Dirty Wars (89 page)

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 handsfree mobile. “The role of general is two-way street. In a conventional, well-funded war, the generals lead from behind with orders,” he declared. “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.

In 2008, al Shabab began targeting Ahlu Sunna leaders, carrying out
assassinations and desecrating the tombs
of ASWJ's elders. Al Shabab considered ASWJ to be a cult whose practices of celebrating the dead and speaking in tongues were heresy. After
much debate
within the ASWJ community, militias were formed to take up arms against al Shabab. At the beginning, its fighting force of undisciplined clan fighters and religious scholars left much to be desired. Then, quietly, Ethiopia started
arming and financing
ASWJ, as well as providing its forces with training and, eventually,
boots on the ground
. By early 2010, ASWJ was widely seen as an Ethiopian—and therefore US—proxy. In March 2010, after heated debate within its community, ASWJ signed a
formal cooperation agreement
with the Somali government.

One of the prime beneficiaries of ASWJ's new status as a paramilitary militia was Abdulkadir Moalin Noor, simply known as “the Khalifa,” or the successor. His father, a widely revered
holy man
, died in 2009 at the age of ninety-one and had designated Noor as the new spiritual leader of the movement. Noor was educated in London and managed his family's business investments outside of Somalia. When his father died, he left his life of safety and comfort to return to Mogadishu, where he was given the title of minister of state for the presidency. Noor, however, still enjoyed the luxuries of the West. He rolled around Mogadishu in an armored SUV with animal skins over the seats. He set up a wireless Internet network in an ASWJ camp outside of the capital that didn't have indoor plumbing and his Koran was housed in a shiny new iPad. He showed me an e-mail from Ethiopia's minister of foreign affairs on his recently acquired white iPhone.

Noor, who regularly met with Western officials and intelligence agents, declined to outline who exactly was funding ASWJ from the outside, but he did single out the United States as Somalia's “
number one
” ally. “I'm here to thank them, because they are helping us, fighting against the terrorists,” he told me. “What about on a military level?” I asked him. “I don't want to mention a lot of things,” he replied. “But, they are in deep, deep. They are working with our intelligence, they are giving them training. They are working with the military personnel. They have special trained forces fighting against al Shabab here. I don't want to disclose—but I know
they're doing a good job. They do have people here, fighting al Shabab. And by the help of Allah, we hope this mayhem will end soon.”

By mid-2011, the ASWJ militias had emerged as some of the most effective fighters battling al Shabab forces outside of Mogadishu, winning back territory in the
Mudug
region and several other pockets of the country. But, like most powerful paramilitary groups in Somalia, there was far more to the group than met the eye.

The UN Monitoring Group on Somalia declared that some ASWJ militias “
appear to be proxies
for neighboring States rather than emergent local authorities.” ASWJ also
received support
from Southern Ace, a private security firm. Technically registered in Hong Kong in 2007 and run by a white South African, Edgar Van Tonder, Southern Ace committed “egregious violations of the arms embargo” on Somalia, according to the United Nations, and “also began to explore prospects for arms trafficking and engaged in horticultural experiments aimed at the
production of narcotic drugs
, including marijuana, cocaine and opium.”

Between April 2009 and early 2011, according to the United Nations, “Southern Ace and its local associates recruited and operated a well-equipped, 220-strong militia...supervised by a dozen Zimbabweans and three Westerners, at an estimated cost of $1 million in salaries and at least $150,000 in arms and ammunition. The result was one of the strongest forces...with the potential to
change the balance of power
in the area.”

Southern Ace began acquiring arms from the weapons market in Somalia, including scores of Kalashnikovs, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and an antiaircraft ZU-23 machine gun with 2,000 rounds of ammunition. The company's arms purchases “were
so substantial
” that local officials “noted a significant rise in the price of ammunition and a shortage of ZU-23 rounds.” Some of the weapons were mounted on four-wheel drive vehicles and pickup trucks. The company also imported to Somalia “Philippine army-style uniforms and bullet-proof jackets in support of their operations,” according to the United Nations.

Backed by Ethiopia and Southern Ace, ASWJ conducted a series of major offensives against al Shabab that the United Nations alleged were supported through violations of the arms embargo. Although Ethiopia and the United States undoubtedly saw ASWJ as the best counterbalance to the rhetoric of al Shabab and al Qaeda, in just three years they transformed a previously nonviolent entity into one of the most powerful armed groups in Somalia. “To a certain extent, the resort to Somali proxy forces by foreign Governments represents a potential
return to the ‘warlordism
' of the 1990s and early 2000s,” a UN report soberly concluded. Such practices, it added, “historically proved to be counterproductive.”

SOUTHERN ACE WAS HARDLY
the only mercenary company to intervene in Somalia. No modern US war would be complete without the involvement of Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Even though his company's crimes and scandals were closely associated with the neoconservatives and the Bush era, Blackwater forces continued to play a significant role in the CIA's global operations under the Obama administration. With Blackwater under intense investigation and his top deputies indicted on federal conspiracy and weapons charges, Prince left the United States in 2010 and relocated to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, a major hub for the mercenary industry and the war-contracting business as a whole. Prince had
close ties to the royals
, particularly the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. He said he chose Abu Dhabi because of its “great proximity to potential opportunities across the entire Middle East, and great logistics,” adding that it has “a friendly business climate, low to no taxes, free trade and no out of control trial lawyers or labor unions. It's
pro-business and opportunity
.”