Pakistan,” New York Times, June 30, 2008.
31. “Al Qaeda Blamed for Somali Bombing Wave,” CNN, Oct. 29, 2008.
32. Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson, “Somali Americans Recruited by Extremists,” Washington Post, Mar. 11, 2009.
33. I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali, 4th ed. (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), p. 15.
34. Abdurahman M. Abdullahi, “Perspective on the State Collapse in Somalia,” in Somalia at the Crossroads: Challenges and Perspectives on Reconstituting a Failed State, ed. Abdullahi A. Osman and Issaka K. Souaré (London: Adonis and Abbey, 2007), p. 44.
35. Ken Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, Adelphi Paper 364 (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 56.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 60.
38. Quoted in Marc Lacey, “Islamic Militants Declare Victory in Mogadishu,” New York Times, June 5, 2006.
39. Bruno Schiemsky et al., “Report of the Monitoring Group on Somalia Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1676,” U.N. Security Council Committee, Nov. 2006, p. 42.
40. Andre LeSage, interview with author by phone, Mar. 30, 2011.
41. Michael R. Gordon and Mark Mazzetti, “U.S. Used Base in Ethiopia to Hunt al Qaeda,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 2007.
42. Marc Lynch, Rhetoric and Reality: Countering Terrorism in the Age of Obama (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, 2010), p. 30. For other examples of this revisionist view, see Martin Fletcher, “Somalia Is Greatest Victim of President Bush’s War on Terror,” Times (London), Dec. 21, 2009; Nir Rosen, “How Did al Shabaab Emerge from the Chaos of Somalia?,” Time, Aug. 20, 2010; Matthew Yglesias, “How Bush Failed Somalia,” American Prospect, Dec. 18, 2008; Editorial, “Haunted by Somalia,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 13, 2009.
43. Bill Roggio, “Failing to Understand Somalia,” Weekly Standard, Dec. 19, 2008.
44. Chris Tomlinson, “Islamic Group Under Scrutiny in Somalia,” Associated Press, June 20, 2006.
45. Chris Tomlinson, “Video Shows Foreign Fighters,” Associated Press, July 6, 2006.
46. Schiemsky et al., “Report of the Monitoring Group on Somalia,” pp. 42–43.
47. Tristan McConnell, “British and American Fighters Respond to Jihad Call in Somalia,” Times (London), May 23, 2009.
48. For a first-rate profile of Hammami, see Andrea Elliott, “A Call to Jihad from Somalia, Answered in America,” New York Times, July 12, 2009.
49. J. M. Berger, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011), p. 172.
50. Bill Roggio, “Al Qaeda Names Fazul Mohammed East African Commander,” Long War Journal, Nov. 11, 2009.
51. Quoted in David H. Shinn, “United States-Somali Relations: Local, National, and International Dimensions,” paper presented at the Center for African Studies, Ohio State University, Apr. 26, 2010, p. 2.
52. For more on these groups in Gaza, see “Radical Islam in Gaza,” Middle East Report No. 104, International Crisis Group, Mar. 29, 2011; Yoram Cohen and Matthew Levitt, Deterred but Determined: Salafi Jihadi Groups in the Palestinian Arena (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2010). For a discussion of how al Qaeda has not formally connected to these groups, see Cohen and Levitt, Deterred but Determined, p. 3.
53. Josh Kron, “Uganda Says It Thwarted Possible Fourth Bombing,” New York Times, July 13, 2010.
54. “Somalia’s Islamist Leader Threatens Ugandans, Burundians with Revenge,” Xinhua News Agency, July 5, 2010.
55. Josh Kron, “World Cup Bombing Suspects Arrested,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 14, 2010.