by Ronan Farrow
19
WHITE BEAST
SOME OF THE BEARDS were henna red, some white or black, but all of the men had them. They sat in the late afternoon sun, in patterned headscarves and prayer caps, sipping tea. When I saw them, the men were huddled around metal coffee tables in a walled garden near the Embasoira Hotel in Asmara, Eritrea. It was the first days of 2008 and, in the midst of a Horn of Africa plunged into chaos, Asmara was a mirage of calm. Its wide boulevards were shaded by low palm trees and acacias and lined by immaculately preserved architectural jewels in a collision of styles—romanesque, deco, baroque, cubist—left behind from decades of Italian colonial rule. Even the name Asmara, meaning “they made them unite” in Tigrinya, was a beautiful deception for a city that was, at that moment, teeming with warring elements, cast out of the maelstrom of nearby Somalia. The men sipping tea at the Embasoira were among them. My interpreter leaned in and whispered conspiratorially: “There they are!”
“Who?” I asked.
He shook his head—a shake that said, so far as I could tell, that this meant trouble—and replied: “The men from the Islamic Courts.” In Somalia, the loose coalition of Shari‘a courts known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) had once served as the sole alternative to that country’s normal state of chaos: a roiling cauldron of warlords, crossing and double-crossing without end. The courts were retrograde but largely without violent ambition. Nevertheless, the United States, gripped with fear that Somalia might become the next Afghanistan, threw its weight behind a succession of local fighting forces with the intention of ousting the ICU. Not long after the decision to arm Dostum and his fellow commanders, the CIA set to work building a similar set of alliances with Somalia’s warlords. Later, when those alliances backfired spectacularly and galvanized support for the ICU, the Pentagon turned to the Ethiopian military, backing an invasion that scattered the leaders of the courts to cities like Asmara, leaving behind radical elements and hastening the rise of the terror group al-Shabaab. By that afternoon just over a year later, when I saw the exiled ICU officials outside of the Embasoira, that transformation was already under way. The Americans had taken a local nuisance and turned it into a terrifying new threat to international security.
In the Horn of Africa, as in Afghanistan, a struggle for control of American foreign policy was playing out in the formative years after 9/11. In both cases, military and intelligence solutions won out. In both cases, the United States actively sabotaged opportunities for diplomacy. And in both cases, the destabilizing effect was felt continents and cultures away.
IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE a place farther from Somalia than Wooburn Green, in Buckinghamshire, England, a working-class suburb of London. And it was difficult to imagine a person less likely to be affected by the chaos of the Horn of Africa than Sally Evans, whom I first saw in the narrow kitchenette of one of Wooburn Green’s low brick houses in 2016. Evans was fifty-eight, with graying hair cropped in a no-nonsense pageboy bob, and sensible shoes. She was pottering around, offering me a cup of instant coffee. “We’re just ordinary people,” she said, looking out at the hedge-lined street outside her window. “I never thought it would happen. No.” But Sally Evans carried with her a secret utterly alien to the rest of the mothers on her street in Wooburn Green.
Evans’s sons, Thomas and Micheal, grew up together. In home videos, they are interchangeable: carefree, skinny boys laughing and playing, with identical, tousled brown hair. “We kinda did everything together,” Micheal told me. “We had the same group of friends growin’ up.” Thomas was nineteen when that began to change. When he converted to Islam, Sally said, she took it as a positive, a sign that he was looking for more moral structure in his life. But that was before Thomas moved to a hard-line conservative mosque. After that, she recalled, “Little things began to change. Like his appearance, he grew the beard. Stopped listening to music. And he wouldn’t eat my food anymore. What I cooked wasn’t right for him anymore because it wasn’t halal meat. He just isolated himself from us.” Some of the developments had an air of absurdity. Thomas wouldn’t be in the living room as long as a Christmas tree was up during the holidays.
He began to spend more and more time behind closed doors, at his computer. “He was always upstairs in the bedroom,” Sally recalled. “I can’t believe he sat on there just, you know, browsing Facebook or whatever,” Micheal added. “He was on there specifically to look at—” he paused. “Look at things he was told to look at.”
Then Thomas began trying to leave the country. In February 2011, he was stopped by counterterrorism police at Heathrow, on the verge of flying to Kenya. A few months later, he successfully boarded a flight to Egypt. Initially, he told his mother he was traveling to study Arabic. But Evans disappeared for months, and, when he reemerged, calling Sally in January 2012, it was to say he was in Somalia. He had joined al-Shabaab. “He told us, didn’t he?” she said, turning to Micheal. “To go online and look at them. See who they were. And that’s when I realized what he’d become.” Sally pleaded with her son to come home. She told him that what he was doing “wasn’t right.” Thomas just kept invoking Allah. “I said, ‘No, no, no,’ ” she told me. “ ‘No god would guide you to this.’ ”
Over the ensuing year, mother and son fell into a strange rhythm. Thomas, who changed his name to Abdul Hakim and earned the nom de guerre “White Beast,” would call home every few weeks. The updates on the life of the White Beast—a persona in which she struggled to see the son she had raised—became increasingly alien. In one call, he told her he had married a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl who spoke no English. In others, he talked around the violence of his new life. Sally Evans chronicled some of the conversations in a series of journals. “Thomas rang,” she wrote in one in 2012. “I asked him if he’d hurt anybody, and he didn’t answer.”
A YEAR AFTER THOMAS LEFT HOME I stooped to the ground in a Nairobi alley and picked up an empty bullet shell. Behind me, the plaster façade of the Westgate shopping mall was still pockmarked from recent gunfire. I was there, with a television crew, reporting on a recent attack that gave an unambiguous answer to the question Sally Evans had posed: If her son was not hurting anyone, his fellow recruits certainly were.
A succession of survivors of al-Shabaab’s most elaborate attack yet, just weeks earlier, joined me in the bullet-strewn alley and shared memories that were still raw and painful. Preeyam Sehmi, an artist, had kissed her fiancée goodbye, run an errand, and met a friend for coffee at the upscale mall, not far from her home. She and the friend had bantered for an hour about Sehmi’s work as a local artist before she rose to pay their bill at around 12:30 p.m. She was waiting for change when a deafening blast rocked the building. She had no idea what was happening. “I just saw people flying off their chairs and over tables,” she recalled. Then “everyone was on the floor,” some crawling for safety, others now still and lifeless. She remembered the scene in slow motion, “like being in a movie.” Sehmi took shelter in a nearby clothing store, and waited, covering her ears for wave after wave of gunshots and screams.
Young men with machine guns, most in plain clothes, some wearing headscarves, were ripping through the mall, hurling grenades and shredding men, women, and children with bullets. Those who survived the initial attacks were taken hostage and subjected to grisly torture and mutilations. The attackers held the mall for three days against attempted interventions by Kenyan authorities. Sehmi was one of the lucky ones to escape, spirited away by police officers after six tense hours in hiding. By the conclusion of the raid, seventy-two people had been killed, sixty-one of them civilians.
Al-Shabaab quickly claimed responsibility, saying it was counteracting foreign meddling in Somalia. The group had successfully launched attacks outside of Somalia before, including bombings in Uganda in 2010 that left seventy-six dead. The mall shooting was a stark reminder of its international aspirations. The United States saw the shooting as “a direct threat,” and dispatched FBI agents to the scene of the wrecka
ge to search for clues.
Thomas Evans claimed, to his family, that he wasn’t directly involved in the mall attack. But he cheered it on from afar. This, he said, was the reason he had joined al-Shabaab. “Spoke to Thomas 14th Nov 2013, not a good phone call,” Sally Evans wrote in a diary entry shortly after the incident. “We rowed about that shopping mall siege in Kenya. Selfishly, I’m relieved he wasn’t involved but very angry with him because he thinks it’s okay to murder innocent men women and children out shopping.”
THE DESTRUCTION OF SALLY EVANS’S FAMILY, and the violence wrought by the group Thomas Evans and other young men around the world flocked to join in that period, were tied to a long cycle of US foreign policy. The parallels between America’s alliances in Afghanistan and Somalia, it turned out, reached back decades. For years, the Soviet Union and the Americans attempted to buy the loyalty of Somalia’s authoritarian strongman, Siad Barre, hoping to gain control of the strategically placed country. After Barre was overthrown, the country descended into pandemonium, livened by guns from the United States and other foreign backers, like Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and nearby Ethiopia. International attempts to protect humanitarian interests ended in grisly failure. For most Americans, the word “Somalia” evokes the phrase “Black Hawk Down,” the title of Mark Bowden’s book and the Hollywood film chronicling the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, which took the lives of several American servicemen. Western forces withdrew and left the country to rule by warlord.
Over the ensuing decade, only one alternative to the warlords emerged: the Shari‘a courts, which gained strength and became increasingly formalized in the early 2000s. Funded and armed by Ethiopia’s regional rival, Eritrea, the courts began to band together, and twelve united under a shared banner, as the ICU, in 2004.
In the wake of the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—and, more acutely, the 9/11 attacks—the ICU became a point of obsession for American leaders. But there was a problem: according to Africa experts fluent in the region’s complex dynamics, there was little basis for making Somalia a focal point in America’s newfound war on terror. “There was a feeling here after 9/11 that Somalia might become the next Afghanistan. That it would become a terrorist training ground, a new source of support for global terrorism,” Princeton Lyman, who held two ambassadorships in Africa and was President Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, told me. “Really, Somalia didn’t lend itself to that.” In 2002, analyst Ken Menkhaus, who served as a counterterrorism consultant at the State Department and the UN, estimated that fewer than a dozen Somali nationals had “significant links” to al-Qaeda. “There’s no need to be rushing into Somalia,” one retired American diplomat, David Shinn, agreed.
The ICU even appeared to have a stabilizing effect. The courts could be brutally conservative, amputating the limbs of thieves, stoning adulterers to death, and declaring sports illegal acts of Satanism. But they also evinced little extremist ambition beyond maintaining Islamic law within Somalia. Clerics with broader aspirations of jihad were a minority without much influence. Of the ninety-seven courts, just nine were under al-Shabaab control. Under ICU rule, ports and airports were opened for the first time in years. Even American diplomatic cables at the time acknowledged gains made in humanitarian access under court rule.
BUT THE UNITED STATES military and intelligence communities became bent on toppling the courts. Direct intervention was a political nonstarter, in the shadow of the Black Hawk incident. And so, another covert proxy war took form. By 2004, the CIA was quietly approaching warlords perceived to be secular and offering them alliances in exchange for counterterrorism cooperation. For the next two years, the agency financed clan leaders and warlords across Somalia. Run out of the CIA station in Nairobi, the operation was a small-scale proxy war. Pockets lined with US dollars, the warlords were expected to battle the ICU and suspected militants—regardless of whether or not they truly had ties to al-Qaeda. The operation broadened until “eventually there was a group of about a dozen militia leaders who came together with United States support,” recalled Matthew Bryden, who headed a United Nations group monitoring the flow of arms in the region. The US-backed warlords were even given a PR-friendly title: The Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, with an acronym unwieldy enough to make any government bureaucracy proud, ARPCT. The strategy was much the same as the agency’s embrace of Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan: These, ostensibly, were the better guys, if not the good guys. If they weren’t secular, at least they were more secular than the alternative.
To say the Somali warlords came with complications would be an understatement. Ironically, many of them had fought American forces in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993. Some, like Yusuf Mohammed Siad—known on the battlefield as “White Eyes,” or, for those who recalled his reign of terror capturing swaths of Somalia in the 1990s, “The Butcher”—were for years closely allied with al-Qaeda. When Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the notorious terrorist behind the 1998 bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, sought refuge from the CIA, it was White Eyes who gave him safe haven. After 9/11, he became a voluble source of anti-American sentiment. Nevertheless, he has claimed, in press interviews, that the CIA approached him during that very same period. “They offered me money, they offered me funding for the region I was controlling,” he said in 2011. At the time, he refused.
Other advances were successful, however. Mohamed Afrah Qanyare was approached in late 2002 by CIA agents seeking the benefits of his private airport near Mogadishu, and his 1,500-strong militia. American military and intelligence officials sealed the deal in 2003, kicking off a series of regular meetings and a pricey friendship—by Qanyare’s estimation, $100,000 to $150,000 a month, for the use of the airport and, ostensibly, the loyalty of his men. Qanyare was among several warlords who, either at the behest of CIA officials or with their tacit understanding, began undertaking capture-and-kill operations of supposed Islamic terrorists. Sometimes, the targets of the warlords’ operations were simply executed. Other times, they were rendered into US custody, as in the case of Suleiman Ahmed Hemed Salim, who was transferred from Somalia to a series of prisons in Afghanistan.
The CIA’s relationship with the warlords destabilized Somalia. Warlord rule had, by the mid-2000s, become deeply unpopular across the country. The capture-and-kill operations—often targeting imams and local prayer leaders without apparent links to international terrorist concerns—enflamed Islamist sentiment. “It’s a time bomb,” the mayor of Mogadishu said of American support for the warlords. “They are waiting, they want to weaken the government, and they are waiting any time that the government falls, so that each one will grab an area.” When a tenuous new transitional government for Somalia was installed in 2004 to try to counteract the warlords, its president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed “wondered aloud why the US would want to start an open war in Mogadishu” during a meeting with the American ambassador.
The warlord alliances, in the years after, became an albatross. Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the second George W. Bush administration, told me that the Department had inherited the policy from the CIA with little opportunity for input. “CIA action in Somalia in 2002 through 2005 was in a restricted channel and not subject to very much interagency discussion or debate,” she said. When the relationships finally did arise in conversations outside of the CIA, through Richard A. Clarke’s Counter-Terrorism Security Group at the White House, it was “very much a surprise to everyone in the interagency other than the agency.” Frazer felt that the CIA wanted to check the box of notifying America’s diplomats without actually doing so. “Just to be blunt with you,” she told me, “I think they raised it to that NSC group in a way that ensured no one knew what they were talking about. So they could claim we knew.”
Still, once Frazer and others in the diplomatic chain of command became aware of the alliances with the warlords, they began defending them. Diplomatic cables from 2006 describe a policy of using “non-tra
ditional liaison partners (e.g., militia leaders)” in Somalia to “locat[e] and nullif[y] high value targets.” Diplomats who pushed back on the use of the warlords were quashed quickly. Michael Zorick, a political officer at the US embassy in Nairobi, filed a dissent cable on the subject and was promptly reassigned to Chad, a move that was widely perceived as punishment for asking too many questions.
WHEN A DIPLOMATIC OPTION materialized, it was greeted as an inconvenience, something to be nipped in the bud. In 2004, Somalia’s neighbors came together in an intensive diplomatic effort to create an alternative to either the warlords or the courts. Somalia’s new transitional government presented a glimmer of hope. But it had little control beyond a few blocks of Mogadishu, and little ability to counteract the strongmen the US had empowered. And so, the members of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD)—a regional trade bloc that included Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda—met in October 2004 and issued a unanimous call for African troops to deploy to Somalia, to ensure that the fledgling government stayed intact. Two months later, representatives from the transitional government, UN, African Union, European Union, and Arab states met in Kenya to discuss a plan for the mission. By the early months of 2005, the AU was on board, with heads of state adopting a resolution welcoming a “peace support mission.” The UN Security Council formally backed it by the end of the year.
Tekeda Alemu, a veteran Ethiopian diplomat who was involved in the negotiations, felt that a regional peacekeeping force could have averted disaster. “I was the head of the Ethiopian delegation,” he told me. “And we accepted the proposal unanimously.” He noted with a raised eyebrow that even Ethiopia’s bitter regional rival, Eritrea, cooperated. (Ethiopia and Eritrea signing on to a shared peacekeeping initiative was like Israel and Hamas doing the same. It was an extraordinary development.) Alemu cut a distinguished profile, with short-cropped, graying hair, professorial spectacles, and just a hint of African new money bling: a chunky gold ring; an outsize watch with Swarovski crystals around the edge. When I spoke to him, he was sitting in his run-down office at the Ethiopian mission in midtown Manhattan, a world away from the Horn. We were on ample suede couches, the kind you’d get at a bargain furniture retailer like Raymour & Flanigan. A plastic ficus drooped behind him. “At that point, it was no problem with the US,” he told me with a sigh. “The problem would come later.”