ELEVEN

KENYA, SOMALIA AND UGANDA

 

In January 2007, a Pentagon spokesman named Bryan Whitman announced that somewhere in southern Somalia American warplanes were carrying out air strikes against Islamists. Whitman refused any further details. ‘I don’t have anything for you on Somalia,’ he said. When the US attacked a second time two weeks later, he was just as reticent. ‘We’re going to go after al-Qaeda and the global war on terror, wherever it takes us,’ he said. ‘The very nature of some of our operations is not conducive to public discussions and there will be times when there are activities and operations that I can talk to you about and there will be other times when I just won’t have anything for you.’

Six years after 9/11, I was tiring of the US military’s paradoxical view of freedom: that it was dandy in peace but in war you best defended liberties like freedom of information by restricting them. The US had just declared war on a group of Islamic militants in Africa but was refusing to account for it beyond a few sentences to a small group of Washington journalists 13,000 kilometres away–because it was Africa and nobody cared. That wasn’t defending freedom. It was contempt for it, and the same old contempt for Africa too. By assuming authority for Somalia, by not considering that Somalis might have something on Somalia, Whitman was placing himself firmly in the tradition of arrogance and ignorance exhibited by so many foreigners in Africa. Whitman’s sparse statements did at least confirm what I’d been hearing in Mogadishu, however. The Americans were back.

The US military had nursed an allergy to any presence in Somalia for more than a decade after ‘Black Hawk Down’. That persisted after 9/11. It endured even after the CIA located in Somalia three fugitive leaders of the 1998 US embassy bombings–Comoros Islander Fazul Mohammed, Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Sudanese bomb-maker Abu Talha al-Sudani. Instead of pursuing these three al-Qaeda men directly, in the years after 9/11 the CIA outsourced, hiring four Mogadishu warlords to do the job for them. And I’d just met one of them.

Mohamed Afah Qanyere was 65 and an elder from the Murosade sub-clan of the Hawiye clan, Somalia’s largest. When Bashir called him, Qanyere asked us to drive out to his camp on the southern outskirts of the city at the end of a broken and deserted coastal road. The warlord had taken over an old, isolated villa whose windows and walls were all shot up and which was surrounded on all sides by thorn bushes that, after years without tending, had grown as big as trucks. He’d ringed the building with artillery, truck-mounted heavy-calibre machine guns and a few hundred uniformed men. Satisfied he was safe, Qanyere had taken to dressing down. His hair out-shocked Don King and he met us barefoot in a yellow and orange Hawaiian shirt and a thin kikoi wrapped tightly around his pot belly.

Qanyere led us into the villa’s main reception room, bare of furniture except for a large, deep-red Persian rug, a comfortable sofa for Qanyere and a plastic chair for me. ‘You’re late,’ said Qanyere as we shook hands. ‘You said five o’clock.’ It was a few minutes after. Qanyere didn’t look busy. Still, I apologized. ‘Don’t ask too many questions,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t like too many questions.’

Qanyere’s aggression extended to his pessimism over the transitional government that had just replaced the Islamists in Mogadishu. ‘Clan war never ends,’ he said. ‘They fight over grass, they fight over water. You rape my girl and I kill 150 of yours. There is no reconciliation.’ It seemed disingenuous for a clan warlord to complain about clan fighting. At the time, Qanyere was also refusing a request from the new government to disarm. I suggested Somalia’s future might be brighter without so many guns. Qanyere snorted. ‘If you have two people and you take a weapon from one, and I keep mine, then what will happen?’ he asked. I said I didn’t know. ‘I know,’ said Qanyere, looking me in the eye. ‘I will kill you.’

After half an hour of this, I ventured: ‘You’ve always enjoyed close relations with the US.’ Qanyere laughed. ‘I think their involvement is confidential,’ he said. ‘But I am sure they’re not far away.’ The CIA’s whereabouts in Mogadishu were actually no secret. Theirs were the first buildings you saw when you landed at Mogadishu airport, at the end of the runway, painted pink. Still, the Americans were careful to stay hidden in town and Qanyere, speaking against his own interests, was the first meaningful confirmation I’d had of their presence.

By that time, Qanyere had enjoyed a long and profitable relationship with the US. In 2006 a UN panel monitoring an arms embargo on Somalia published a report detailing how, in the first few years of the new millennium, the CIA paid him between $100,000 and $150,000 every month. In return he allowed the CIA and US Special Operations soldiers looking for the al-Qaeda trio to use his militia of around 1,500 men as well as the airstrip, south of Mogadishu, to where Qanyere flew in daily planeloads of qat from Kenya. Asked why the Americans had returned, Qanyere grew suddenly serious. ‘The people who destroyed the US embassies in East Africa were here,’ he said. ‘These are bad people. They tried to kill me several times.’

Qanyere said he had known for years where the three embassy bombers lived. Initially he was puzzled when the Americans declined to act on the information. But Qanyere soon realized their timidity was his opportunity. He began doing the CIA’s work for it, snatching what he said were al-Qaeda members off the streets of Mogadishu and handing them over in return for more money. Hearing how much Qanyere was earning, three other Mogadishu warlords began doing the same. For their part, the CIA was delighted. This was an unprecedented local buy-in. Apparently with a straight face, the CIA called its band of warlords the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-terrorism.

The Agency’s enchantment was short-lived. The US was paying millions of dollars to the men who were tearing Mogadishu apart. Predictably, the warlords used the money to buy more men and guns and wage yet more destruction. Mogadishu was already wrecked by a civil war that had raged since 1991. Now the warlords set about destroying what was left. Their mini arms race also helped transform Bakara Market into one of the world’s biggest illegal arms bazaars, a market offering not just small arms and mines but artillery, surface-to-air missiles and even, I heard more than once, chemical weapons and dirty nukes. Asked to explain the chaos, Somalis liked to recite a proverb that celebrated the stubborn and self-defeating animus of the warlord:

I against my brother.

I and my brother against the family.

I and my family against the clan.

I and my clan against Somalia.

I and Somalia against the world.

In addition to their appetite for self-destruction, the warlords turned out to be less than reliable contractors. In 2003 one of them, Mohamed Ga’modhere, abducted a Tanzanian, Suleiman Abdallah Salim, from Mogadishu and sold him to the Americans for several hundred thousand dollars, claiming he was the al-Qaeda commander Fazul. The Americans took Suleiman for interrogation in Nairobi, then on to a French-US Special Operations base in Djibouti, then Afghanistan, where he was held without charge for five years at Bagram outside Kabul. Finally, in July 2008, the US sent Suleiman back to Tanzania with a brief note saying America did not consider him a threat after all. A medical team from an independent US group called Physicians for Human Rights who examined Suleiman in Zanzibar reported he had been repeatedly tortured. ‘Severe beatings, prolonged solitary confinement, forced nakedness and humiliation, sexual assault, being locked naked in a coffin and forced to lie on a wet mat, naked and handcuffed, and then rolled up like a corpse,’ was their summary.

If the CIA was having doubts about the tools of its intervention, most residents of Mogadishu had long ago rejected them. By 2004, almost anything seemed better than a city run by homicidal clan gangsters. Out of this popular desire for law and order arose a rival alliance of Muslim clerics called the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Aware that warlords recognized only muscle, the ICU formed a militant wing it called al-Shabab (The Youth).

The CIA’s problematic outsourcing experiment had now graduated to full-blown catastrophe. Al-Shabab, like ‘Taliban’, was a common name in the Muslim world for zealous and uncompromising Islamist militias. The new group soon attracted a collection of exactly the kind of characters you might expect: thousands of young, ill-educated hotheads, sprinkled with a few hundred itinerant jihadis from the Middle East, plus the three embassy bombers. This was a disaster. For years the Americans had been too faint-hearted to go after the bombers. For the sake of expediency, they had employed a group of warlords who exaggerated the size of the al-Qaeda presence in Somalia, duped the CIA into kidnapping and torturing innocent men, then screwed them for millions of dollars. The ‘collateral damage’ from this mess amounted to more or less the entire capital of Somalia and a large part of the rest of the country. Now the blowback from all that had empowered the very al-Qaeda group the CIA was meant to be pursuing. Al-Qaeda were part of a group championing Somali freedom. Bin Laden couldn’t have wished for more.

The US was undeterred. It promptly labelled al-Shabab an al-Qaeda offshoot and Somalia a new hotspot in its war on terror. Again, this seemed to be giving bin Laden precisely what he wanted. But how true was the charge? Had a new member of an international Islamist conspiracy suddenly materialized in Somalia? Or did that perception reflect the old problem of foreigners in Africa: how assumption, extrapolation and imagination, in this case emanating in equal parts from Washington and Abbottabad, could conjure up an illusion more captivating than its reality?

Shortly after I met Qanyere, I asked Bashir to set up a meeting with an al-Shabab fighter. To meet me at the Peace, Ali Sayid stashed his gun, changed into jeans and a football shirt and walked across the city, through several battlefields and a series of militia and Ethiopian checkpoints. Just 15 years old, he was skinny, polite and mostly serious, though every now and then he would collapse in giggles, almost as though he’d caught sight of the man he was becoming and the boy he still was saw right through it.

Bashir brought Ali to the Peace and after we introduced ourselves I asked him why he had joined a group that the CIA regarded as a blood brother to al-Qaeda. Ali told me he was born in southern Somalia in 1991, the year civil war broke out. When he was 11 he left his village and travelled to Mogadishu to look for an education. Realizing he could not pay the school fees, he found a job as a porter, then graduated to selling shirts and kikois by the side of the road. In time, he was given a job inside a clothes store in Bakara Market.

By then, Ali was earning 80 cents a day, just enough to feed himself. Walking home from work, he was often forced to hand over his wages to clan fighters at roadblocks that the warlords had set up across the city. ‘I was very angry with the militias,’ said Ali. Ali could not speak English or Arabic–‘the warlords had done that to me’–and now his oppressors were robbing him too. They killed people, including one of Ali’s friends, and made a business out of denouncing innocent men as al-Qaeda to the Americans. ‘They took one of my neighbours to Addis Ababa and said he was a terrorist. But the Ethiopians said he was not and the man came back to Mogadishu and told us what happened to him. It was all just a business for these warlords.’

Al-Shabab fought back against the warlords on the people’s behalf, said Ali. They were ‘good people’ who trained you to defend your neighbourhood, how to handle a gun, how to drive a car and endure pain and administer first aid. ‘So I began to end my work then go for training with al-Shabab from four o’clock until midnight.’

Ali was describing the growth of a Somali popular resistance movement pushing back at tyranny sponsored from abroad, in this case by the US. There was no suggestion of international terrorism. Al-Shabab attracted sympathy even from its nominal enemies. In early May 2006, when al-Shabab attacked all the warlords’ positions in Mogadishu simultaneously, the warlords found their own men were reluctant to fight what even they considered to be a legitimate revolt. Hundreds of them defected to al-Shabab. By 5 June, the Islamists had pushed the warlords out of the city. For the first time in nearly a generation, Somalis could walk the streets of their capital in safety.

Its success earned al-Shabab even wider support. One morning on the terrace of the Peace I watched a group of Somali clan leaders meet for coffee and, when they had finished their discussion, asked if I could join them. In the Byzantine constellation of Somalia’s clans, all Somalis ultimately claimed to be descendants of Cush, son of Ham, son of Noah. Because Ugas (‘King’) Abdullah Ugas Farah could trace his ancestors back 24 fathers, further than anyone else, the others had made him their chairman. Though no Islamist himself, he took a pragmatic view of al-Shabab. ‘They secured the city,’ said Ugas. ‘If that security had lasted, then Somalia would have had something we have not seen in 16 years: unity. Everyone believes that.’

By mid-2006, it was possible to believe a new, peaceful era was dawning for Somalia. But a resistance movement against oppression is a broad tent. Though al-Shabab attracted mostly nationalist Somalis, it also pulled in those with a more international and doctrinaire outlook. Those included the al-Qaeda trio and a former colonel in the Somali army who had fought in a war against Ethiopia in 1977, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys. Aweys had also been friends with bin Laden during the al-Qaeda founder’s years in Khartoum and even used bin Laden’s money to form his own militia, al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, which carried out bomb attacks in Ethiopia in the 1990s.

If bin Laden considered al-Shabab ripe for hijacking, Aweys was the man to do it. Without consulting other ICU leaders, Aweys abruptly declared a jihad on his old enemy, Ethiopia. Aweys had few men at his command and, even if he had had more, the threat that a few thousand guerrillas posed to one of Africa’s biggest and best-trained armies was empty. According to an Ethiopian intelligence officer, the US was also counselling Ethiopia against a strong reaction, stressing the dangers of giving Aweys the fight he apparently wanted and the risk that posed of bringing al-Shabab’s more hard-line elements to the fore. The then commander of the US Central Command, General John Abizaid, flew to Addis Ababa in November 2006 to urge Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to reconsider what was, by then, a plan for a fully fledged invasion, banging the table and shouting that Somalia would become ‘Ethiopia’s Iraq’.

But Meles was adamant. Ethiopia was facing its own low-level ethnic Somali insurgency in the east of its territory and could not risk further escalation of a centuries-old conflict. On Christmas Eve 2006, Ethiopia invaded Somalia. In days, it killed more than a thousand al-Shabab fighters. ‘They came at us in wave after wave after wave,’ the Ethiopian officer said. ‘We just cut them down.’

Ali was on the receiving end of the onslaught. Outgunned, out-trained and poorly equipped, most of his comrades were killed before they could fire a shot. But the slaughter only seemed to redouble Ali’s commitment to al-Shabab. ‘It was our duty to die at the front instead of being under occupation here in Mogadishu. Everyone prayed they would be killed at the front. It was excellent.’ Ali stared off into the distance, his eyes dancing as he remembered the bright bloodiness of battle. ‘I’ve never seen a government in my life and the Ethiopians took away the only security I’ve ever known,’ he said. ‘But to defend your religion and your country–it was excellent.’

Having glimpsed the subtleties at play in Somalia, Washington quickly forgot them. Once the Ethiopian invasion was under way, no longer did the US perceive a popular uprising against repression nor a patriotic resistance against a foreign invader. What it saw was an opportunity to settle its old score with three of its most wanted.

Within a week, the Ethiopians had captured Mogadishu and overthrown the ICU. Thousands of Islamists fled Mogadishu, driving south towards bases and camps on the Kenyan border. The Mogadishu exodus was the moment for which the Americans had been waiting. Somewhere in those convoys were the three al-Qaeda ringleaders. Suddenly Somalis began spotting small groups of bearded US Special Operations soldiers travelling with the Ethiopians.

This was the moment the rank and file of al-Shabab began to feel they might be engaged in a war with significance beyond Somalia. Ali, for one, had no doubts as to his ultimate enemy. ‘It’s the Americans who are now attacking us,’ he declared. ‘The Americans were supporting the warlords. Now Americans are using the Ethiopians to kill us. Why? Because America does many things against Islam.’ That made the US his enemy, said Ali. ‘If America is an enemy of Islam, then I am an enemy of America.’

It was all too neat. Too neat, and too nuts. In its hunt for three bombers, America had so inflamed Somali national pride that a patriotic fury was now coalescing around an anti-American, radically Islamist insurrection. Whitman’s terse statements suggested that Washington hadn’t even considered Somalis might object to a foreign power attacking their country but, rather, assumed that any sense of national sovereignty had been obliterated in Somalia along with everything else.

That misunderstood the stubborn nature of freedom, how people fight for it harder the more it is threatened. Ordinary Somalis, certain of the righteousness of their cause, were undeterred when the US described al-Shabab as part of al-Qaeda. If America wanted to unite al-Qaeda with a Somali popular resistance, if it wanted to fight Somalis in Somalia, they said, bring it on. The Islamists led the cheerleading. ‘Bush must invade Somalia!’ demanded Hassan al-Turki, a hard-line al-Shabab commander. ‘Everyone in Somalia is a terrorist!’

Was everyone blood-crazy? Was Ali, the boy soldier? I tried an appeal to reason. Al-Shabab had allowed the embassy bombers to join. Al-Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had just released a video calling on Somalis to ‘launch ambushes, landmines, raids and suicidal combats’ against the ‘crusaders… until you consume them as the lions eat their prey’. You had to see how this looked to Washington, I said. It appeared as though Ali and his friends were part of al-Qaeda, the group that had started the war on terror by attacking the US.

Ali sighed wearily and slumped in his seat. Saying America was his enemy had sounded good. Now the foreigner was taking it too far. ‘People think our group is something else, that we’re al-Qaeda,’ he said. ‘We’re not. We fight for the people. We fight for Somalia. People need security. It has to come.’ Zawahiri’s broadcast didn’t matter. It wasn’t relevant. ‘If someone called al-Zawahiri says the people should do this or do that, then it could be right or it could be wrong,’ said Ali. ‘I don’t know and I don’t really care. He is not from here, you see?’

When I returned to Mogadishu six months later, Ga’modhere’s abduction of a random Tanzanian and selling him to the CIA for millions of dollars had become well known. Somehow that had not prevented Ga’modhere from being appointed Interior Minister. At his new office in Mogadishu, I was nervous about bringing up his ties to the CIA but I needn’t have worried. Almost before we sat down, Ga’modhere said he was pleased to see me because foreigners needed to know they should be sending him all the cash they could. ‘We are fighting al-Qaeda,’ said the warlord. ‘They are a danger to the whole world and it’s the world’s duty to give us support.’

Ga’modhere skipped to the next item on his wish-list: US assistance in rounding up troublesome journalists. ‘The media here belongs to al-Qaeda,’ said Ga’modhere. ‘They demand freedom of expression but they use it to criticize the government. That means they are members of al-Qaeda. They are partners of them. We know this. We are following them. We have a lot of information on them.’

Ga’modhere’s attitude struck me as not all that different to the Pentagon’s. Whitman was also trying to shut down reporting on Somalia and Ga’modhere’s reasoning was the same as his: that anyone not helping the US was against it. Ga’modhere’s insistence that he was fighting al-Qaeda also bore striking resemblances to the rhetoric from Washington and his fellow warlord, Qanyere. The US and its warlords seemed to be drowning in group-think.

I decided to test the theory on a third Alliance warlord, Bashir Raghe Shiraar. In more reduced circumstances than his two peers, camped by the side of the road with a handful of men and a single artillery gun under a torn and oily tarpaulin, Raghe was even keener than Ga’modhere and Qanyere to stress the danger the Islamists posed and the need for millions more dollars to fight them. ‘We know their dream was to have a nuclear bomb and they wanted to prepare it somewhere here in their safe haven,’ he declared. ‘So you see? There was that danger coming from them. This is not only to save Somalia. This is to save the world.’

Ali hadn’t seemed like a global threat. Still, it was possible that a foot soldier would be unaware of his commanders’ more diabolical ambitions. I asked Bashir to find me an al-Shabab commander, someone of rank, and within a day Mohamed Mahmood Ali appeared at my door at the Peace. Mohamed smiled a lot but he had the burning eyes of a zealot. He seemed torn between his duty to welcome a foreign visitor and his duty to kill a kufr.

Mohamed introduced himself with a brief sketch of his life. He was 41, had three wives and eight children. He was in charge of around 30 al-Shabab fighters. ‘We are defending ourselves and our country against an occupation by our long-time enemy, Ethiopia, which is backed by the American government,’ said Mohamed. ‘This is a local war. But because of the American involvement, it is also a fight for our faith and freedom and that is an international war.’

Mohamed declared: ‘We are against al-Qaeda.’ But he added he was also against America because, ‘in the war on terror, this government of America takes their weapons and uses this word “terrorism” to stop Muslim beliefs and eliminate Muslims from the globe. We want to implement sharia law. But even if a small town declares sharia law, America will make war.’

I asked Mohamed if he truly believed he was fighting America. ‘We feel the suppression of America,’ replied Mohamed. ‘We feel the hostility of Westerners.’ He followed events in Afghanistan and Iraq and felt al-Shabab shared the same beliefs and was fighting the same war as the Taliban and the Iraqi resistance. US aggression was a great recruiting tool, he added. ‘That’s one of the things we use to get more troops, to get their trust. America has the upper hand but we have people’s moral support.’

As I had done with Ali, I asked Mohamed to see the situation from Washington’s point of view. What were the Americans supposed to think of a group that had taken in the three embassy bombers? Mohamed replied that America knew there was no real al-Qaeda threat in Somalia. ‘They know everything. Sometimes we cannot sleep at night because we hear their aircraft circling above us.’ The US had allowed itself to be tricked by the warlords, he said, who wanted two things: ‘to rule the country and to get money from Westerners’. Or maybe, he added, the US had its own agenda. He had heard talk that the US wanted to create a new state of Israel in Somalia. Mohamed’s tone suggested he was sceptical of this particular conspiracy. He was like Ali. The big talk was rousing and fun. But no one took it very seriously.

No one, that was, except intelligence analysts in Washington and foreign journalists like me. Obsessed with al-Qaeda, we seemed almost determined to miss the point. As I circled back time and again to the subject of al-Qaeda, Mohamed became increasingly exasperated. Eventually he said that, as best as he understood it, ‘America is fighting their own war across the world and, for now, they just happen to be fighting it here.’

It was that casual disregard for Somalia’s sovereignty that Mohamed found unacceptable. Ali expressed similar sentiments. So had Africans over the centuries. Caught up in their own ambitions or best intentions, foreigners looked right past African freedom as if it didn’t exist. The arrogance offended Mohamed’s patriotism. But it also violated his notions of plain common sense. ‘Here is Africa,’ he said. ‘How far away is America from here? What is their cause here? Can we disturb America from here?’

As a former officer with US military intelligence with 20 years’ service including time in the Balkans and Iraq, David Snelson’s charm, slight build and neatly parted blond hair always seemed unusual for a soldier until you remembered it was his job not to appear like one. Since leaving the services, David had freelanced as a security contractor in East Africa and often partnered with Bashir. When I’d gone to see Qanyere, it was David who had taken me and we’d stayed in touch.

When the Pentagon announced its air strikes, I emailed David to see if he was interested in heading out to southern Somalia to look for the wreckage. If the CIA was mischaracterizing al-Shabab, the sparse information the Pentagon was releasing about its own operations felt like lying by omission. The strike site was solid proof of a US operation in Somalia and the wreckage was a good place to start unearthing the truth. The problem was the location, deep in al-Shabab territory close to the Kenyan border. David said we’d have to wait for a break in the fighting. Six months later he called to say there was a lull. We could go.

We caught a UN prop making a fuel resupply run from Mogadishu to a UN airfield outside the southern port of Kismayo. This was the northern edge of al-Shabab’s newly reduced territory. Driving into town we heard gunfire, and when it continued through the afternoon and into the night, David set about making us look as forbidding as possible. By nightfall we had two pick-ups filled with a total of 20 gunmen that he hired off the street for $10 a day, guns and rounds included.

David also sought out the local MP for advice on routes. Abdirashid Mohamed Hiddig was a middle-aged man with a ready smile who asked people to call him Abdi. The Islamists had arrived in 1993, he said, the year after bin Laden moved to the region. They based themselves in an area of southern Somali swamp called Ras Kamboni. The place had no road, no airport and no communications but did have fresh water, fish in the sea and proximity to Kenya. ‘You can do whatever you want there,’ said Abdi. ‘The people in the area are nomadic so no one knows who is who. There is just the ocean. If you’re looking for a place to hide, you can stay there for as long as you want.’

After the Ethiopian invasion, a few hundred Islamists, among them numerous foreigners, regrouped in Ras Kamboni, said Abdi. ‘They’re waiting until things change. As soon as they get their chance, they will do what they’re planning.’ Abdi said the foreigners had attracted concerted attention from the US. ‘At times, the sky was black with aircraft. Helicopters, jets, drones. I thought they would crash into each other.’

Also of interest to the US, added Abdi, were the thousands of fighters captured by the Ethiopians. Most were local Somalis but some were foreigners and neither the Americans nor the Ethiopians could tell them apart. ‘The Americans asked me to go with them and sort them out,’ he said. He flew with the Americans to a holding site where he stayed for five days, sifting foreigner from Somali. He identified more than 20 jihadis from abroad. Many were British, he said. After that, the Americans flew Abdi to a town called Kulbio, the site of the US air strikes where David and I were heading. There the Americans asked Abdi to sort out the dead. ‘That was a last stand for an Islamist convoy,’ said Abdi. ‘The Ethiopians and the Americans killed all of them but they didn’t know who was who.’

Just then there was a burst of gunfire outside our guest house gates and Abdi apologized and asked to be allowed to leave. We promised to talk again once David and I returned.

Starting the next morning, David and I made a long, lazy loop to the Kenyan border and back, 800 off-road kilometres in 36 hours. We kept our distance from towns and villages, driving through swamps and acacia thorns that, by the end of the trip, had scraped our pick-up’s paintwork back to the metal. We saw partridge, guinea fowl, warthog, dik-dik and leopard tracks but, as David intended, very few people. When we did come across a farmer or a goatherd, David and I would hide on the back seat, our faces wrapped in headscarves.

That, and our gunmen, was enough to make anyone who saw us hesitate. Our plan was simple–get in, get what I wanted and get out–and we made only three brief stops during the trip: a couple of hours’ sleep, an hour straightening a bent axle with a rock and a half-hour righting our pick-up after a passing tree snagged the front bumper and tipped us gently on our side. It was a hard pace. One of our gunmen seemed especially unhappy, complaining loudly that he was tired and enforcing our brief sleep stop by firing a single shot into the air and jumping off the back of the truck. The next day, when the same man wondered out loud what kind of ransom David and I might make, his commander walked him off to one side, then reappeared two minutes later, his arm around the man’s shoulder, offering him a tissue for his broken lip.

We’d been driving for 24 hours when our dirt track opened out into a clearing littered with brass bullet casings, metal ammunition boxes and plastic mortar wrappers. Six burnt-out and rusted 10-ton trucks were scattered in a rough circle. Several had flipped on their backs. One had been carrying an anti-aircraft gun. Its three-metre steel barrel had been blown 30 metres from its mount. The ground was punctured with scores of fist-sized holes and, towards the centre, nine large craters, two metres deep and twice that distance across.

I had brought with me accounts of the RAF strikes of November 1920 ordered by the then British Minister for War, Winston Churchill, against the ‘Mad Mullah’. Group Captain Robert Gordon, commander of the RAF’s secret and experimental ‘Z Unit’, wrote that the attacks were a test run for an early form of shock and awe. The warplane was a new weapon that, it was hoped, would have the ‘power to carry out, without warning, a form of attack against which no counter-measures could avail’. Captain Gordon added that ‘this object was attained in full’. Six airplanes bombed the Mullah’s forces, even singeing the Mullah’s clothes. They then descended to 300 feet and engaged the Mullah’s forces with machine-gun fire, which ‘created the most profound impression on all’.

From the debris around us, I was able to reconstruct an air strike whose essential elements were unchanged since 1920. Going by the number of trucks, a group of 60 to 80 Islamists had been running south. The craters indicated the warplanes–US and Ethiopian, we later discovered–struck first with their largest weapons, 250lb and 500lb laser-guided bombs. Once they stopped the Islamists’ trucks, they followed up with incendiary rounds, which filled the cabs and flat-backs with fire. Then, with the few surviving Islamists scattering for cover, the holes in the ground indicated the pilots had strafed them with cannon fire. They’d done it over and over. In parts, the ground looked ploughed. Most of the wreckage lay inside a rough rectangle the size of a football field, a kill grid, I read later, that was the signature of an American AC-130 gunship. No one had escaped.

We were still examining the wreckage when we heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. A pick-up entered our clearing. Our gun-men surrounded it. Three bearded men got out with their hands raised and lay face-down on the ground. ‘Al-Qaeda,’ hissed our militia commander.

He and David had a brief discussion. David turned to me. ‘Our commander wants to kill them. He says they have a nice car and we could use the extra room. He says that if we just let them go, they’ll only come back and try to kill us.’

David told the commander we weren’t killing anyone and that we wanted to know who the men were. The commander asked them some questions. The men said they worked for Hassan al-Turki, the al-Shabab commander who had urged the US to invade. They were en route to one of al-Turki’s camps. It seemed to be a supply run: next to the men’s Kalashnikovs, the back seat of the car was full of tea and sugar.

David instructed our militia to let the three men go, minus their guns. The trio drove away slowly, until they disappeared out of sight–though for the rest of the trip our militia reported seeing the car following us from a distance. That was only more encouragement to get back to Kismayo as quickly as possible. Affronted by our squeamishness, our gunmen’s opinion of us was also darkening.

We made it back to Kismayo in the early hours of the morning, paid off the gunmen and slept. In the morning I went to find Abdi. But he had left Kismayo and nobody knew when he would return. I cursed myself for not asking him more about the US operation when I’d had the chance. It wasn’t like the Americans went around recruiting anyone who spoke English.

Sure they did, said someone. Within minutes I was talking to Haile Abdi Hakim, a 35-year-old sugar importer whom the Americans had also asked to assist them separate local al-Shabab fighters from foreigners. Haile said the entire operation, the bombing, the capture of prisoners and the sifting of the foreign jihadis, took around three weeks in all. ‘The planes were moving day and night out of Kismayo airport,’ he said. He listed the aircraft as helicopters, MIGs and lumbering AC-130s, American and Ethiopian. ‘One AC-130 was bombing the vehicles, then others on the ground would attack the Islamists as they ran for cover,’ he said. The Americans used phone signals to target their attacks. ‘One time a local farmer found a satellite phone left behind by the Islamists and tried to make a call and they bombed him too.’

Haile said the Ethiopians had hundreds of Islamist prisoners. A group of Americans in civilian clothes went through their ranks, comparing their faces to pictures they had on their computers. Though neither the Americans nor the Ethiopians knew it for weeks, one of the three embassy bombers, al-Sudani, had already been killed. ‘When the villagers went to loot the vehicles, they found him there,’ said Haile. ‘They buried him. His body is still there.’

A second man introduced himself as Hukun Abdi Koreye. He was 28 and worked as the UN’s fuel manager at Kismayo airport, where he’d also got to know the Americans. Hukun said the operation had lasted 28 days. The Americans had flown in on Kenyan and US planes, up to 60 soldiers at a time. ‘They took over one whole side of the airport,’ he said. Hukun said he’d seen F-16 fighter-bombers, helicopters, including a Chinook, and drones. The planes arrived from Kenya. The helicopters came from a US aircraft carrier, stationed just offshore in the Indian Ocean. Later, studying US Navy ship deployments, I found the US had had five warships off Somalia that month, including the USS Eisenhower, which had 3,500 men and 60 aircraft on board.

Far from the two air strikes Whitman had announced, this had been a mammoth US military operation, a mini-invasion, lasting a month and involving thousands of US servicemen on land, sea and in the air. It was the biggest clandestine operation the US had undertaken since 9/11. That combination of size and its secrecy made its legality questionable.

The operation has continued in the years since. The Pentagon has maintained its policy of disclosing almost nothing about its operations. But even if you counted only the attacks it admitted to, by September 2014 the Pentagon had staged a total of 30. More even than the number, it was the range of armour used–drones, missiles fired from submarines and warships, helicopter gunships, fighter-bombers, AC-130s and Special Operations attacks by sea, land and air–that described the scale of the US effort in Somalia.

Mohamed and Ali had been right. They were fighting Americans. America was waging a covert war in Africa.

If you misread a problem, you can’t fix it. If you misrepresent a local rebellion as global terrorism, that may eventually be what you’ll face.

A conflict that had started with the CIA’s blundering pursuit of three al-Qaeda men had led directly to the creation of a new anti-American Islamist force. If there was a war on terror in Africa, it was at least partly the self-fulfilment of a prophecy that originated in America. And as the conflict grew in size and reach, and with bin Laden taking such an interest, it was all but inevitable that one day al-Shabab would take the path others had already marked out for it.

In the early evening of 11 July 2010, as the world watched Spain beat the Netherlands in the soccer World Cup in South Africa, three men wearing black safari-style vests made their way through a warm, dusty evening in the Ugandan capital Kampala. The first man entered the Ethiopian Village restaurant, where a crowd of Ethiopians, Eritreans and Americans were sitting in front of an open-air screen. A second man slipped into the Kyandodo rugby club where another crowd had gathered to watch the game. Sometime on his journey across town the third man removed his vest and slid it into a laptop bag before entering the ICS nightclub, just south of the city centre.

During the first half of the game, each of the three men received a phone call. The first two reached into their vests. In an inside pocket they felt for a lighter and, sticking through the pocket lining, a short fuse. They both flicked the lighters. The fuses sparked and ran quickly to their other ends, where they disappeared into several pounds of plastic explosive wrapped inside a number of bags of ball-bearings.

Tesfalem Waldyes, a 27-year-old Ethiopian journalist on a Norwegian exchange programme to Uganda, was a few metres from the Ethiopian Village blast. ‘I hear this sound, then this high ringing in my ears,’ he said. ‘I look around and people are screaming everywhere, jumping over the chairs. I have blood and bits of flesh all over my clothes, my arms, on my glasses. Three white people are on the ground covered in blood. This other white guy is saying to them, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” I am talking to them too. But they do not respond. They just stare up in the air.’

A total of 76 people died in the two blasts, mostly Ugandans, but also Ethiopians, Eritreans and a 25-year-old American, Nate Henn, of Wilmington, Delaware, who was working for Invisible Children. Around 85 more people were injured, among them five Americans.

Somehow–maybe the bomber lost his nerve, maybe his device malfunctioned–the third bomb did not detonate. A cleaner found the laptop bag the following morning leaning against a wall near the bar. Also in the bag was a cell-phone.

In the years after the Ethiopian invasion of late 2006 al-Shabab regrouped and counter-attacked. It beat back the Ethiopians. It beat back a Ugandan force sent by the African Union to replace the Ethiopians. By late 2008 it controlled most of Mogadishu and large parts of Somalia. That year also marked al-Shabab’s international debut. It killed 30 people in a series of bombings in the autonomous state of Somaliland, to the north of Somalia proper.

By taking its war to the Ugandans 18 months after those first strikes, al-Shabab was finally graduating to what the US claimed all along it was trying to prevent: fully fledged international terrorism. But like humanitarians who could only advocate more involvement as a solution to their failures, the Kampala attacks were the signal for yet more US intervention. Within 24 hours of the blasts, a team of FBI agents arrived in Kampala. Handed the phone found by the nightclub cleaner, they bypassed its pin code and used the phone’s call history to plot a network of numbers. The FBI agents then repeated the process with those numbers. Within hours, they had a phone tree connecting more than 100 people in Uganda and Kenya. The FBI men then handed their diagram to their counterparts from Uganda and Kenya.

Eleven days after the attacks, at 3.30 a.m. on 22 July, Mohamed Abdow, a 24-year-old Kenyan Somali street hawker, was asleep with his brother in their shack in the market town of Tawa, east of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, when there was a knock at the door. Mohamed opened it to find 20 men, some in police uniform, some in civilian clothes. They pushed past him.

‘They ask for our phones,’ said Mohamed. ‘My phone is under my mattress so I ask my brother to call it. I say, “0… 7… 2… 4…,” and as soon as I mention those digits, one man says, “That’s the number we’re looking for” and they tell us to lie down on the floor, tie our hands behind us and say: “If you get up, we will shoot.” Then they ransack the house as two officers hold guns to our heads.’

After several hours, the pair were taken to Nairobi and separated. Three days of interrogation followed. On the fourth day, Mohamed was bundled into a car with two other men and driven west. Several hours passed, then the trio reached an immigration post and Mohamed guessed they were entering Uganda. Soon they were transferred to a waiting Ugandan convoy and taken to Kampala, then nearby Entebbe.

More interrogations followed. On the third day there, three white men who said they were FBI joined Mohamed’s interrogation. On 30 July, his ninth day of detention, Mohamed was taken to court in Kampala and charged with 76 counts of murder, 20 counts of attempted murder and terrorism. ‘It is the first time I’ve heard that I am being accused of the Kampala bombings,’ said Mohamed.

After his court appearance, Mohamed was taken to Luzira maximum-security prison in Kampala. There he was interrogated intermittently over the next few months by the Ugandans and more white men. What linked him to the bombings, it became clear, was his phone. Mohamed explained that he had bought it second-hand from a market in Nairobi on 8 July 2010, just three days before the bombings. He’d barely used it. The part it played in the phone tree had to be due to the previous owner.

But his interrogators wouldn’t listen. One day Mohamed found himself being questioned jointly with Khalif Abdi Mohammed, the shopkeeper who sold him the device and who had arrived in Uganda after a brief spell at a secret prison in Mogadishu. ‘If you do not tell the truth, you will never see your family again,’ said one of the white men.

In East Africa, I often worked with Mohamed Ibrahim. Mo was an ethnic Somali born in Mogadishu, raised in Nairobi and educated in London, from where he retained an accent. Laid-back and easy-going, every now and then Mo would let slip hints of extraordinary journalistic endeavour. One day he mentioned how, at a time in 2008–9 when few journalists felt safe going to Mogadishu, he spent 18 months in the city photographing the front lines of al-Shabab’s war with the Ugandans. Another time I discovered he had made more than 30 trips to meet Somalia’s pirates and even acted as a go-between for them and the families of the hostages they were holding. Then there was the time when, walking down a street in Mogadishu, the convoy of the then Somali President, Sheikh Sharif, passed Mo on the street.

‘One of Sharif’s security guys stopped and asked me to come with him,’ said Mo. ‘I said I was a journalist, yeah? But they took me anyways to Villa Somalia and just next to the presidential palace is this prison. It runs deep underground, yeah? It’s a secret prison. Everyone in Mogadishu knows if you go in there, you do not come out.’

It dawned on Mo that he had been taken to a clandestine CIA ‘black site’ prison. ‘We could see some white men in Ray-Bans and khakis–military dudes–five of them going up and down into the prison. They took me into a room, got my fingerprints and mug shots, and then they started asking questions.’ In American accents the men asked Mo who he was and for whom he spied. Then they told him they knew he worked for al-Shabab. ‘You collect information for them,’ said the Americans. ‘But we can help you. We can put you in our witness protection program.’

Mo laughed. ‘I said to them: “This is ridiculous, man. I need to make a call.” And they said: “You can’t call.” And they took me to this room above the cells.’ An hour later, the white men returned with more questions. They asked him again who he was. ‘I said: “Listen, man, I am a journalist. I have a British passport.”’

The Americans took Mo’s shoes and belt, then marched him down a set of stairs leading underground and into a long, windowless corridor. Barred cells lined each side of the corridor, said Mo, all of them occupied by a total of perhaps 50 men. Mo was pushed into one cell already home to another man. Mo recognized him immediately as someone with whom he’d been at school in Nairobi. ‘Three classes above me,’ said Mo. ‘His name was Ahmed. He had lost a leg.’ The man looked at Mo and recognized him but, before Mo could say anything, murmured: ‘We do not know each other.’

After a while, Mo persuaded Ahmed to talk. Ahmed said he had been in the prison for 19 months. His family had no idea where he was. ‘They came to my home in Nairobi,’ said Ahmed, ‘knocked my door down, blindfolded me, took me to the airport and brought me to Mogadishu.’ Mo began asking around the other prisoners. All of them had been kidnapped from Nairobi. They said that the Americans would interrogate them occasionally but mostly they were just kept in their cells. Like Ahmed, most had been there for months or years. Mo said he thought Ahmed had once been a member of al-Shabab but had retired a few years earlier after losing his leg in fighting. ‘The Americans don’t know what to do with him,’ said Mo. ‘He’s not a fighter now and they haven’t got anything on him. But they’re afraid if they release him, he will go public. So he’s still there.’

During the night, Mo managed to give his mobile number to a guard and asked him to pass it to a leader from his clan. The next day the man showed up with several trucks filled with armed men and demanded Mo be released. ‘And suddenly it’s, “Sorry, we did not know who you were,”’ said Mo. Still, as they were letting him go, the Americans warned Mo: ‘You cannot tell anybody what you saw or we will get you.’

Mo sighed. ‘These guys, man,’ he said. ‘Serious, I’m telling you.’

The Americans’ brief detention of Mo, like their belief that a phone signal was sufficient grounds for an air strike, encapsulated how little care they took with the facts. What protected them was secrecy. With his brief detention in a US black site prison, Mo had pierced that. Keen to find out more back in Nairobi, Mo sought out Amin al-Kimathi, a former journalist who had founded the Muslim Human Rights Forum in Kenya and specialized in researching secret US prisons in Africa.

Amin was tall and broad, with a beard, skullcap and gold-rimmed glasses, a look that mixed traditional and modern Muslim. In Kismayo in 2007, I’d heard that once the Americans and Ethiopians sorted their foreign prisoners from locals, they took non-Somalis to Addis Ababa. Amin had heard the same, plus other testimony that more prisoners rounded up on the Somali-Kenyan border were also renditioned to Ethiopia.

Working with the British rights charity Reprieve, over several months Amin uncovered a system of black site prisons in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, run by the CIA and FBI inside existing African jails. Detainees were held incommunicado, often without charge, sometimes for years. Most were interrogated by American and British officers. Eighty-six people had been renditioned from Kenya, either to Somalia or Ethiopia. Between 85 and 120 people, at least 11 of them children, had been taken from Somalia to Ethiopia. After years of campaigning, Amin and Reprieve helped get all the detainees home. None was ever charged with a crime. In 2010 Reprieve’s East Africa representative was deported from Kenya.

After the Kampala bombings, Amin began hearing about another round of abductions and renditions, this time from Kenya to Uganda. ‘People had been renditioned from Kenya and it was illegal,’ he said. ‘So I decided I would monitor the trial.’ Amin first travelled to Kampala to visit Mohamed Abdow and around 50 other Kenyan prisoners in August 2010. In an email he sent to a colleague at the time, Amin wrote: ‘I am advised that it will not be wise to make the trip now as the investigations into the bombing are giving the anti-terrorism operatives carte blanche to pull in anyone they may be having grudges with and I fall quite high up that premise. Kenya will definitely turn a blind eye/deaf ear and feign action as the Ugandans work on me in the Ugandan way, I am told.’

Despite his misgivings, Amin went. He was denied permission to see the detainees. A month later, Amin set off for a second attempted visit with a lawyer friend, Mbugua Mureithi. ‘Just before I boarded my flight at Nairobi, I got a call from this fellow, Andy,’ Amin said. ‘He said he had visited the Rapid Response Unit, the Ugandan security cell that was the lead agency in the investigation and which had a terrible human rights record. He told me to call him when I arrived. So I got to Entebbe and I call this guy and he said: “I really want to meet.” It was 10.30 p.m., and he said he wanted to meet now, at a hotel en route to Kampala.’

Amin and Mbugua drove to the hotel. Andy was waiting in the car park, carrying a phone and a newspaper as arranged. As the two Kenyans pulled in, a car pulled up next to them, the doors opened and a group of heavily armed men jumped out. ‘We were surrounded,’ said Amin. ‘They pushed me into their car. Andy got into the driver’s seat and I saw that in the newspaper he was carrying a pistol. Andy drove the car. There were five other security officers in there with me. We were searched. Then one guy says: “Hood them.”’

Unable to see where they were being taken, Amin said it felt as though they drove around the city for a while before turning onto some rough roads, country tracks. ‘It was like they were waiting for instructions,’ said Amin. At one point they were held for two hours in cells in a police station. ‘All the time, these guys are shouting at us,’ said Amin. ‘“You are terrorists! You have come to do what you did in Ethiopia! But we do not have human rights for terrorists in Uganda!” Mbugua asked them: “Are you going to kill us?” And they said: “That’s up to you!”’

The driving continued until daybreak. Just before dawn, Amin was moved to a second car. ‘Mbugua was screaming, thinking it was the end of me,’ he said. ‘But in the second car they were more friendly. They asked: “Why do you think terrorism suspects have human rights? You should let us do our work. You should not do what you did in Ethiopia. If you don’t stop, we will put you on the charge sheet.”’

Despite acknowledging that Amin was a human rights worker and Mbugua a lawyer, their captors eventually drove them to the headquarters of Uganda’s Rapid Response Unit. Amin’s legs were chained and he was led to a cell where he and Mbugua stayed for several days. Any attempts at investigation were amateurish. ‘At one point they asked about a grant I received from the Open Society Institute,’ said Amin. The organization, founded by billionaire George Soros, promotes democracy around the world. ‘They said: “This is terrorism money,”’ said Amin. ‘I mean, what do you say to that?’ Eventually Amin and Mbugua were taken to court with 31 other prisoners, 20 of them, like Mohamed Abdow, from Kenya. All were charged with terrorism, 76 counts of murder and 20 of attempted murder.

Over the next few months, Amin was able to observe the interrogation of other prisoners by Ugandan, American and British officers. At the end of November, 19 of them were released without charge. Neither Amin, Mbugua nor Mohamed Abdow was among them. ‘We are not sure whether Kimathi really is a human rights defender or if he was involved in the attack,’ said Kenya’s government spokesman, Alfred Mutua. Mutua also claimed–wrongly–that smuggling prisoners across borders was legal. ‘We cannot have renditions among East African states,’ he said. ‘We have agreements on terrorism. This is a legal process.’ Amin’s Ugandan lawyer Ladislaus Rwakafuzi replied that the accusations against his client were absurd. ‘If Amin took part in the bombings, would he really have come here to observe the court hearings?’ he asked. ‘It makes no sense.’

With just a blanket to sleep on and 45 minutes outside his cell every day, plus 15 minutes to empty his waste bucket, wash and eat a bowl of porridge, Amin found conditions in jail wearing. He tried to occupy himself by fighting to improve them, demanding more time to exercise, and books, and pens. Eventually, to stop torturing himself with hopes of his release, he forced himself to ‘accept that these people wanted me there for the long haul’.

Finally, after 362 days in prison, his captors told him they were dropping all charges. Amin, Mohamed Abdow and Khalif Abdi Mohammed, the shopkeeper who had originally sold him the phone, were all freed the same day.

Freedom and dignity are the marrow of the soul and a year in prison had starved Amin’s close to death. It was five months since his release but he still had that jail look, like a cornered animal, all stress and humiliation. Amin was channelling his adrenaline into pursuing his tormentors. But even before he’d left jail, he had given up on calling the true culprits to account. ‘In prison, the Ugandan authorities would complain the Americans were in total control,’ he said. ‘They would say, “The Americans treat us like children. They come here and interrogate us.” Whatever the Americans wanted done would be done. Several times the Ugandans told me the decision to release me did not rest with them but with the Americans.’

Amin added that, since his release, a senior Kenyan minister had told him that the government in Nairobi repeatedly petitioned the Americans for his release, explaining who he was. But the Americans had insisted. ‘They were not happy with your exposure of the Ethiopian renditions,’ said the Minister. ‘With you removed from the scene, they reckoned they were going to have an easier ride.’

Amin told the Minister flatly that such subservience to a foreign power was a disgrace to Kenya and Africa. ‘You have opened yourself to the point of ridicule,’ Amin said. But despite everything he now knew, despite everything he and Mo and hundreds of others had endured, Amin said there was no way to make a legal case against the Americans. ‘They configured it all to make sure that would never happen.’

The lesson the US military seemed to have taken from its earlier prison scandals at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was simply to be more secretive. From Nairobi, I phoned Joseph Margulies, a Chicago attorney and former counsel for the Guantanamo detainees. Margulies had created many of the Bush administration’s legal headaches by pursuing the rendition case of a British man taken from Afghanistan to Guantanamo to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was for US courts alone, not the US government or its military, to decide whether inmates could be held indefinitely.

When I described the programme of renditions, detentions and black site prisons in East Africa, Margulies replied: ‘This is counter-terrorism 2.0. It’s very deliberate and reflects a learning curve from the perceived mistakes of counter-terrorism 1.0.’ Guantanamo ‘had had its own purpose’, said Margulies. ‘It created a sense of security. “We are keeping you safe because these guys are not on the street.” But it ended up biting them in the butt. There were abuses, guys that didn’t belong there. The whole thing became a symbol of an oppressive America all over the world.

‘That led to 2.0,’ continued Margulies. The rise of al-Shabab in East Africa was an opportunity to test some new ideas about how to wage the war on terror. Mostly these centred around outsourcing. ‘You reduce footprint and visibility, so there is very little risk to US life,’ said Margulies. ‘And by keeping it in the region, you reduce the risk of international legal pressure as a result of rendition flights, say, overflying Italian airspace.’ It was crucial to keep the operation outside US jurisdiction, said Margulies. ‘If it’s run by Somalis, the expectation will be: “Were these guys treated according to local standards?”’ Plus, with everything happening overseas in Africa, American lawyers like him had been completely shut out. Margulies said he almost admired the neatness of it. ‘It’s a very elegant solution,’ he said. ‘We used habeas corpus so effectively in Iraq and Guantanamo. But if these people are not in US custody, if Americans are present only as “advisors” and “observers”, then there is no jurisdiction.’ Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo looked amateurish by comparison, said Margulies. The US’s new black site prisons in Africa were truly hidden. ‘Democracy dies in the dark,’ he said.

Especially ironic was how the US secret prison programmes were often dressed up as assistance programmes to help professionalize foreign armies–teaching developing-world allies a respect for the law and civilian authority. In reality these programmes were precisely and intentionally the opposite. The US was hiding its illegality in plain sight. The US liked East Africa’s prison system because it was open to abuse. Inside it, the US could retreat from view and do in obscurity what it could no longer do in its own territory. Tellingly, the US persuaded African countries to go along with its plans by paying them. ‘We buy them,’ said Margulies. ‘We call it “capacity-building” of local forces but the training, the offer of surveillance and intelligence, the sending of funds and weapons but particularly the money–all that makes an irresistible offer for local economies. It’s what the US does best: throw money at the problem. It’s what we’ve always done. And it always leads to foreign policy and moral bankruptcy.’

Amin said he had made the same point to the Kenyan minister. ‘I told him: “The people who say they’re coming to help you should not be trampling on your sovereignty as a nation. What they are doing could not happen in the US or UK. They tell you how bad your system is, how bad your President is, how they are trying to help them shape up.”’ But the truth was the reverse, said Amin. The US wanted Africa’s prisons to be bad. It had a use for them. ‘The more tainted it is, the better for them.’

The Kenyan minister agreed his government did it for the money, said Amin. ‘There was a lot of infighting because of it,’ said the Minister. ‘The military intelligence took the largest share, the prison service complained they did not get enough, the joint terrorism force had a bigger share.’ These arguments over money helped distract everyone from questions of sovereignty, the Minister said. ‘Pretty soon the money was the only thing people talked about,’ he told Amin. ‘Nobody talked about what they were doing but what they were being paid to do it.’

In Rwanda, Paul Kagame had said the foreigners turned things upside down. In East Africa, the extent of the inversion outraged every African who knew about it. That wasn’t many. The Ugandan newspapers ran regular stories warmly reviewing the co-operation between Kampala and Washington as proof of Uganda’s clout and the professionalism of its security services. ‘On the face of it, it looks like a very noble and lawful and helpful intervention, assisting poorer countries to improve standards of policing and intelligence,’ said Peter Walubri, a Kampala lawyer for the detainees. ‘But what they are actually doing is assisting the Ugandan, Kenyan and Tanzanian governments to break their extradition laws, to break the laws on pre-trial detention, to break laws against the use of torture, to break laws against the mistreatment of prisoners, to deny the accused prisoners access to their next of kin and lawyers, or doctors; to frustrate their attempts to get bail; and to assist in setting up a kangaroo court.’

Peter was most offended by the disrespect to his country’s sovereignty. ‘We should not allow them to run a Guantanamo in Uganda,’ he declared. ‘To whom are they accountable? This is a question of our liberty.’

There it was again. Freedom. Freedom had been al-Shabab’s rallying cry in Mogadishu. Freedom was what motivated Amin in his work on secret jails and what, when it was taken from him, so humiliated him. Freedom was the continuing African fight on which bin Laden was trying to piggy-back. And the al-Qaeda leader was starting to look prescient, said Amin. America’s abuse of African freedom would inevitably rebound on it. ‘There is a lot of anger about what America is doing. Everyone thinks America is behind everything now, that they force their way into everywhere. This high-handedness, it radicalizes more than the radicals. It moves everyone to extremes. It makes people say: “It’s us against them.”’

It was, in the end, what had always outraged Africans about foreigners: the way they barged into a foreign land, proclaimed their self-righteousness, then relentlessly pursued their own narrow interests. It was the corruption of them.

In September 2007, at the start of the global financial crisis then gathering pace, bin Laden released a startling video address to the ‘people of America’ in which he declared Western democracy had failed them. ‘The major corporations are the real tyrannical terrorists,’ he said. Despite its slogans–justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, humanitarianism–bin Laden said the reality was that democracy was a con in which one ‘class of humanity’ laid down ‘its own laws to its own advantage, at the expense of other classes–and thus made the rich richer and the poor poorer’. Any neutral observer would conclude that Western civilization was regressing, he added. ‘The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of “globalization”. If you were to ponder it well, you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than your systems in the Middle Ages. It is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that.’

This was another element to bin Laden’s plan to restore al-Qaeda’s standing. In places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, it would do that by confronting American military adventurism directly. Across Africa, it could confront criminal and venal government, especially when it was backed by the West. But Western capitalism–what Westerners called development–also offered a global theatre of war to the perceptive jihadi, said bin Laden. Not only did capitalism cover the world; as a system based on personal reward it inevitably involved greed, and that led to social injustice. ‘Their laws make the rich richer and the poor poorer,’ repeated bin Laden. ‘Those with real power and influence are those with the most capital.’

Bin Laden’s new thinking borrowed heavily from Karl Marx. Bin Laden proposed his fighters champion the oppressed, whether their subjugation was military, political or economic. The group would align itself with the righteous masses in the oldest of human divides, between rich and poor. It was an approach that has often been adopted by extremists. Adolf Hitler also attacked capitalism for exploiting the weak and mixed Marxism with racism to produce Nazism. To create his ideology, bin Laden mingled it with religious righteousness, depicting inequality as not just crooked and repugnant but a profanity and a sin. Though the Sheikh never spelled out what would take capitalism’s place, he presented al-Qaeda as a purist and pious alternative. The holy mission, to which bin Laden returned repeatedly in his broadcast, was for the masses to cast off their chains. ‘As you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings and feudalism,’ he said, ‘you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system.’

If al-Qaeda had once attracted only zealots and sociopaths, now bin Laden hoped its appeal would be almost unlimited. In his address, he extended his call to revolution beyond the ummah, speaking to the poor and neglected everywhere, even those inside the rich, capitalist, Christian US. The reach of America’s military, political and economic power meant almost no one on earth was untouched by its hegemonic abuse, he said. ‘Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa–all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system,’ he declared. The enemy was the US and its facilitators, including poor-world governments who took aid or investment from the West and, in doing so, made themselves slaves to it.

Foreign humanitarians wanted to save Africans from themselves. African nationalists wanted save Africans from foreigners. Bin Laden’s strategy proposed saving the poor from both. After all, they represented the same injustice. They were rich.

By arguing that Westernization and elitism were one and the same, bin Laden was echoing the movement against globalization, a term he used several times in his speech. ‘Globalization’ is a term that describes how, more than 100 millennia after humanity first began dispersing around the planet, we have begun to reconnect in the past few centuries. In our modern interpretation of it, it describes the process of how, after the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989, the West attempted to take liberal democracy and capitalism to the world. In the West, this was initially described as a wondrous uniting of humanity in a ‘global village’ whose new interdependence would underpin a new era of worldwide peace and prosperity. But critics, mainly from the poor world, saw it as a process of ever more Westernization.

The sceptics had plenty of evidence. There was the imposition, via the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and foreign aid funding, of Western liberalism as the global political and economic orthodoxy. There was also the extension of Western culture and mores to the world. This took numerous forms: in economic behaviour, via the efforts of the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum and the G-20, G8 and G7, as well as the World Bank and IMF; in human rights, pushed by the International Criminal Court and Western pressure groups; in a liberal sexuality, transmitted via pornography and Western women’s and gay rights groups; in sport via the English Premier League; and in cinema via Hollywood. All the while, Western military forces, UN peacekeepers and aid workers were shaping ever more of the world’s nations into Western-style capitalist democracies.

From a Western angle, these were well-intentioned efforts to improve the world according to a set of universal human values. From others, they could look like a fiendish attempt to remake the world to a Western model, one whose design would ensure that power and money remained the preserve of a new global class of Westernized super-rich. Doubters argued that ‘globalization’ was a disingenuous misnomer hiding what, in reality, was a Western victory parade celebrating the super-rich’s win in the great ideological battle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far from inaugurating a harmonious coming-together of equals, by this view globalization was a rigged game in which the rich and their Third-World proxies were the sure winners and the rest of the world merely the spoils.

This is the great paradox of globalization: how it has provoked a backlash of anti-Western nationalism and cultural conservatism around the world. Strident opposition to the West is now consensus politics in much of the world, uniting governments, nations and rebels of all stripes. The West, in this shared view, is hypocritical, sanctimonious and dissolute. All the emerging powers–India, Brazil and South Africa–oppose the West on principle. Russia and China, and lesser powers such as Iran, Kenya, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, sometimes seem to talk of little else.

Bin Laden planned to ride this wave of anti-Western sentiment. His timing was excellent. He broadcast his speech just as the financial crisis was beginning to revive some long-buried suspicions inside the West about whether capitalism was striking the right balance between the haves and have-nots. The richest of the rich–the bankers–had managed to plunge the entire world into crisis. That raised doubts about whether anyone should wield such outsize influence in a civilized world and whether the West’s cult of individuality had reached such heights that it threatened the whole. The crisis also prompted loud criticism of Western inequality which, after three decades in which stock markets boomed but average real wages failed to rise, had risen to heights not seen since the roaring 1920s. Resentment at this disparity swelled and spilled onto the streets. The G-20 protests, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Indignados in Spain–all were the acceptable face of this unrest. More questionable manifestations included the rise of far-right parties in Europe, sporadic riots across European capitals and, as bin Laden foresaw, a steady trickle of disaffected Westerners to radical Islamic causes.

Much of this has been minutely observed and analysed. Less attention has been paid to the accompanying widening of inequality in poorer parts of the world. In cities like Bombay, Johannesburg, Jakarta, Moscow and São Paulo, the arrival of unfettered capitalism led to the sudden emergence of some of the world’s richest people, who promptly built themselves sky-high, multimillion-dollar apartments from where they gazed down on slums home to millions of the world’s poorest. How long before the poor wake up one day and decide to tear them down?

Not long, perhaps. If the links between government and big business have spawned a rising public suspicion in the West, in the poor world the public is often openly hostile to ruling elites who seamlessly blend the two. The Arab Spring, the Indian Naxalites, the Nepalese Maoists, Peru’s resurgent Shining Path, South Africa’s mine and farm worker protests, Boko Haram, and the battles between riot police and government opponents that seemed to sweep the world in early 2014 from Bangkok to Kiev to Phnom Penh to Khartoum to Caracas–all have followed the same anti-elite, anti-corruption, anti-capitalist narrative.

It is an era ripe for the enterprising revolutionary, and in no continent more so than Africa. With the end of slavery in the nineteenth century, foreigners and African leaders stopped physically selling Africans–but they have continued to sell them out. Since African independence, the resource extraction business in Africa has been capitalism at its most raw: taking as much as possible–diamonds, gold, rubber, platinum, wood–for as little as possible, with scant regard for the people who live there.

The most notorious example of a neo-imperial industry was the global oil business. If post-independence Africa was a place of murderous dictators, billion-dollar corruption, epic poverty and environmental destruction, it was no coincidence that that coincided with Africa’s first oil boom. For decades, in return for being allowed to keep most of the profits, oil companies paid billions of dollars directly into African leaders’ foreign bank accounts while ignoring the environment, natural and human, in which they worked. It was oil cash that maintained so many of Africa’s despots, funded their armies and stoked the inequality and resentment that sparked countless counter-coups and rebellions. The most infamous example was Nigeria and its crude-slicked, rebellious Delta, but there were others: Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Angola, to name just three. So bad was the history of Western oil in Africa that the Africa-focused crude prospector and extractor Tullow built one of Europe’s biggest businesses in 30 years largely on the proposition that it didn’t screw Africans. ‘The history of oil is pretty bad [in Africa],’ CEO Aidan Heavey said. ‘The bulk of the profits went to the oil companies and they really didn’t care about the environment or local communities. They just went in, made as much money as they could and got out.’

Western business still short-changes Africans when it can. In February 2012, former South African President Thabo Mbeki kicked off a two-year investigation into foreign business in Africa by revealing that between 2000 and 2008 the continent lost $50 billion a year in illicit financial flows–that is, due to foreign companies under-reporting profits or manipulating prices or laundering cash so as to avoid tax and move money off the continent. Measured against foreign aid, the outside world was taking back from Africa almost as much as it was giving. If you included estimated losses to Africa of an additional $17.7 billion due to illegal logging and $1.3 billion in illegal fishing, Africa was down nearly $20 billion a year. As Mbeki, Kofi Annan and the African Development Bank all noted, Western business in Africa still follows an essentially imperial model. Partly because of resource extractors’ habit of paying the ruler not the people, the top six most iniquitous countries in the world are all African. Even if Western aid mitigated the inequality stoked by Western capitalism, it did nothing to soften the impression of arrogance.

Bin Laden was adamant that al-Qaeda should show the poor the meaning of genuine altruism. As well as attacking the rich, al-Qaeda itself would guide the poor out of poverty and supplant Western aid. ‘Some Muslims in Somalia are suffering from immense poverty and malnutrition because of the continuation of wars in their country,’ he wrote in a letter to al-Shabab leader Muktar Abdirahman Godane, outlining a poverty alleviation strategy he recommended al-Shabab adopt alongside its military campaign. It was imperative that the brothers make time to ‘support pro-active and important developmental projects’. In another letter, he wrote: ‘The people have needs and requirements, and the lack of these requirements is the main reason for their revolt against the ruler. It is human nature that they will go with whoever better provides them with these needs.’

This was a modernization of Africa’s conflict with colonialism. Once again it cast jihadis as the champions of Africa’s freedom. Now it pitted them against Western humanitarians and Africa’s Western-style economic rise–and positioned al-Qaeda as their true saviours. When Western diplomats described the deployment of peacekeepers to Darfur, South Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Somalia and the Central African Republic as noble missions to save lives, jihadis would note that all of those countries were Muslim and decry the interventions as yet more Crusades. If Western business looked at Africa’s rising GDP as proof that the continent was finally coming right, jihadis saw it as evidence of Africa’s descent into degeneracy. Aid’s billion-dollar budgets might be touted as proof of generosity in the rich world, but on the other side of the planet jihadis argued the money showed how poorly Western materialism contrasted with Islam’s ascetics and self-sacrifice. Aid was not a salve to inequality, they argued, but a tool of Western corruption, channelling billions to criminal African leaders and allowing them to shirk their responsibilities to their people. The true solution to inequality was not patching up the Western system that spawned it but replacing it.

There was an awkward accuracy to this analysis. It became even more uncomfortable if you examined how closely, in the age of mega-philanthropy, Western charity was linked to inequality. To be a billionaire philanthropist, after all, you had first to be a billionaire. When, in the early years of the millennium, the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, emerged as the newest champion of Western aid, perhaps least surprised or impressed would have been the jihadis. When Gates unwisely began describing aid in religious terms, calling critics of it ‘evil’ and squaring off against groups such as the Taliban and Boko Haram who blocked foreign polio eradication programmes, the connection between the West’s unjust wealth, its aid and its war on terror was never clearer to the jihadis. The manner in which the US created a famine in Somalia with aid group complicity would likewise have come as little surprise.

There was a clear solution to all this hypocrisy, argued bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was to show it cared.

The Westgate shopping mall in central Nairobi is aptly named. Owned by an Israeli company, home to designer boutiques, high-end fast food joints, coffee shops, an Apple retailer, a casino and the best sushi for hundreds of kilometres, to step through its doors is to walk out of the poor world and into the rich.

On 21 September 2013, five al-Shabab gunmen walked through those doors and shot and killed 67 people. The dead were a perfect cross-section of the cosmopolitan Kenyan elite: 48 Kenyans, including a nephew of President Uhuru Kenyatta and his fiancée, four Britons, three French, three Indians, two Canadians, one of whom was a diplomat, an Australian architect and his pregnant Dutch girlfriend, a 78-year-old Ghanaian poet, a Peruvian manager for Unicef, a South African, a South Korean and a 29-year-old Oxford economics graduate originally from Trinidad and Tobago. At least four of the dead were working in aid. Since two of the gunmen entered the mall through a rooftop car park where an Indian radio station was holding a kids’ cooking contest, the dead and injured, an additional 175 people, also included several children.

Al-Shabab initially boasted that its men held off the might of the Kenyan armed forces for three days. Later, in a special edition of al-Shabab’s magazine Gaidi Mtaani (Street Fighter), the Islamists crowed they caught affluent Kenyans unaware as they shopped and dealt a blow to the West, which was pursuing ‘a crusade against Muslims’ through its ‘British slaves’, Kenya and Uganda. ‘If Westgate was Kenya’s symbol of prosperity, it is now a symbol of their vulnerability, a symbol of defeat and overall Kenyan impotence,’ the group wrote. ‘Westgate was not a fight, it was a message. This will be a long, gruesome war.’

Soon, however, it emerged that many of Kenya’s soldiers, far from being held off by the gunmen, had simply been having too good a time to pay them much attention. CCTV cameras caught soldiers looting the supermarket and designer stores. Photographs of scores of empty beer bottles strewn across the bar of a cocktail lounge bore witness to a legendary party. It was only when the soldiers tired of shopping and drinking and thieving that on the fourth day they fired a missile into the building and collapsed it on top of the attackers.

So many themes of the new Africa converged in the Westgate attack: the continent’s rising prosperity; the greed and inequality that accompanied it; the way that made the aid and government elite targets of popular anger; the Islamists who wanted to co-opt that fury. Gaidi Mtaani was also an inadvertent reminder that what happened in Africa reflected a global phenomenon. The magazine alternated between Swahili and south London English. One article was illustrated by a photograph of a black man in a black coat and wool hat, a butcher’s cleaver in one hand, his other covered in blood. Michael Adebolajo, an ethnic Nigerian from south London, had been arrested in Kenya in 2010 en route to receiving training from al-Shabab. Deported back to south London, in May 2013 he and another ethnic Nigerian ran over a British soldier, Lee Rigby, in a car on a busy street in Woolwich, then stabbed and partially dismembered him in an attack they encouraged passers-by to film on their phones. The photo, from one of the phones, showed Rigby’s blood on Adebolajo’s hands. ‘Remove your government,’ Adebolajo told onlookers. ‘They don’t care about you.’

Al-Shabab had been attracting jihadis to Somalia since 2007. They came from the Middle East and Pakistan but also American, British and Scandinavian cities with large Somali populations like Minneapolis, Cardiff, London and Oslo. One day in a Nairobi hotel room I met a Kenyan al-Shabab deserter, Ali Warsame, who gave me a stunningly complete list of the globalized make-up of the group. Nationalities inside al-Shabab included Somali, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Eritrean; Sudanese, Tanzanian, Algerian, Libyan; Pakistani, Syrian, Saudi Arabian; British, American, Canadian, Australian, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. Al-Shabab had been founded on patriotic Somali grievance. By Westgate, its growing international membership indicated how it saw itself as part of a worldwide struggle, and had ever more global ambitions.

I spent the days after Westgate talking to survivors, asking them why they thought they had been targeted. For most, it was too soon for reflection. A wedding photographer called Joe had braved the gunfire for seven hours to rescue people, but as he spoke the nerves danced so wildly under his skin that I cut the interview short and made him promise to see a doctor.

In any case, the attackers’ backgrounds held clear clues to their motivations. All five were young Muslim men, Kenyans and ethnic Somalis. They came from all over Kenya, a reflection of how a young Muslim might find the inspiration to become a jihadi almost anywhere in the country. In the east, Kenya’s Muslim coast had been ignored for decades by governments run by Kenya’s inland tribes. Its main port, Mombasa, was now home to a group called the Muslim Youth Centre, later al-Hijra, which in 2012 declared it was ‘part of al-Qaeda in East Africa’. In the north, 20 years of war in Somalia had produced the Dadaab refugee camp, three permanent settlements with a total population of 400,000 Somalis who were unable to work, vote, own property or ever really belong.

Kenya’s marginalization of its Muslims was nowhere more visible than in Nairobi’s Somali neighbourhood, Eastleigh, where at least two of the Westgate attackers lived. Home to 500,000 people, Eastleigh was the wholesale capital of East Africa, attracting buyers of clothes, electronics, plastics and food from as far away as Rwanda and Congo and accounting for around a third of Nairobi’s $9 billion-a-year economy. Much of the place was also a giant money-laundering machine. A couple of years before the attacks, I’d been wandering around Eastleigh with my Somali journalist friend Mo when I wondered out loud how much pirate cash was floating around. ‘See that hotel over there?’ Mo asked, pointing to a new-looking six-storey pile of purple and gold. ‘We call that the “pirate money hotel”.’

For all the money–licit and illicit–that Eastleigh brought into Kenya, the authorities had not returned the favour. The dirt-packed roads, open sewers and lack of state hospitals or schools gave Eastleigh a resemblance to parts of Mogadishu. And in the last few years, the mood in Eastleigh had soured. In October 2011, a small Kenyan army force had invaded southern Somalia, claiming it was acting out of frustration at Somali gangs who crossed the border and killed a British tourist and abducted a French one, who also later died. Al-Shabab sympathizers in Nairobi retaliated with home-made grenade attacks on bus queues and crowded markets, which killed around 100 people. Kenya’s security services struck back in turn. In and around Mombasa they assassinated a dozen radical Muslim clerics. The Kenyan police harassed, beat, robbed and detained Somalis, at one stage rounding up more than 3,000 in a football stadium and holding them for weeks while claiming to be checking their identities. In Nairobi, MPs in the Kenyan parliament called for the mass deportation of all Somalis. In the streets ordinary Kenyans threw stones at Somalis. Slowly but inexorably, Somalia’s war was moving south to Kenya.

A year before the Westgate attack, I got talking to Adan Mohammed Hussein as he sipped a counterfeit Coke in an Eastleigh café. An unemployed international relations graduate, Adan said the experience of living in Eastleigh could easily persuade a young man to join al-Shabab. ‘The police harass us and make us feel like second-class citizens just because of the way we look and dress,’ he said. They stopped ethnic Somalis from going to school, arrested them even if they had identity papers and demanded bribes to set them free. ‘If there is any problem, they just figure, “It is Eastleigh. Let’s get Eastleigh.”

‘So, sure there is anger. And when people feel excluded, when they feel furious and neglected and marginalized, people associate with extremists.’ Imagine finishing school or university to find ‘there are no jobs for you’, said Adan. ‘People feel they have no option but to go against the law. They become capable of anything. Maybe they even flee out of the country. Maybe they even join some group.’

Adan’s words echoed those of John Githongo. John was a veteran anti-corruption activist who in 2006 fled from Kenya to London in fear of his life. His story had been the subject of a book on African corruption, Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat. And here he was back in Kenya, holding court in a city-centre coffee shop like a Big Man, dressed in a huge, expensive-looking white babban riga with four phones in front of him on the table. ‘Africa is full of contradictions,’ laughed John when I remarked on his appearance.

I laughed too. After a while I asked whether he thought that–contradiction, complexity–wasn’t the real story of the new Africa? Africa wasn’t dirt-poor any more. But to see the place as on a smooth path to prosperity was simplistic.

John agreed it was going to be a bumpy ride. Kenya had a growing economy, better health care, even a new IT industry. The number of Kenyan kids in primary school had doubled in the three years to 2006. ‘But if you tell the average African that his economy is growing, he’ll ask you: “Growing for who?”’

Inequality, not flat-out poverty, was now the biggest challenge in Africa, said John. And that would see ‘some nations disappear under the wheels of a bus. Some countries will suffer tremendous convulsions. Some will sink. We will see an increase in coups. There’s truth to the optimism about Africa. But if you do not share the benefits, there is a price to be paid–and it’s paid in blood.’

John said the new inequality would play out along Africa’s existing divisions: tribe, race, religion. One group worried him in particular. ‘Look at the Muslims,’ he said. ‘We’ve lost them. They’re really marginalized and they’re really pissed off. That’s a bomb. It’s going to explode.’

Westgate was that explosion. And after the attacks, whatever ways I once had of reaching al-Shabab fell away. I called Amin. The security services were right that he sometimes talked to the group. If I couldn’t hear from al-Shabab directly, Amin might pass on what they were saying.

Amin lived just behind Westgate and had followed the battle by listening to the sound of gunfire coming through his window. The tenacity and discipline of the attackers disturbed him. Initially, Amin thought the attackers must belong to another group. ‘I know al-Shabab,’ he said. ‘Most of these fellows are kids. They’re goofers. I don’t see them having the capacity to pull something like this off.’

As the Westgate siege went on, however, it dawned on Amin that the kids he once knew had become men. They’d had training. ‘And look at the target,’ he said. ‘An Israeli property full of luxury and foreigners. It says they have changed their ways. Before, they used to target bus queues with little bombs. It was small and indiscriminate. Now they’re saying: “We are going after the real owners of the economy.”’

This new professionalism terrified Amin. ‘They did this thing of separating out the Muslims by their dress and by asking them to recite parts of the Qur’an,’ he said. The night of the attack, Amin received a call from a friend who had been inside the mall. ‘She said she saw two of the gunmen. Both were speaking English with American-Somali accents. She said they were very controlled. They said to my friend: “You are a Muslim, you can go.” The next lady was a Muslim but not in Muslim gear at all. The guy was very mad. “You are a Muslim! And you are dressed like this! It can’t be true!” And he shot her. Blam! Blam! Blam!’

Just as worrying was the group’s new class-consciousness. ‘This is a progression,’ said Amin. ‘The inequality we have here is coming into play. All the previous targets have been in poor districts and that stirred animosity against them. Now they’re trying to tap into people’s feelings of being marginalized. And it’s almost working. People don’t support it, but what they do say is: “These guys deserve it. They are our oppressors. At least they got the right guys. At least they got the big Babas. Why should we care?”’

Amin reckoned that by aligning itself with the underdog, al-Shabab was finally implementing a strategy that had been long in gestation. Even four years earlier, he said, al-Shabab members had told him they wanted to remake their image into a humane anti-capitalist group. ‘They wanted to be seen as more caring than they were depicted. They wanted to show they were in tune with the suffering of the masses. They identified with injustices and leftist causes around the world. They wanted to make Islam the identity of the dispossessed.’

After false starts in Mali and Nigeria, and two years after his death, bin Laden’s last teachings were finally being put into practice.

Inevitably, Mo knew a leader of this remade al-Qaeda. Two weeks after Westgate, a group of US Navy Seals, coming ashore in rubber speedboats, stormed the town of Barawe in southern Somalia. As usual, the Pentagon revealed almost nothing about the raid beyond stating that it was intended to capture Abdikadir Mohamed Abdikadir, also known as ‘Ikrima’, a Kenyan of Somali origin said to be an associate of the 1998 bombers and ‘a top commander in the terrorist group al-Shabab’.

Mo called from Nairobi. ‘I used to play football with this guy Ikrima,’ he said. ‘He’s older than me by about seven years. He grew up here and in Norway. He loved pets, especially pigeons. He loved children. He’s really short, kind of skinny and smiley. I could wrestle him down and beat him.’ Mo was talking fast. ‘My head is still banging, man,’ he said. ‘He’s such a humble, harmless person.’

Mo went over what he remembered about Ikrima. ‘About a year ago all of my friends who he had visited in Norway and London and Nairobi were pulled in by the cops,’ he said. ‘That means a year ago this guy was on the radar. So the plan to capture this guy is something that they have been planning for a while now.’ Mo reasoned that must mean Ikrima was indeed, as the Pentagon said, ‘a top commander’ in al-Shabab. Asking around Eastleigh, Mo said he heard Ikrima was the liaison between al-Shabab and other al-Qaeda groups, including the central leadership in South Asia. ‘He’s very well educated, from this middle-class family in Kenya,’ said Mo. ‘He can speak English, Swahili, French and Arabic.’

The Seal unit deployed to seize Ikrima had been Team Six, the same team that killed bin Laden. The Pentagon tried to put a brave face on the Somali operation, saying ‘it demonstrated that the United States can put direct pressure on al-Shabab leadership at any time of our choosing’.

That was not how al-Shabab saw it. Dug in at Barawe with surveillance in all directions, they had seen the Seals coming and waited until they were in range before pouring fire down on the Americans. ‘The Americans were lucky to get out alive,’ said Mo.

After all the years of doubt and introspection, then the blow of bin Laden’s death, Mo said the failure of bin Laden’s killers had renewed the jihadis’ faith in their cause. Maybe Allah was smiling on them once more. Maybe they were back on the path of miracles. ‘They’re saying, “We beat Team Six!”’ said Mo. ‘“We beat the best in the world!”’