Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  A Somali journalist who was arrested in Mogadishu after filming a sensitive military operation told me that he was taken to the prison and held in a windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man’s nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali intelligence agents.

  Once in custody, according to the senior Somali intelligence official and former prisoners, some detainees were freely interrogated by US and French agents. “Our goal is to please our partners, so we get more [out] of them, like any relationship,” the Somali intelligence official told me. The Americans, he said, operated unilaterally in the country, but the French agents were embedded within AMISOM at its airport base. Indeed, in July 2011, I witnessed a French intelligence agent, with an AMISOM commander, monitoring the passengers disembarking a flight from Nairobi. Somali intelligence sources told me the French sometimes ask for passengers to be snatched from flights and questioned. According to Aynte, in some cases, “the US and other intelligence agencies have notified the Somali intelligence agency that some people, some suspects, people who have been in contact with the leadership of al Shabab, are on their way to Mogadishu on a [commercial] plane, and to essentially be at the airport for those people. Catch them, interrogate them.”

  The underground prison was housed in the same building once occupied by Somalia’s infamous National Security Service (NSS) during the military regime of Mohamed Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to 1991. A former prisoner told me he actually saw an old NSS sign outside. During Barre’s regime, the notorious basement prison and interrogation center, which sat behind the presidential palace in Mogadishu, was a staple of the state’s apparatus of repression. It was referred to as Godka, “The Hole.”

  “The bunker is there, and that’s where the intelligence agency does interrogate people,” said Aynte, who maintained contact with Somali intelligence officials. “When CIA and other intelligence agencies—who actually are in Mogadishu—want to interrogate those people, they usually just do that.” Somali officials “start the interrogation, but then foreign intelligence agencies eventually do their own interrogation as well, the Americans and the French.” The US official made available to me for comment said that American operatives’ “debriefing” of prisoners in the facility had “been done on only rare occasions” and always jointly with Somali agents.

  In a dramatic flourish that appeared to fulfill his campaign promise to close the CIA’s infamous “black sites” established under President Bush, Obama had signed Executive Order 13491 on January 22, 2009. The order required that “the CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.” To human rights groups, the use of the underground prison appeared a backdoor subversion of that order. After the publication of my report on the prison in the Nation and a subsequent, related article by Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times, a coalition of human rights groups wrote a letter to President Obama. The articles, they said, “further call into question whether the United States is in compliance with its obligations to respect, and ensure respect for, international human rights requirements relating to non-refoulement, arbitrary detention, and humane treatment.” Citing Obama’s signing of Executive Order 13491, they told the president, “You made clear your deep commitment to ensuring that counterterrorism operations are conducted with respect for human rights and the rule of law. We urge you to reaffirm that commitment by disclosing, to the fullest extent possible, the nature of U.S. involvement in overseas detention, interrogation, and transfer operations relating to the prison in Somalia, so that there can be meaningful public dialogue regarding the extent to which such operations comply with the law.”

  Despite the early rhetoric from President Obama and his surrogates about the need to balance liberty and security, two years into his administration it was clear that the White House had repeatedly chosen national security over civil liberties. And though some of the excesses of the Bush era were ended and others curbed, the kill/capture program was growing, not abating. Many serious questions still loomed over the targeted killing program: Was it actually making America safer? Would these operations result in less terrorism or more? Would the actions taken by the White House in the name of defeating terrorism—drone strikes, assassinations, renditions—actually aid groups like al Shabab, AQAP and the Taliban in recruiting new members and supporters?

  IN EARLY 2011, al Shabab was in firm control of a greater swath of Somalia than the Transitional Federal Government, even though the TFG was supported by thousands of US-trained, -armed and -funded African Union troops. In Mogadishu, despite increased US funding and weapons, AMISOM forces were largely confined to their bases. Instead of fighting a counterinsurgency, they opted for regular shelling of al Shabab–held neighborhoods teeming with civilians. JSOC was bumping off militant figures, but the civilian death toll of AMISOM’s shelling pushed some clan leaders to lend support to al Shabab. Meanwhile, the Somali government was viewed as weak, illegitimate or worse.

  “Ninety-nine percent of the government are corrupted, immoral, dishonest people, selected by the international community,” Mohammed Farah Siad, a Mogadishu businessman, told me when I visited him at his home near the port of Mogadishu during the summer of 2011. Siad, who had owned his business since 1967, complained of having to regularly pay bribes and of government officials stealing from him and other importers. “I think those people must be selected by being in the category of the worst. The more you are criminal, the more you are a drug abuser, the more you will be selected as member of the Somali parliament.” The government, he declared, existed “to cheat money.” Siad, who adamantly condemned al Shabab and al Qaeda, said that al Shabab was far better organized than the Somali government, and he believed that if the AMISOM troops pulled out, al Shabab would take power. “Immediately, in half an hour,” he exclaimed. “Less than a half an hour.” Somalis, he said, were faced with a choice between the government “thieves” and the al Shabab “criminals.” “We are like orphans,” he concluded.

  Al Shabab controlled what “amounted to be about half of Somalia, which is the size of Texas. So you could imagine the large amount of the country—including a portion of Mogadishu, the capital city,” Aynte estimated. It was abundantly clear that if the Somali government was incapable of building police and military forces that could stabilize even the capital, the influence of al Shabab would continue to grow. Each suicide bombing was evidence that the government was vulnerable and every mortar that crashed into civilian areas sent a message that the government—and the US-backed African Union force—was not on the side of the people.

  With most Somalis caught between a government they despised and Islamic militants they feared, the Obama administration unveiled what it referred to as a “dual-track” approach to Somalia. It would simultaneously deal with the “central government” in Mogadishu, as well as regional and clan players in Somalia. “The dual track policy only provides a new label for the old (and failed) Bush Administration’s approach,” observed Somalia analyst Afyare Abdi Elmi. “It inadvertently strengthens clan divisions, undermines inclusive and democratic trends and most importantly, creates a conducive environment for the return of the organized chaos or warlordism in the country.”

  The dual-track policy encouraged self-declared, clan-based regional administrations to seek recognition and support from the United States. “Local administrations are popping up every week,” said Aynte at the time. “Most of them don’t control anywhere, but people are announcing local governments in the hopes that [the] CIA will set up a little outpost in their small village.”

  By mid-2011, “In Washington, American officials said debates were under way about just how much the United States should rely on clandestine militia training and armed drone str
ikes to fight the Shabab,” according to the New York Times. “Over the past year, the American Embassy in Nairobi, according to one American official, has become a hive of military and intelligence operatives who are ‘chomping at the bit’ to escalate operations in Somalia.”

  While the United States ratcheted up both its rhetoric and its strikes against al Shabab, its tactical successes were largely in rural areas outside of Mogadishu. In the Somali capital, the CIA-trained and -funded counterterrorism force brought few tangible gains. “So far what we have not seen is the results,” the senior Somali intelligence official told me in the summer of 2011. He conceded that neither US nor Somali forces had been able to conduct a single successful targeted mission in al Shabab–controlled areas in the capital. In late 2010, according to the official, US-trained Somali agents conducted an operation in an al Shabab area that failed terribly and resulted in the death of several agents. “There was an attempt, but it was a haphazard one,” he recalled. On February 3, 2011, al Shabab broadcast the execution of an alleged CIA informant on its al Kataib television channel.

  While the CIA’s newest project in Somalia struggled to achieve any victories, the United States waged its campaign against al Shabab primarily by continuing to support the AMISOM forces, which were not conducting their mission with anything resembling surgical precision. AMISOM regularly put out press releases boasting of gains against al Shabab and the retaking of territory, but the reality was far more complicated.

  As I walked throughout the areas AMISOM had retaken in 2011, I saw a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by al Shabab fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels stretched continually for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by al Shabab snipers and guarded by sandbags—all that remained of guerrilla warfare positions. Not only had the al Shabab fighters been cleared from the aboveground areas, the civilians that once resided there were cleared, too. On several occasions when I was there, AMISOM forces fired artillery from their airport base at the Bakaara market, where whole neighborhoods had been totally abandoned. Houses lay in ruins and animals wandered, chewing trash. In some areas, bodies had been hastily buried in trenches with dirt barely masking the remains. On the side of the road in one former al Shabab neighborhood, a decapitated corpse lay just yards away from a new government checkpoint.

  In a series of interviews in Mogadishu, several of the country’s internationally recognized leaders, including President Sharif, called on the US government to quickly and dramatically increase its assistance to the Somali military in the form of training, equipment and weapons. Moreover, they argued that without viable civilian institutions, Somalia would remain vulnerable to terrorist groups that could further destabilize not only Somalia but the region. “I believe that the US should help the Somalis to establish a government that protects civilians and its people,” Sharif said. But the United States had little faith in Sharif and other government officials—and with good reason. “If the [Somali government] were doing anything but pocketing all the money that has been given to it, it would have a lot more resources than al Shabab,” said Ken Menkhaus, the Davidson College Somalia scholar. According to the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, weapons and ammunition given to the Somali government “and its affiliated militias” were increasingly surfacing on the black market and ultimately ending up in the hands of al Shabab. The United Nations estimated that “the Government and pro-Government forces sell between one third and one half of their ammunition” on the black market.

  In the battle against al Shabab, the United States did not cast its lot with the Somali government. The emerging US strategy on Somalia—borne out in stated policy, the expanded covert presence and funding plans—was two-pronged. On the one hand, the CIA was training, paying and at times directing Somali intelligence agents who were not firmly under the control of the Somali government, while JSOC conducted unilateral strikes without the prior knowledge of the government. On the other, the Pentagon increased its support for and arming of the counterterrorism operations of non-Somali African military forces.

  By 2011, one Somali who was exercising a lot of control over his territory was Indha Adde, the former Islamic Courts Union defense minister and erstwhile al Shabab ally. When I visited him in the summer of 2011, he had rebranded himself as General Yusuf Mohammed Siad and was decked out in a military uniform bearing three stars. He had become a high-ranking officer in the Somali military. While the United States and other Western powers conducted specialized training exercises and armed and equipped the Ugandan and Burundian militaries under the auspices of AMISOM, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the Somali government could barely pay its own soldiers. The Somali military was underfunded and underarmed, its soldiers poorly paid, highly undisciplined and, at the end of the day, more loyal to their clans than to the central government. That’s how the rent-a-militia program was born. And Indha Adde was a prime example of how it operated.

  While Washington went to great lengths to shield its support for Somali warlords and militias, it was a barely masked public secret in Mogadishu that its proxies from Ethiopia, Kenya and AMISOM were making deals with warlords similar to those brokered with the CIA’s Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism in the early 2000s.

  As the United States focused on its own unilateral kinetic ops, the Somali government and AMISOM turned to some unsavory characters in a dual effort: to independently build something vaguely resembling a national army and—much in the way the United States attempted with its Awakening Councils in the Sunni areas of Iraq in 2006—to purchase strategic loyalty from former allies of the current enemy. Indha Adde was given a military rank, despite never having served in an official army, while others were given government ministries in return for allocating their militia forces to the fight against al Shabab. Several were former allies of al Qaeda or al Shabab, and many had directly fought the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion or had rallied against the US-led mission in Somalia in the early 1990s that culminated in the Black Hawk Down incident. Other militias were little more than proxies for the Ethiopian or Kenyan governments, both of which are heavily backed by Washington. In 2011, Indha Adde had become sort of a hybrid of his former selves, an Islamic warlord who believed in Sharia law, taking money and weapons from AMISOM and cultivating friendly relations with the CIA.

  Large parts of Mogadishu were not accessible without Indha Adde’s permission, and he controlled one of the largest militias and possessed more technicals in the city than any other warlord. His mechanic, who built specially weaponized pickups for Indha Adde’s forces (and bore a striking resemblance to Mr. T), was said to be the best in Mogadishu. With a senior military rank and a flow of modern weapons, Indha Adde was more powerful—and, at least as far as he saw it, respectable—than ever. As I sat outside one of Indha Adde’s homes, waiting for his entourage to prepare to head out for the front lines, a white Toyota Corolla pulled into the drive. Within moments, box after box of fresh ammunition was being unloaded.

  Indha Adde took me to several front lines where his militia was fighting al Shabab. As we made our way to various positions, we were repeatedly fired on by al Shabab snipers. A few months earlier, Indha Adde’s personal bodyguard was shot in the head as he stood in front of his boss in a battle with al Shabab fighters. According to witnesses, Indha Adde slung the man’s body over his shoulder, carried him to a secured area, picked up an automatic weapon and then charged at his killers. “One night I fired 120 AK-47 rounds, four magazines and 250 machine gun bullets. I am the number one fighter on the front lines,” he told me as we walked through the bombed-out remains of a neighborhood his men had recently retaken from al Shabab. Unlike the forces from AMISOM, Indha Adde did not wear any body armor, and he regularly stopped to take calls on his hands-free mobile. “The role of general is two-way street. In a conventional, well-funded war, the generals lead from behind with orders,” he dec
lared. “But in a guerrilla war, as we are in, the general has to be at front line to boost the morale of his men.”

  As we walked alongside trenches on the outskirts of Bakaara market, once occupied by fighters from al Shabab, Indha Adde’s entourage stopped. In one of the trenches, the foot of a corpse poked out from a makeshift grave consisting of some sand dumped loosely over the body. One of Indha Adde’s militiamen said the body was that of a foreigner who fought alongside al Shabab. “We bury their dead, and we also capture them alive,” Indha Adde told me in his low, raspy voice. “We take care of them if they are Somali, but if we capture a foreigner, we execute them so that others will see we have no mercy.”

  I asked Indha Adde why he was now fighting on the side of the United States and against his former al Shabab allies, and he spat what sounded like memorized verses without skipping a beat: “Foreign international terrorists came into our country, started to kill our people. They killed some of our fathers, raped our women and looted our houses. It is my obligation to defend my people, my country and my religion. I have to either liberate my people or die in the course.” The militants from al Qaeda and al Shabab changed, he said, not him. “The terrorists are misinterpreting the religion,” he said. “If I would have known what I now know—that the guys I was protecting were terrorists—I would have handed them to the CIA without asking for any money.”

  ONE OF THE MORE POWERFUL FORCES that emerged in Somalia’s anti–al Shabab government-militia nexus was Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama (ASWJ), a Sufi Muslim paramilitary organization. Originally founded in the 1990s as a quasi-political organization dedicated to Sufi religious scholarship and community works—and avowedly nonmilitant—ASWJ viewed itself as a buffer against what it saw as the encroachment of Wahabism in Somalia. Its proclaimed mandate was to “preach a message of peace and delegitimize the beliefs and political platform” of “fundamentalist movements.” It ran madrassas and taught Koranic memorization. The sect’s prayer services, which featured a lot of group chanting, more closely resembled an evangelical Sunday service than conventional Friday prayers at mosques throughout the Muslim world.