The Delta Solution

by Patrick Robinson

  And now, by all accounts, on the Horn of Africa, the snake bite of al-Qaeda was once more on the loose, almost certainly delivered by the twin-headed cobra formed by their alliance with al-Shabaab.

  The shock in Ethiopia’s main city was profound. The president himself was on the line to his Washington embassy, anxious to recruit US military help if he found himself in yet another holy war with the jihadists. By 9:00 a.m. Washington time, the Ethiopian ambassador had briefed his military attaché to contact the US secretary of defense.

  And now Simon Andre, the world-travelled, world-weary occupant of the big office on the third floor of the Pentagon, was staring at his first briefing of the day, a sketchy account of the atrocity in Addis Ababa. He read the communiqué with the swift mechanical grasp of a career diplomat, tossing back and forth the ramifications in his mind.

  He noted with concern the immediate reaction of the president of Ethiopia, which, in his experience, was a sure sign that something most unfortunate had broken out. Not just the blast and the deaths of so many people and the pure misery it had unleashed, but also the political background of the event, including the likely culprits. And right there was the word he currently dreaded above all others: Somalia.

  Andre knew all about the urgent formation of an anti-pirate attack force being masterminded in Coronado. And of course he understood the recent political history of the area, better than most as it happened. And he was especially aware of the plight of that benighted land beside the Indian Ocean.

  God knows, he thought, they have enough trouble without fucking al-Qaeda starting a brand new war. Andre had been there, he’d seen the mind-blowing situation of a place ravaged by decades of war and terrorism, which in turn had led to brutality, oppression, poverty, and malnutrition on an almost unprecedented scale.

  Over half a million people were living in makeshift camps. Hundreds of thousands more were living absolutely nowhere. Somalia represented the worst country on earth, with only a third of its population literate and 40 percent entirely reliant for survival on food provided by other charitable nations.

  And in the middle of this terrible place, the evil of al-Qaeda was rising again, bringing yet more strife to a nation that simply could not cope. Andre Simon knew full well the strength of Ethiopia’s armed forces—almost 300 main battle tanks, 400 armored infantry fighting vehicles, almost 100 fighter aircraft and helicopters, and 330,000 overall military personnel.

  Hapless Somalia, bankrupted by other wars, would surely buckle and fold under an Ethiopian attack. And then the cycle would begin again. The United States inevitably being called upon by the world community to persuade their allies in Addis Ababa to stop the fighting and then to step in and help deal with the aftermath of the carnage.

  Simon Andre could hear alarm bells everywhere: If that beady-eyed Ethiopian president decides that bomb in his city originated in some godforsaken al-Qaeda training camp in the mountains of western Somalia . . . well, all hell might break loose.

  The dichotomy of his ponderings was not lost on the most sophisticated member of the US government. On one side Andre was trying to cope with the arch-villains of Haradheere, the Beverly Hills of East Africa, and on the other, he may need to smash into yet more al-Qaeda training camps.

  “Jesus Christ,” said the US secretary of defense.

  MEANWHILE, FAR AWAY in the burning hills of western Somalia, only four miles from the Ethiopian frontier, the al-Shabaab training camp was indulging in a day of self-congratulation. The bomb in Addis Ababa was judged a huge success and would almost certainly make world headlines. According to their sources in the city, the blast had caused unremitting chaos, with its spectacular detonation and fairly high death toll on Churchill Avenue.

  The men of al-Qaeda had no regrets. And as permanent residents, their work reflected credit on the entire camp. The attack had been one part of their master plan, which would not cease until they had driven the infidel from the Middle East—not until there was a Muslim empire stretching west from the Horn of Africa all the way to the Atlantic coast.

  The policy was primitive: We must keep killing and smashing the cities of the unbelievers until the intruders from the Western world pack up and leave. And in the execution of our master plan, we will eliminate the illegal state of Israel.

  Ethiopia, with its Christian majority and long-standing ties to the US, Great Britain, and Italy, was merely an irritating neighbor that had to be brought into line. Neither al-Qaeda nor the warriors of al-Shabaab considered the possibility that the rulers of Ethiopia might unleash their very powerful military upon the terrorist camps in Somalia.

  There is a uniformity to these training camps, wherever al-Qaeda pitches its tent. The one north of Saddam Hussein’s home village of Tikrit was almost identical to the ones in the Hindu Bush. And they in turn were precisely the same as the ones in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and further south in the tribal areas of Waziristan.

  They consist of crude accommodation blocks, small unobtrusive buildings constructed of mud and rocks. There is invariably a shooting range and a much wider area to test explosives. There is usually a high wooden wall with primitive siege ladders for practice. There is always an obstacle course for training new recruits, but by Coronado standards of difficulty, these would be regarded as absurd.

  In fact, military training for “warriors” who really only attack long-range, mostly with missiles and bombs, is a fairly steady waste of time. But it keeps them fit, focused, and single-minded. The trouble with this al-Qaeda /al-Shabaab alliance in the high wastelands of Somalia was a dire, life-threatening shortage of money.

  And while the jihadists had made forays into the Somali pirate camps, demanding a share of the booty, they had not been very successful. The hard-eyed pirates risked their lives boarding ships and fighting for every last dollar of the ransoms, and they were not about to hand it over to the wild-eyed, bearded fanatics who came busting into their coastal villages asking for funds whenever they felt inclined. At least they were not about to do so without a fight. If necessary, to the death.

  But in recent months things had worsened for the men in the training camp. With no more cash being funnelled to them from the bin Laden family, hardly a token payment from the pirates, and arsenals of weapons that seemed to shrink by the day, the situation was on the south side of desperate.

  There was no longer a central command to which they could apply for cash. The hugely expensive war being waged against the slick, supremely well-provided forces of the Western world was draining every bank account al-Qaeda ever had.

  The blast in Addis Ababa had wiped them out of ammonium nitrate, their ammunition boxes were low, and very soon they would have to steal to eat. And all the while there were astonishing tales of wealth beyond understanding in the tiny coastal town of Haradheere, two hundred miles to the east.

  Sheikh Sharif el-Dahir, the forty-two-year-old Saudi-born commander-in-chief of the camp, called his fourth council of war in a week. He gathered around him his senior commanders. The camp, he declared, had become dysfunctional since they no longer had the wherewithal to mount another attack on anyone. To the north lay Ethiopia with its obdurate dislike of extremist Islam, and all around lay Somalia with its total disinclination to adopt the strict religious bonds of the Taliban, al-Shabaab, or al-Qaeda.

  Sheikh Sharif understood he had to lead his troops somewhere. He needed funds, military hardware, and a new place to settle. There was no earthly point in remaining out in the wastelands, going broke and doing nothing. He felt the call of his hero, Saladin, and he felt, as ever, the urgent summons of the jihad.

  With the entire camp of more than thirty warriors gathered around, he announced a plan that would lead them back to the promised land. They were moving out, heading east across the desert, through the scrubland and over gigantic sand dunes to the coast.

  There they would once more experience the joy of conquest. Because Sheikh Sharif planned to attack and conquer Haradheere with all of its wea
lth and military supplies. The pirates’ lair would quickly fall to the disciples of bin Laden, owing to the al-Qaeda army’s huge reputation for merciless killing and mind-blowing bravery. Of that he was certain.

  The sheikh, in his time, had established a personal reputation as a bloodthirsty warrior. He had taken part in both attacks against the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998—no one disputed that both raids had been planned and mounted in Somalia.

  But now al-Qaeda’s little army was on the move, and there was not really much to pack up since there was hardly any food, they were down to the last sticks of TNT, a couple of old Russian medium mortars, and each man’s personal Kalashnikov with ammunition belts. They were in possession of several very old SUVs, mostly stolen. And lashed to the roof of three of these vehicles were two of the twenty-foot high timber siege ladders, six altogether.

  Flush with the triumph in Addis Ababa, they set off on the long journey to Haradheere. Sheikh Sharif did what he could along the way to recruit more troops, making a succession of cell phone calls to various contacts in Mogadishu.

  All of them were very pleased to hear his plan. Every member of this ramshackle, fading brotherhood of quasi-religious militiamen looked forward to sharing in the fabled riches of the Somali pirates without having to do the actual fighting. But throughout the journey, Sheikh Sharif was able to find only a couple dozen young men prepared to go into battle on behalf of the jihadists.

  They rolled through the scrubland, pooling their financial resources whenever they found a gas station. After a twenty-eight-hour journey, they finally reached a sheltered point four miles north of Haradheere, and there they circled the wagons, forming a defensive wall of the ten SUVs and pitching their tents in the clearing between the vehicles.

  Sheikh Sharif dispatched two young braves in two SUVs to refill the water cans, either at an oasis or in the town where they might locate a communal pump or well. In the absence of that, they would have to buy from the village elders, a common practice in a land where fresh water is considerably more precious than roasted goat.

  The plan that night was to check out the northern approaches to the town, to try to reach the center without attracting any attention. Sharif needed to decide on a point of attack, and speed was crucial since they could not survive much longer without an infusion of money.

  Sheikh Sharif was anxious to find out precisely where the pirates’ millions were stored. And then he needed to assess the strength of the guard. He had no knowledge of the Somali Marines, their leaders, their commanders, or how well they were equipped.

  He was already disappointed in the size of his own force because there were, he knew, probably three hundred al-Qaeda operatives residing in Somalia, the majority of whom had infiltrated the country in the past five years. But thus far he would be fortunate to have fifty of them under his command.

  He had no doubt that the superior war-fighting ability of his troops would win the day against the African tribesmen. The forthcoming raid would enable him to make a handsome contribution to the global movement of al-Qaeda by funding their ambitious plans to mount operations against their enemies.

  He had everything to gain from this operation. Defeat, in the mind of the Saudi-born sheikh, was out of the question. But he had a problem the size of the Sahara Desert: The Haradheere Stock Exchange cash was stored in a fortress, the high-walled stronghold of Mohammed Salat. This was built along the lines of a small medieval castle—solid concrete with massive wooden gates leading out onto the central road to the “downtown” of tiny Haradheere.

  Salat’s house occupied the northwest corner and one hundred feet of the north wall. It was a 12,000-square-foot dwelling of unutterable luxury, with bomb-proof skylights throughout and windows on the south side only. The north wall ran for another 150 feet beyond the house and provided the back wall for the offices, operations center, and strong rooms for the cash. Set into the northeast corner was the armory, comprising ammunition and equipment stores.

  Salat had six armed guards on duty at all times in the interior courtyard, which also contained an accommodation block for Salat’s private army. There were high observation posts in the northeast and northwest corners equipped with mounted machine guns. Neither of them was ever unmanned.

  On the south side, left and right of the main gate, two more observation posts were set atop the six-hundred-foot long side walls. Each post had an area that was eighty feet long, built high, with room for a six-man fighting force, one facing west and one east.

  In addition to his personal fortress, Salat had on his payroll the local tribal warlord, who could produce a thirty-strong combat force on request within ten minutes. This cost the stock exchange boss $20,000 a month, which he considered a bargain. It worked out to $300 each for the bone-idle but aggressive tribesmen, with $10,000 for the chief, and a thousand for equipment.

  Salat kept this tribal army on permanent standby. He had no doubt it might one day prove extremely useful. Besides, it kept the bloodthirsty warlord Colonel Patrick Zeppi onside at all times.

  At this highly combustible East African redoubt, Sheikh Sharif intended to hurl his army. And in making his plans, guided by his desperation for success, he tended to ignore the military history and traditions of his own force, many of whom had come to Somalia to help in the 2006 wars against Ethiopia.

  They were accomplished in bomb-making techniques and in the kind of sneak-attack expertise necessary to deliver IEDs of all shapes and sizes, including the big one that just knocked down a stretch of Churchill Avenue in Addis Ababa. They were also skilled in the ideology of martyrdom and the spiritual rewards awaiting suicide bombers.

  They understood the strong international links between themselves and ambitious young Muslims in places like Great Britain who yearned to join the fight against the West.

  There were four or five members of Sheikh Sharif’s army who had mounted a very successful attack against the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombassa in November 2006, when a car bomb killed fifteen people. They had also been involved, minutes earlier, in the firing of two terrorist missiles at an Israeli-chartered aircraft as it was taking off from Mombassa Airport with 261 passengers on board.

  However, the guidance systems may have been faulty because both missiles had missed and then failed to detonate when they hit the ground. In the tried and tested Arab way, they had spent about a zillion hours endlessly reliving that day of mixed fortunes with their new leader, Sheikh Sharif, in Somalia.

  A more strategic military leader might have considered that their basic skills were in bombing, assassinating, and blowing up vehicles and buildings, staying as far away from their enemy as possible. They always relied on their more powerful, longer-range weapons, even in hot-firing battles against the Americans and, more often, against the undergunned British with their 5.56-caliber standard rounds.

  Al-Qaeda troops were simply not used to being close to their target. Formal warfare was not their game. And their leader was about to commit them to an attack on an occupied armed fortress. However stealthily they made their approach, and however stealthily they launched their attack against an unsuspecting enemy, they still had to take Mohammed Salat’s fortress by force of arms. And that might prove extremely challenging.

  Sheikh Sharif’s major decision was whether to attack by day or by night. But first he needed to insert men to conduct reconnaissance, critical to finding out where the treasure was kept. He knew of the existence of the mysterious Mohammed Salat, and he had heard of the Haradheere Stock Exchange. Everyone knew about the massive quantities of cash the pirates had stashed away.

  But the geography of the thriving little outback town was unknown to him. He needed his troops to see for themselves. That first afternoon he dispatched three of his commanders into Haradheere with orders to stay unobserved, separate, and watchful. He was certain that the pirates’ stronghold would be more than obvious.

  He was correct. The three al-Qaeda operatives walked the final
two miles into town, split up, and then located Salat’s garrison inside the first hour. From the outside it was a fairly formidable sight: high grey walls, cast concrete, with obvious guards in two positions on the roof.

  This did not faze the al-Qaeda killers. They merely assessed that it would be possible to climb the walls at night with the ladders and slit the throats of the guards. Then, somehow, they would open the gates. Their fifty-strong army would swarm in with their trusted Kalashnikovs, and the garrison would fall to them almost immediately.

  And, of course, there were the Russian mortar bombs. Maybe they would fire a barrage into the courtyard beyond the walls to create a massive diversion before the attack on the guard posts. They would certainly make a good report to their leader when they returned to their new base.

  However, they had grossly underestimated the sensitivity of the village of Haradheere, which, like most communities with far-reaching secrets to conceal, was ever-alert for intruders. The water boys had been most conspicuous, driving around the town until they located the central pump and then filling seven or eight standard gas cans for each of their two sandblasted SUVs.

  They had spoken to no one and then vanished into the semi-desert scrubland to the north of the main building. The three reconnaissance men had been more circumspect, operating far apart, and moving into the shadows to make notes while they assessed the strength of Mohammed Salat’s garrison.

  At no time did they raise a genuine suspicion among the tribesmen, except when one of them walked right around the building. On the west wall, he went past the home of Admiral Ismael Wolde, who was sipping a beer in the forecourt beneath the questionable shade of a banana tree.

  Wolde was alert, and he noted only that he had never seen the man in his life, which was a rare phenomenon in Haradheere, where there were no strangers. The pirate chief decided the guy could have been visiting anyone, and he watched the man disappear around the north corner. He thought no more about it until another ten minutes had passed, and the man showed up again, still examining the walls, and apparently on another circuit of the bastion where Salat kept the cash.