Authors: Matthew M. Aid
Most of the U.S. intelligence community's attention in the region over the past three years has been focused on the activities of a radical Islamic organization in Somalia called Harakat al Shabaab al-Mujahideen (Mujahideen Youth Movement), usually referred to just as al Shabaab (the Youths), which the United States has long alleged has ties to al Qaeda. A number of American and European counterterrorism analysts interviewed over the past three years find it ironic that al Shabaab probably owes a debt of gratitude to the U.S. government and the CIA for its very existence.
Al Shabaab can trace its origins back to the port city of Kismayo, a longtime Muslim militant stronghold in southern Somalia, where in early 2006 a coalition of moderate and radical Somali militia groups, including al Shabaab, banded together under the banner of an umbrella organization styling itself as the Islamic Courts Union, led by an ambitious and politically astute Libyan-educated man named Sheikh Sharif Ahmed. Ahmed's forces drove northward and captured the Somali capital of Mogadishu in June 2006 from a coalition of local warlords calling themselves by the grandiose title of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, which had been quickly brought together by the CIA and the Ethiopian National Intelligence and Security Service with the help of suitcases filled with brand-new one-hundred-dollar bills.
The fall of Mogadishu set off alarm bells in Washington and the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Both governments agreed that it was intolerable that Somalia should once again become a haven for radical Muslim extremists and al Qaeda sympathizers, which was what the Islamic Courts Union was believed to be at the time. The CIA station in Addis Ababa was ordered to begin planning a massive covert operation designed to overthrow the Union of Islamic Courts regime in conjunction with Ethiopia's two intelligence services, the National Intelligence and Security Service (Beherawi Mereja na Deheninet Agelgelot), headed by a shadowy figure named Getachew Assefa, and the Military Intelligence Department, headed by Brigadier General Gebredela. Together, the agencies launched an ambitious covert action operation to provide funding, as well as intelligence and logistical support, to a number of Somali warlords who were opposed to the Islamic Courts Union. But the operation backfired, and by late 2006 the Somalia militant militias were on the verge of taking control of the entire country.
With substantial intelligence and logistical support from the CIA and the U.S. military, on December 8, 2006, 10,000 Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia. They captured Mogadishu three weeks later after the Islamic Courts Union fled to strongholds in the south. On January 8, 2007, just days after the fall of Mogadishu, the U.S. government arranged for Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the president of what was called the Somali Transitional Federal Government, to return to Mogadishu from exile in Nairobi. The Somali Transitional Government had been created in Nairobi in November 2004 with the CIA's financial backing and U.S. government political support, but it had little support inside Somalia among the four clans who had controlled the country since the collapse of the last Somali government in 1991. “Ahmed was doomed from the moment he set foot in Mogadishu,” a former State Department official said in a 2009 interview. “No one in Washington seemed to appreciate that he would instantly be seen by the [Somali] clans as the bagman for the Ethiopians.”
The Islamic Courts Union collapsed almost immediately after the invasion began. Before long, however, Washington recognized that the Ethiopian invasion was not having the desired effect. One of the most radical of the Islamic Courts' members, al Shabaab, did not disintegrate or disappear. Instead, al Shabaab announced that it was going to stand and fight from its strongholds in the southern part of the country. In a matter of months, thousands of militiamen from all of the major Somali clans joined forces with al Shabaab with the goal of evicting the hated Ethiopians from their country and destroying President Ahmed's transitional government, which now was widely viewed by the clans as a puppet of the U.S. and Ethiopian governments. This marked the beginning of a bloody two-year-long guerrilla war in which al Shabaab spearheaded the resistance to the Ethiopian occupation.
The Ethiopian invasion also stirred up a hornet's nest of anger within the Somali diaspora in Africa, the United States, and Western Europe, leading to an influx into Somalia of a wave of militant foreign fighters who are today the driving force behind the al Shabaab insurgency. According to a leaked 2009 State Department cable, “
Many of the foreign fighters currently operating in Somalia
, particularly those who entered to fight the Ethiopians from 2006â2008, are ethnic Somalis, recruited from either neighboring countries or diasporas overseas and motivated in the past by a sense of Somali nationalism, jihadist propaganda, and the presence of foreign troops in the country ⦠This includes North Americans, including at least 20 young men who were recruited from Minneapolis alone, and recruits from European countries with large Somali diasporas. Fighters have also come from within East Africa, most notably Kenya and Sudan.”
During 2007 and 2008, al Shabaab's militia forces racked up one military victory after another against the weak and poorly equipped forces of the Somali Transitional Government. By the end of 2008, almost all of central and southern Somalia was in their hands, including the vitally important city of Baidoa.
The CIA and U.S. military tried to help the Somali government by secretly going after the leadership
of al Shabaab, killing one of the group's senior commanders, Aden Hashi Ayrow, in an air strike on May 1, 2008.
The U.S. government hoped that Ayrow's death would somehow arrest al Shabaab's progress on the battlefield inside Somalia. Instead, Ayrow was immediately replaced by two veteran and even more militant al Shabaab commanders, Mukhtar Robow and Hassan al-Turki, who intensified their group's attacks on Ethiopian forces deployed in and around the capital of Mogadishu. By late 2008, the situation had deteriorated to the point that Ethiopian government concluded that its troops were rapidly losing control of the countryside outside of Mogadishu and ordered the withdrawal of all its troops from Somalia.
The last Ethiopian troops pulled out of Mogadishu on January 22, 2009, two days after President Obama was inaugurated, leaving only the capital and a tiny pocket of territory surrounding the city in the hands of the Somali Transitional Government, which was now headed by Sheik Sharif Ahmed, who had led the Islamic Courts Union that the CIA and the Ethiopian military had ousted from power two years earlier. With only a tiny number of clan militiamen supporting him, Sheikh Ahmed had to depend on a contingent of almost 2,500 peacekeeping troops from Uganda and Burundi for his personal survival and tenuous control over the capital and surrounding area.
Al Shabaab immediately took advantage of the departure of the Ethiopian forces to consolidate its control of southern and central Somalia and press forward toward Mogadishu, having declared the newly elected Somali government un-Islamic. By the summer of 2009, the Somali Transitional Government was on the verge of collapse.
The area around Mogadishu was under relentless attack by al Shabaab militia forces
, and the militants even made deep inroads into the few areas in the country that previously were government strongholds, as demonstrated by the June 18, 2009, suicide bombing in the pro-government town of Beledweyne that killed the Somali government's minister of national security, Omar Hashi.
U.S. intelligence analysts in Washington believe that a significant part of the reason for al Shabaab's success on the battlefield was thanks to the substantial supplies of weapons and money that it was getting from a number of Arab states who were determined to counter Ethiopia's influence in Somalia. At the top of the list of countries covertly supporting al Shabaab was tiny Eritrea, Ethiopia's Muslim neighbor to the north, which has secretly provided political and military support for the Somali militant organization for almost a decade. This has brought Eritrea into conflict with the U.S. government. In October 2008, Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer publicly labeled Eritrea a “state sponsor of terrorism,” leading to a near break in relations between the two countries.
Leaked State Department cables show that since 2006
, Kenyan-based operatives of the Eritrean intelligence service have been covertly providing al Shabaab with weapons, money, and other forms of logistical support to counter the presence of Ethiopian troops in Somalia. According to intelligence sources, the Eritrean intelligence service has continued to equip and fund al Shabaab even after Ethiopian troops left Somalia in early 2009, with Ethiopian intelligence officials alleging that the Eritrean support of al Shabaab is being directed by the chief of the Eritrean intelligence service, Abraha Kassa.
The State Department repeatedly warned the Eritrean military-led government in early 2009 that its covert support for al Shabaab was perilous and would have diplomatic repercussions if it continued; a leaked February 2009 State Department cable shows that the U.S. ambassador to Eritrea warned government officials that unless the support for al Shabaab ceased, it would “
hurt closer ties
” with the United States.
At about the same time that the State Department was trying to get the Eritrean government to cease its support of al Shabaab, the U.S. government secretly began flying millions of dollars' worth of weapons and other military equipment into Dire Dawa Airfield in southern Ethiopia bound for the Somali Transitional Government in Mogadishu. The Ethiopian National Intelligence and Security Service then shipped the weapons across the border to the Somali military. The rapid influx of weapons stopped the hemorrhaging, but it was only a temporary respite. While Sheilk Ahmed's transitional government continued to control Mogadishu, al Shabaab and its allies pretty much controlled the rest of the country except for northern Somalia, which had become essentially an independent country with its own government.
Thanks to the covert supplies of weapons and material received from the CIA and the Ethiopian and Kenyan intelligence services, the Somali Transitional Government was able to stabilize the situation on the ground during the fall of 2009 and begin the painful process of rebuilding its military forces. The CIA station in Nairobi, Kenya, quickly became the secret command center for the U.S. government's effort to bolster the Somali Transitional Government. The CIA and U.S. military secretly helped train and equip six thousand newly recruited troops for the transitional government, arranged shipments of much-needed ammunition and fuel for the Somali military forces, and arranged for a select group of Somali officers to be sent to Camp Hurso in Ethiopia to receive advanced training in weapons, tactics, and intelligence gathering.
None of this would have been possible but for the shield provided by some five thousand African peacekeeping troops from Uganda and Burundi who were stationed in Mogadishu protecting Sheikh Ahmed's Somali Transitional Government, although few people knew that the African peacekeepers were secretly being paid for by the U.S. government. The CIA's Nairobi station also coordinated intelligence and logistical support for the African peacekeepers in Mogadishu, including providing near-realtime intelligence in sanitized form about al Shabaab military activities derived from SIGINT intercepts and imagery from Predator unmanned drone flights flown from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.
By the spring of 2010, the secret retraining and resupply effort to aid the army of the Somali Transitional Government was complete. In March 2010, the Somali interim government announced its intention to launch a large-scale offensive against the al Shabaab militia forces, which were estimated at about five thousand men. Ugandan peacekeeping troops in Mogadishu knew something big was coming because they suddenly began hearing the near-constant buzz of American unmanned drones flying overhead reconnoitering al Shabaab military positions around the city. But the much-anticipated offensive never materialized, for reasons that remain unclear today.
Today, the security situation in Somalia has largely degenerated into a standoff. Sheikh Ahmed's Somali Transitional Government continues to hold Mogadishu and the surrounding area, but only because of the almost seven thousand African peacekeepers (up from five thousand troops just the year before) who protect him and the huge bribes paid out to rapacious local Somali warlords in return for their support in keeping al Shabaab at bay.
U.S. intelligence officials interviewed in 2010 admit that there is little that the United States can do directly to affect the trajectory of the war in Somalia. On September 14, 2009, attack helicopters flying from a U.S. Navy assault landing ship off the coast of Somalia blew up a car with Hellfire missiles carrying Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the leader of al Qaeda in East Africa, who was wanted by the U.S. government in connection with the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in Kenya. The decision was made in Washington to kill Nabhan as a matter of practical expediency. The
New York Times
quoted an American defense official as saying, “We may have been able to capture the guy but the decision was made to kill him.”
But Nabhan's death changed nothing. According to U.S. intelligence officials, the al Shabaab militants are still lurking just outside the Mogadishu city gates. Over the past two years al Shabaab has increased the size of its militia to over five thousand men who are better armed in most respects than the Somali government troops they face. It is actively recruiting more foreign militants over the Internet to come to Somalia and join their jihad. Al Shabaab also provides safe havens in the western part of the country for two Ethiopian terrorist organizations, the Oromo Liberation Front and the Ogaden National Liberation Front.
On July 11, 2010, the final day of the World Cup soccer tournament being held in South Africa, al Shabaab militants executed two simultaneous bombings in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, killing seventy-four men who were watching the final soccer match between Spain and the Netherlands on huge outdoor televisions. The Kampala bombings were the militia's first attack outside of Somalia, with an al Shabaab spokesman confirming that the bombings were in retaliation for the presence of several thousand Ugandan troops in Somalia who were protecting the transitional government in Mogadishu.