by Ronan Farrow
The “problem” was that, by the time the African nations began their effort to protect the transitional government from the warlords, the United States had already bet on the other side. The CIA and the Pentagon were fixated on the singular goal of destroying the Islamist threat, perceived or actual. Broader diplomatic initiatives in the region were a fly in the ointment, or, worse, a potential source of opposition to the factions with which the United States was working. Nominally, the American policy—articulated by State Department officials like Frazer—was noncommittal. But behind closed doors, the United States began waging a diplomatic battle to sabotage the deployment of peacekeepers.
In early 2005, the international peacekeeping force was, after months of intense negotiation, essentially ready to go. The United States quietly pushed back—often through State Department officials, but enforcing policy that was, at its root, designed by the intelligence community. In February 2005, diplomat Marc Meznar, who represented the Population Refugees and Migration bureau at the American embassy in Brussels, met with an EU official, Mark Boucey, to make it clear that the United States would oppose the peacekeeping effort. At the time, an EU team was in Nairobi conducting fact-finding in support of the initiative, and was scheduled to travel to Mogadishu to help advance the international force several days later. Shortly after the meeting with Boucey, the EU team canceled the Mogadishu trip. The Pentagon worked its relationships as well: US deputy assistant secretary of defense for Africa Theresa Whelan met with an EU official named Matthew Reece, who subsequently declared the peacekeeping initiative the EU had once backed a “wildcat plan.” Several weeks later, when officials from individual EU allies began to offer their support for the peacekeepers, Tom Countryman—at the time the minister-counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Rome—was dispatched to meet with Italian officials to try to ward them off.
In the end, when international support for the operation had largely coalesced, all that remained was for an arms embargo on Somalia, imposed in 1992, to be lifted to allow the peacekeeping force to train soldiers. At the eleventh hour, the United States threw a wrench in the proceedings, sending a terse statement to the Council of Ministers from the regional players about to commit forces. “We do not plan to fund the deployment of IGAD troops in Somalia and are not prepared to support a UN Security Council mandate for IGAD deployment,” it read. Later, the United States publicly threatened to veto any initiative to bring peacekeepers to Somalia. The effort, finally, foundered.
Colonel Rick Orth, the US defense attaché at the time, explained the US opposition plainly: “We didn’t want to divert into this tertiary sideshow.” Since at least a few of the ICU leaders had historic ties to al-Qaeda, “the agency was running ops to go after selected individuals . . . it was not an effort to have a broader solution, we were just going after more pointed targets.”
Tekeda Alemu, the Ethiopian diplomat, said US opposition to the plan was palpable from the beginning. “It was very clear,” he recalled. “They didn’t even want to look at whether the plan we had would work or not, was good or not. It was not given an opportunity.” An aide placed a porcelain cup of Ethiopian black coffee in front of him. He picked it up, frowned, and then put it down, reflecting on the failed diplomatic effort. “Apparently they had some plan,” he said of the Americans, “to capture a few people in Mogadishu [using] warlords who had cooperated with them. Therefore, they didn’t want anybody to spoil that. . . . They had the project that they embraced, and didn’t want to be adversely affected in any way.” He picked up his coffee again. “And that’s how superpowers behave.” Alemu took a sip and smiled.
US officials argued that there were legitimate reasons for their opposition. Lack of capacity among the African troop contributors was mentioned, as was cost. Above all, they argued that sending in so-called “frontline states”—direct neighbors to Somalia, such as Ethiopia—would enflame regional tensions. It was a canard: the plan already required that troops come from non-neighboring countries. But the Americans argued that even indirect support from the Ethiopians would be viewed within Somalia as a power grab from larger, stronger countries, and worsen the violence. It was a position that would soon after prove hauntingly hypocritical.
WITH NO PEACEKEEPING FORCE in place to oppose the warlords, only the Islamic Courts Union served as a counterbalance. Predictably, the courts grew more popular and powerful, taking control of territories across Somalia between 2004 and 2006. Finally, after several months of brutal fighting, they wrested control of Mogadishu from the US-backed militias. “People started—the Mogadishu people—admiring this Islamic Court,” explained Tekeda. “They were able to defeat a group of people, those warlords, who had been supported by a big power. And the Islamic Court began to be lionized. That’s how they became very inflated, totally uncontrollable.”
Shortly after the defeat of the CIA-allied warlords, the Pentagon began devising another plan to force out the ICU. Still allergic to direct intervention, the Americans turned to their long-standing ally—and Somalia’s regional rival—Ethiopia. The United States was Ethiopia’s largest donor. Thanks largely to American support, the country’s military was the most powerful in the region.
US statements over the course of 2006 were careful to maintain distance from Ethiopia and its role leading what was increasingly perceived to be an American proxy war. “It’s not like we had big NSC meetings saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we get the Ethiopian—’ No, we didn’t. The Ethiopians did this,” General Hayden, the CIA director at the time, offered haltingly when I asked about the United States’ role in the invasion. He shrugged. “They had their reasons for doing it.” But even he conceded the move fit neatly with American objectives. “Given the chaos that was Somalia at the time,” he said, “this was certainly a near-term palliative that was very welcome.”
Many disputed the idea that the Ethiopian invasion simply fell into the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s laps. Simiyu Werunga, a former Kenyan military official and counterterrorism expert, said that “the dismantling of the Islamic Union would not have taken place without the support and resources of the American government. That is the general feeling in the region.” Supporting that narrative was a backdrop of covert collaboration between the two nations: after 9/11, the CIA and the FBI had interrogated alleged terrorist suspects from nineteen countries in secret Ethiopian prisons notorious for the abuse, torture, and unexplained deaths of inmates.
Evidence of the American role in the operation mounted over the course of 2006. The US began publicly emphasizing the ICU’s human rights abuses and defending the idea of an Ethiopian intervention. Classified State Department memoranda from the period suggest a decision to back the invasion had already been made, with one noting that the US intended to “rally with Ethiopia if the ‘Jihadist[s]’ took over.” It further clarified: “Any Ethiopian action in Somalia would have Washington’s blessing.”
When Ethiopia did strike in December 2006, pouring thousands of troops into Somalia, it had more than an American blessing. US Special Forces covertly accompanied the Ethiopian troops, serving as advisers and trainers. The US Navy amassed on the coast to offer additional support, and American air strikes complemented those from Ethiopia’s own aircraft. “The US position is, ‘Find out from the Ethiopians what they want, and we’ll provide,’ ” one senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the operation, said. “A lot of it was intelligence and special operation support. . . . I was told that they were in more than an advisory capacity and they essentially teamed up with Ethiopian special forces.”
The operation, in tactical terms, was a success. The combined might of Ethiopian troops and American support left the ICU splintered and in flight from Mogadishu by the new year. At a January 2007 dinner, Abu Dhabi crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan offered a casual compliment to US Central Command boss General John Abizaid: “The Somalia job was fantastic.”
BUT, WHILE THE INV
ASION successfully leveled the ICU’s formal structure, it also managed to give the Islamists a new lease on life. Protests against the newly installed Ethiopian forces began almost immediately. The invasion fit easily within the long-standing history of Somali animosity toward Ethiopia—a sentiment extremist elements moved to exploit. “The invasion legitimized the cause of al-Shabaab and won them a network of support both inside Somalia and outside in the diaspora, because they were able to claim a legitimate jihad” against the occupying forces, Bryden explained. Even Frazer conceded that “from a propaganda perspective, the invasion was quite helpful [to al-Shabaab], sure.”
Further playing into al-Shabaab’s hand, the Ethiopian invasion had caused much of the moderate majority leadership of the ICU to flee Somalia. Those left behind tended to be hard-liners willing to stay and fight, including al-Shabaab leadership. Over the year following the invasion, al-Shabaab transformed from a fringe element with limited influence to a tactically relevant outfit with ambitions beyond Somalia’s borders—a group that would recruit around the world, with a bloody message that would reach a troubled, angry young man in a suburb of London and resonate with a brokenness in him that his family would never understand.
Al-Shabaab was also deft at exploiting anti-American sentiment, claiming in one statement that “Jews” in the United States had sent Ethiopia to “defile” Somalia. Al-Qaeda, recognizing the strength of that narrative, fortified its support for the Somali extremist group. Recruitment rates soared. The period following the invasion from 2007 to 2009 was “al-Shabaab’s period of greatest growth,” Bryden recalled, “because they were an insurgency.”
In 2008, the United States designated al-Shabaab a terrorist organization. A few years later, the group announced a formal affiliation with al-Qaeda, completing its shift in focus from Somali politics to global jihad.
IRONICALLY, TO EXTRICATE SOMALIA from the pincers of al-Shabaab, the United States was forced to turn to what looked very much like the peacekeeping solution it had shunned in 2004. Starting in 2007, an international force—the African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM—emerged as the sole potential antidote to the chaos. As the peacekeeping operation grew more robust, it “created the space . . . for the Ethiopians to have a less visible role,” recalled Frazer, and eventually “to say that they were leaving, which then denied Shabaab that anti-occupation propaganda to the degree that it mattered.”
The United States threw its support behind the new force over the ensuing years. In February 2012, it dispatched Marines to Uganda to train AMISOM combat engineers, now kitted out with American equipment from mine detectors to flak jackets. That effort was augmented by training from private contractors on America’s payroll. After so many years of resistance to the idea, the United States embraced a multinational peacekeeping force born of regional diplomacy, bringing the first signs of stability in years. The number of children killed or maimed in the fight between al-Shabaab and government forces declined. Elections resumed.
Yet, as in Afghanistan, the scars of American misadventure remained and the warlords proved entrenched. Some, like White Eyes, went on to occupy high-ranking government ministry posts. And even the best-placed efforts to support the international peacekeepers at times backfired: According to a United Nations report, at one point up to half of the US-supplied weapons delivered to the African Union in Somalia ended up in al-Shabaab’s hands.
The threat of al-Shabaab proved hard to roll back. In some ways, it was weakened and quelled. But Bryden, the former United Nations monitor, said the group had changed more than diminished. In response to its dwindling territory in Somalia, al-Shabaab was “abandoning guerilla tactics and returning to [its] roots as a largely clandestine terrorist organization,” focused on assassinations and IED attacks. “Its capabilities and tactics have become more sophisticated,” he explained. In the decade after I saw the exiled Islamic Courts leaders, sipping tea and plotting their next steps in Asmara, al-Shabaab added to its fatality list with each passing year. In September 2017, an attack on a Somali military base near the port town of Kismayo left more than twenty Somali military personnel dead. The United States remained in steady conflict with a group partly of its own making, launching a fresh spate of air strikes in the last months of that year.
Opinions vary on al-Shabaab’s international reach. Anders Folk, a former FBI agent who served on a taskforce focused on the group, called the prospect of a successful attack in the United States “possible.” He added: “Do they have the aspiration to conduct violent terrorist attacks against innocents in the United States? Their rhetoric tells us absolutely.”
FOR SOME, THE GROUP’S INTERNATIONAL REACH had been clear for years. On the evening of June 14, 2015, Sally Evans was alone in her living room when she got the worst phone call of her life. “It was twenty-five to ten on a Sunday night,” she remembered. “And it was a reporter, asking me about how I felt about the death of my son.” She told the reporter he wasn’t dead. “And I could hear he was backtracking,” she said. “Thinking ‘I’ve told her something she doesn’t know.’ ” An hour later, Micheal, her other son, got home. “I walked in the front door. And as I come in here my mom was sat at the living room table. And I could just tell something wasn’t right straightaway.” Micheal got on Twitter. At first, he thought to search for Thomas Evans. Then he typed in his new name, the name of a man they never felt they truly knew, Abdul Hakim. “And that’s the first thing to come up, was a picture from the Kenyan army. And it had all the bodies laid out in the street and laying in the dirt. And it was obvious it was him.” Obvious, but, for Sally, hard to reconcile with the man she had raised. “I was devastated to see my son lying on the ground like he was. And he was,” she paused, collecting herself, “he looked so skinny. Just didn’t look like my Thomas.”
A video, shot by Thomas and released shortly after his death by al-Shabaab as propaganda, showed the final moments of the suburban jihadi’s life. Earlier that month, under cover of darkness, he and his fellow terrorists had launched an attack on a military base in Northern Kenya. The video shows the quiet night shattering into explosions of gunfire and sparks, red and pink and blue. Evans, finally, is hit, the camera tumbling to the ground. “I have to admit, yes I have watched that,” Sally Evans said. “No mother should have to see that. That was awful. And it wasn’t— it was just hearing—hearing the final moments, as a mom, and there was nothing I could do.”
Thomas’s death was an emotional paradox for his family. “I hope God will forgive me,” Sally Evans said, “but I am relieved that Hakim is gone. ’Cause he can’t do that anymore. Can’t inflict pain on anybody anymore.” His pictures were still all over her home. She laughed, flipping through albums with Micheal, looking at childhood photos of two spindly, pale boys with toothy smiles. “They had him 99 percent, but there was that 1 percent that he was still my son,” she said. “I can’t let that go.” Even when he became Abdul Hakim, “He always said, ‘I love you, Mom.’ ”
When she finally had to catch the bus to work, Sally Evans walked me to the door and let me out onto the street in Wooburn Green. I thanked her for her time and expressed sympathy for her loss. With some effort, she smiled. “It never goes away,” she said, “does it?”
20
THE SHORTEST SPRING
THE SECURITY OFFICERS REVERSED HARD, pulling away as protesters gave chase, swarming their armored Humvee. In an explosion of dust and debris, the vehicle hit a barrier on the edge of Cairo’s 6th October Bridge, uprooting a light post and sending it over the edge to shatter on the concrete fifty feet below. The Humvee teetered and then plunged. It landed on its roof, hard. Blood stained the ground. The crowd below closed around the wreckage, throwing stones and shouting. It was August 14, 2013, and the bridge was filled with protesters against Egypt’s military regime. For them, that hole in the barrier was a symbol of hope: a punch, delivered to the military and its escalating crackdowns.
Teo Butturini, an Italian photographer, had woke
n early that morning to a call from another journalist, warning him that police were storming a massive protest at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square. Demonstrators there and at al-Nahda in Giza had taken to the streets after the military overthrow of the country’s democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi, six weeks earlier. The protests had gradually evolved into semi-permanent encampments, stoking ever more ire from the military regime. The resulting crackdown had been anticipated. The government would later emphasize that the protesters had been warned.
By the time Butturini and the group of thousands moving with him reached the bridge, police had surrounded the area. He heard the boom of the Humvee crashing to the ground, and saw the protesters surging. That’s when Egyptian security forces opened fire on the crowd. “The army start to shoot at us,” he recalled. “And people start to fall down close to me.” Butturini took cover behind a pylon under the bridge. It wasn’t until forces started hurling tear gas that he felt he had to run—making a dash toward the cover of nearby buildings. He didn’t make it far. “I heard five bullets passing close to me, and hitting me on the left side,” he remembered. Butturini struggled through the streets, bleeding, waving his hands at passing cars. Finally, one stopped and took him to a hospital.