Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  Al Shabab’s spokesperson, Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage, claimed credit for the strike and said it avenged the death of Nabhan. “We have got our revenge for our brother Nabhan,” Rage declared. “Two suicide car bombs targeting the AU base, praise Allah.” He added: “We knew the infidel government and AU troops planned to attack us after the holy month. This is a message to them.” Rage said that, in all, five al Shabab agents participated in the suicide mission. Soon after the attack, witnesses who saw the Land Cruisers being prepared for the suicide mission said they heard two of the bombers speaking English. “They spoke English and identified themselves as being from the United Nations,” said Dahir Mohamud Gelle, the Somali information minister. A Somali news site, known to be reliable, later reported that one of the attackers was a US citizen. While the US was celebrating the takedown of Nabhan, al Shabab had launched its own targeted killing campaign.

  ON DECEMBER 3, 2009, dozens of proud young Somalis poured into the Shamo Hotel in Mogadishu wearing blue-and-yellow graduation caps and gowns. In a city that desperately needed doctors, they would literally become lifelines. All of them were to receive their medical degrees that day from Benadir University, which was established in 2002 by a group of Somali doctors and academics. In a video of the ceremony, which was given to me in Mogadishu, the young graduates-to-be smiled as they posed for pictures, their friends and families looking on with pride. As the ceremony began and people took their seats, dignitaries settled into the front row. Among them were five Somali government ministers, including those from the departments of education, sports and health. Three of the five were diaspora Somalis, who had returned to try to help rebuild the Somali government. The higher education minister, Ibrahim Hassan Addou, was a US citizen, and the health minister, Qamar Aden Ali, was a British Somali woman. Cameramen lined the perimeter of the stage, as they would for a high-profile press conference. The graduation was to be a message to Somalia and the world: this is our bright future.

  Among those who filed into the meeting hall at the Shamo Hotel that day were several women wearing burkas or abayas—which cover much of the head and body. Former minister of health Osman Dufle welcomed the crowd and was beginning the proceedings when one of the burka-clad figures stood up, addressed the dignitaries in the front row and, in a distinctly male voice, said, “Peace.” Before anyone could react, the man under the burka blew himself up. The camera filming the proceedings went blank for a moment. When the video resumed, the smoke-filled room had become a grisly panorama. Severed limbs laid next to the bodies they were once connected to, and three of the government ministers were dead.

  “Suddenly, the hall shook and I heard a PAW! sound from the front of the ceremony, where most government officials and dignitaries were sitting. I got down on the ground and looked back. Dozens of people were on the ground under a huge cloud of smoke. Others were stampeding to the exit for safety,” recalled Somali journalist Abdinasir Mohamed, who was stepping out for a drink of water when the bomber struck. “I looked to my right and saw one of my colleagues dead and bleeding. I couldn’t help him. I saw the government officials’ chairs empty and bloody, and many people badly wounded. The ceremony hall became very dark, and seemed like a slaughterhouse” with “blood flowing on the ground.”

  In all, twenty-five people were killed that day: among them would-be doctors and their family members as well as journalists. A fourth government minister later died from his injuries. Some fifty-five others were wounded. What had been planned as a message of hope had been transformed into a “national disaster,” in the words of Somalia’s information minister. President Sheikh Sharif blamed the attack on al Qaeda and desperately pleaded for outside aid. “We beg the world to help defend us from these foreign fighters,” he implored. The bomber was later identified as a Danish citizen of Somali descent.

  As word of the massacre spread across the world, al Shabab denied it had carried out the attack. “We declare that al-Shabab did not mastermind that explosion,” said Sheikh Rage. “We believe it is a plot by the government itself. It is not in the nature of al-Shabab to target innocent people.” Although attacks against the US-backed, foreign forces from AMISOM may not have sparked outrage among ordinary Somalis—and were quite possibly quietly supported by a significant portion of the population in Mogadishu—blowing up a medical school graduation was indefensible. Perhaps al Shabab wanted to distance itself from the bombing for that reason, or maybe it was a unilateral al Qaeda operation carried out by a foreign operative. No matter who planned the attack, though, it struck fear into Somalis of all walks of life.

  IN EARLY DECEMBER, President Obama delivered a major address at West Point Military Academy in New York. Although the speech was focused on the coming surge of US troops in Afghanistan, the president hinted at the ongoing and broadening asymmetric wars his administration was waging behind the scenes. “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Obama declared. “It will be an enduring test of our free society, and our leadership in the world. And unlike the great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the 20th century, our effort will involve disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies.” He added: “We’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power. Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold—whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere—they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”

  A week after his West Point speech, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. His remarks would win praise from hawkish Republicans for his forceful defense of the projection of US power across the globe and for his assertion that the wars America was waging were “just wars.” “Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars,” Obama said. Obama praised the legendary nonviolent activists Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.—a previous recipient of the prize—in his speech before laying out why he disagreed with their pacifism.

  “As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King,” Obama said. “But as a head of state, sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

  Karl Rove, the former senior adviser to President Bush, called the speech “superb,” “tough” and “effective,” while a slew of neoconservatives also heaped praise on Obama. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, praised the fact that a “liberal president” went “to Oslo on behalf of a peace prize and reminds the committee that they would not be free, they wouldn’t be able to have a peace prize, without having force.” Noting the praise from hawkish Republicans for Obama’s speech, columnist Glenn Greenwald dubbed it “the most explicitly pro-war speech ever delivered by anyone while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.” When Obama returned from Oslo with his Peace Prize, his administration was about to initiate a new, covert US war and herald an era in US foreign policy that would put at its center the expansion of the US global assassination program.

  “If They Kill Innocent Children and Call Them al Qaeda, Then We Are All al Qaeda”

  WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN, 2009 —On December 16, 2009, top US national security officials were given a file of “baseball cards” containing the bios of three alleged AQAP members whom Admiral McRaven wanted taken out by JSOC in a proposed “series of targeted killin
gs” inside Yemen. Their code names were Objectives Akron, Toledo and Cleveland. JSOC wanted to move on the targets in less than twenty-four hours and needed an answer from the lawyers: yes or no. The officials who made up the killing committee had little time to review the intelligence. Both Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, and his counterpart at the Pentagon, Jeh Johnson, reportedly had just forty-five minutes from the time they received the files until the JSOC-led teleconference that would decide if the missions were a go. This meeting was larger than most targeting meetings, involving some seventy-five officials. The Obama administration was about to start bombing Yemen, and the national security establishment was mobilized.

  Admiral McRaven was beamed into the meeting via teleconference and, with the cold and direct tone he was famous for, laid out the military case for “kinetic action” against the “targets.” The main target, “Akron,” was Mohammed Saleh Mohammed Ali al Kazemi, whom the United States had identified as an AQAP deputy in Yemen’s Abyan Province. JSOC had been hunting Kazemi and McRaven’s men had “tracked him to a training camp near the village of al-Majalah.” Kazemi had evaded JSOC for months. Now, McRaven said, the US intelligence had a dead lock on his position. After ruling out a capture operation and weighing other military options, the team decided on a JSOC-led cruise missile attack on the camp.

  Johnson felt “heavy pressure exerted by the military to kill” and believed he had been “rushed and unprepared” to weigh all of the options. Still, he gave his thumbs up. A short time later, Johnson watched the satellite imagery of al Majalah from a command center in the Pentagon. Figures that appeared to be the size of ants moved around. And then with a massive flash they were vaporized. The feed Johnson watched was referred to internally at JSOC as “Kill TV.” Now Johnson knew why.

  On the morning of December 17, Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed’s BlackBerry started ringing. Tribesmen from his Aulaq tribe told him there had been a horrible incident in a tiny Bedouin village in Abyan Province called al Majalah. Early that morning, missiles had rained down on the modest dwellings of a dozen families that lived in the remote, barren, mountainous village. Dozens of people had been killed, the callers told bin Fareed, many of them women and children. Bin Fareed turned on Al Jazeera just as the news was breaking. The announcer read a press release from the Yemeni government, which said that Yemeni warplanes had conducted an attack against an al Qaeda training camp, dealing a devastating blow to the militants. Bin Fareed called his chief bodyguard and his driver and ordered them to get his SUV prepared for the half-day’s drive from Aden to al Majalah.

  BIN FAREED is one of the most powerful men in southern Yemen. His family’s lineage traces back to the sultans who once ruled the Arabian Peninsula. After British colonialists arrived in southern Yemen in 1839, the Aulaq tribe became one of their most prized tribal allies. From 1937 to 1963, the southern Yemeni city of Aden existed as a Crown colony, with remote areas governed through a series of treaties with tribes. Bin Fareed, whose father was a sultan, was educated in British schools and grew up as royalty. In 1960, he went to the United Kingdom for college and military schooling and then returned to Yemen, where he joined the army. In 1967, Marxists took control of southern Yemen and the British withdrew. Bin Fareed and his family fled Yemen, believing they would return in a few months. It would be nearly a quarter century.

  Eventually, bin Fareed came to terms with the fact that he would live in exile. He worked much of his young adult life building up businesses elsewhere in the Gulf, and he spent extensive time at his family’s estate in the south of England. As the years passed, he became a major transportation and construction contractor in the Gulf. By 1990, bin Fareed was an extremely wealthy man. That year President Saleh unified North and South Yemen and he called bin Fareed. Saleh needed the tribes to help him consolidate his control over the south of the country, so he cut a deal with the tribal sheikhs to return. In 1991, bin Fareed was back in Yemen.

  By the time al Qaeda began to formally organize an affiliate in Yemen in 2009, bin Fareed had once again become a powerful figure in the country. He was a member of parliament, leader of a huge tribe and was building a massive private resort right on the Gulf of Aden. He knew there were a handful of people who had ties to al Qaeda, including members of his own tribe, but he primarily saw them as tribesmen and was not particularly troubled by the jihadis, as Yemen was full of veterans of the mujahedeen war in Afghanistan and elsewhere. What’s more, those men were widely considered to be national heroes. Bin Fareed remembered when Fahd al Quso was arrested for his role in the Cole bombing. Quso’s job was to film the bombing, but he had overslept. When the government took Quso into custody as a conspirator in the plot, bin Fareed was called in to mediate, as Quso was a member of the Aulaq tribe. “That’s the first time I heard that any Awlaki belongs to al Qaeda,” he said. “And it was just limited to him, and I think, one or two others.”

  Now, nine years later, bin Fareed watched as news reports alleged that an al Qaeda stronghold was right in the middle of his tribal areas. The reports said “that our government attacked al Qaeda in al Majalah where al Qaeda has a base, and a field for training. And they have huge stores for all kinds of weapons and ammunition, and rockets, all this. And it was a successful attack,” bin Fareed recalled. “And they did not mention the Americans at all.” Bin Fareed found it impossible to believe that there was an al Qaeda base in al Majalah. Even if there were al Qaeda members there, he thought, the government could easily have sent in a ground force to root them out. The reports he was getting about air strikes made no sense to him. It was a remote area, but it wasn’t Tora Bora.

  As soon as bin Fareed arrived in al Majalah, he was horrified. “When we went there, we could not believe our eyes. I mean, if somebody had a weak heart, I think he would collapse. You see goats and sheep all over, you see the heads of those who were killed here and there. You see their bodies, you see children. I mean some of them, they were not hit immediately, but by the fire, they were burned,” he told me. Body parts were strewn around the village. “You could not tell if this meat belongs to animals or to human beings,” he remembered. They tried to gather what body parts they could to bury the dead. “Some of the meat we could not reach, even. It was eaten by the birds.” As bin Fareed surveyed the carnage, most of the victims he saw were women and children. “They were all children, old women, all kinds of sheep and goats and cows. Unbelievable.” He examined the site and found no evidence that there was anything even vaguely resembling a training camp. “Why did they do this? Why in the hell are they doing this?” he asked. “There are no [weapons] stores, there is no field for training. There is nobody, except a very poor tribe, one of the poorest tribes in the south.”

  I later met with several survivors of the attack, in Abyan, including a local tribal leader named Muqbal, spared because he had gone out to run errands in a nearby village. “People saw the smoke and felt the earth shake—they had never seen anything like it. Most of the dead were women, children and the elderly. Five pregnant women were killed,” he told me. After the missiles hit, “I ran to the area. I found scattered bodies and injured women and children.” A woman who survived the strike sobbed as she recalled for me what happened. “At 6:00 a.m. [my family members] were sleeping and I was making bread. When the missiles exploded, I lost consciousness. I didn’t know what had happened to my children, my daughter, my husband. Only I survived with this old man and my daughter. They died. They all died.” In all, more than forty people were killed at al Majalah, including fourteen women and twenty-one children.

  Muqbal, who adopted an orphaned child, was incredulous at the allegation that his village was an al Qaeda base. “If they kill innocent children and call them al Qaeda, then we are all al Qaeda,” he told me. “If children are terrorists, then we are all terrorists.”

  As bin Fareed examined the wreckage, he saw missile parts that appeared to be from Tomahawk cruise missiles. “Of course, our government does not have this kind
of rockets. I mean, any ordinary man could tell that this belongs to a big nation, a big government,” he told me. Then he found a missile part labeled: “Made in the United States.” Al Majalah was also littered with cluster bombs. A few days after the strike, three more people were killed when one exploded.

  Bin Fareed believed the Yemeni government was lying and that the Americans had bombed al Majalah and massacred dozens of innocent people. And he set out to prove it. As did a young Yemeni reporter.

  ABDULELAH HAIDER SHAYE was a rare kind of journalist in a country with a media dominated by regime sycophants. “We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of al Qaeda,” recalled his best friend, Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.” Shaye had no reverence for al Qaeda, but he did view the group’s ascent in Yemen as an important story, according to Sharaf. Shaye was able to get access to al Qaeda figures in part because of his relationship, through marriage, to the radical Islamic cleric Abdul Majeed al Zindani, the founder of Iman University and a US Treasury Department–designated terrorist.