Black Hawk Down Revisited

Somalia is still ruled by the brutal warlords who dragged dead US soldiers through the streets in 1993. But times change. Now they are America’s new allies in the war on terror

THIRTEEN years after President Bill Clinton withdrew forces from Somalia, in the “Black Hawk down” shambles, American security officials are giving clandestine support to the same warlords who mutilated and humiliated US soldiers in 1993.

The American Operation, in breach of the United Nations’ arms embargo on Somalia and therefore in breach of international law, is controlled through the US Embassy in Kenya and Washington’s 1800-strong Combined Joint Task Force in Djibouti, on Somalia’s northern border.

The Combined Joint Task Force, under Admiral Richard Hunt, is an anti-terrorist operation for the troubled Horn of Africa, but most specifically for Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991 and is seen as an ideal place for al-Qaeda activists to hide and plot attacks.

Somalia is only a short boat ride from Yemen and is a historic doorway to Africa from the Middle East. No visas are needed to enter Somalia and there is no police force. The country has a weak and ineffective transitional government operating largely out of neighbouring Kenya. Most of Somalia is in mayhem and lawlessness, ruled by a patchwork of competing warlords; the capital is too unsafe for even Somalia’s acting prime minister to visit.

The US, terrified that Islamists allied to al-Qaeda are gaining control in Somalia, has turned to the kind of warlords who once dragged dead American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, as its new allies in the “war on terror”.

Africa Confidential, the London-based intelligence newsletter, reports in its latest edition: “CIA staff certainly helped to organise the [Somali warlord] Alliance, with, we hear, the involvement of at least one National Intelligence Support Group.” Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, told the Sunday Herald: “If what is happening now in Somalia was happening in Latin America, it would be a new Iran-Contra scandal.” He is referring to the biggest political scandal in the United States during the 1980s. It involved several members of the Reagan administration who in 1986 helped sell arms to Iran, an avowed enemy, and used the proceeds to fund the Contras, a right-wing guerrilla group in Nicaragua.

The Somali Alliance – or, more fully, the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism [ARPCT] – is a group of once-discredited warlords who, with Washington’s backing as “counter-terrorists”, depict their own opponents in perhaps the world’s most anarchistic theatre as agents of al-Qaeda.

So far, the efforts of the US-backed Alliance have met with no success. No “terrorists” have been detained, and Alliance forces have not fared well in ferocious house-to-house fighting against Islamist militias that control most of Mogadishu.

The fighting in Mogadishu has been the heaviest in years. According to Africa Confidential, more than 200 people died in the Somali capital between May 7 and 12, at least 1000 were injured, and the price of ammunition almost tripled in two days, with Kalashnikov bullets rising from 60 cents to US$1.50.

The focus of US concern in Somalia is the Supreme Council of the United Islamic Courts, set up in 2004 to restore some kind of order in Somalia, along with an Islamic government in a country where Somalis generally have a laidback and flexible interpretation of Islam and distrust the kind of foreigners who make up the leadership of al-Qaeda.

The Supreme Council began with five courts, which agreed on a joint militia of 400 men and 19 trucks mounted with machineguns, but which also began building schools and hospitals, an achievement unmatched by any other centre of power in Somalia. “By early 2005, 11 courts had joined, able to deploy at least 1500, possibly 5000, militiamen,” reports African Confidential.

One court chairman, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, warned President George Bush in a letter that the US would “lose the war it is waging against the Somali people” through the warlord Alliance.

Though the Supreme Council denies links to al-Qaeda, the militia commander of one court, Adan Hashi Ayro, was trained in Afghanistan and led an attack that desecrated an Italian cemetery in Mogadishu. Ayro is widely held responsible for the killing of five Western aid workers and BBC journalist Kate Peyton in February last year.

US officials have refused repeated requests by their own country’s news organisations to provide details about the nature and extent of Washington’s support for the alliance of warlords. One senior official in the US capital told the Washington Post: “We’ve got very clear interests in trying to ensure that al-Qaeda members are not using it to hide and to plan attacks.”

The same newspaper reported a senior intelligence official as saying Somalia is “not an al-Qaeda safe haven” yet, before adding: “There are some there, but it’s so dysfunctional.” US officials specifically believe that a small number of al-Qaeda operatives who were involved in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are now living in Somalia.

The avenues through which the US is arming the warlords appear to be multiple. Arms have arrived from Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Yemen, according to Africa Confidential, which also noted that CIA director Porter Goss visited Somalia in February before his as-yet unexplained resignation in April. Several hundred thousands of dollars were then flown into an airstrip for the warlords and a CIA list of al-Qaeda operatives whom the agency believed were in Mogadishu was also handed over.

“In February, Alliance fighters were unusually well-equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and multiple-barrelled anti-aircraft machineguns,” said the newsletter, adding that the weapons supply was backed “with Pentagon enthusiasm”. Africa Confidential said it had no doubt that al-Qaeda militants move easily in and out of Somalia. They have sophisticated weapons, including surface-to-air missiles. Al-Qaeda uses Somalia because its long border with Kenya is porous, cross-border clan links are strong, it has a long coastline and the “failed state” has no counter-terrorist capacity other than the US-backed warlords.

The immediate problem for the US administration, the CIA and the Combined Joint Task Force in Djibouti is that the United Islamic Courts are confident that they can win most battles and widen the conflict. They are also less unpopular than the warlords.

On Friday tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Mogadishu angrily condemning the United States for supporting the warlords’ alliance.

“The courts’ militias have earned some popular praise for bringing a semblance of order in areas under their control, something the warlord factions have been unable or unwilling to do,” said Abdullhai Shirwa, a member of Civil Society in Action, an umbrella organisation of more than a dozen anti-violence groups in Mogadishu. The courts may hand down brutal punishments according to Sharia law but civilians assert that, unlike the warlords, they do not rob and loot ordinary people.

Although the US government is deeply into “plausible deniability mode” over its new alliance with Somalia’s warlords, Red Cross and other aid agency officials report seeing “many Americans with thick necks and short haircuts moving around [Somalia], carrying big suitcases”, according to one aid official quoted by Newsweek. And a senior US political officer, Michael Zorick, in the embassy in Nairobi, the CIA hub for East Africa and The Horn, has been removed from his post after he wrote a critical report on the Somalia policy. The dissenting officer has been silenced and sent to the US Embassy in Chad.

“He really decided to take up the battle. He realised very well what he was doing,” said a Western diplomat close to Zorick who asked not to be identified.

Many American critics are worried that the Bush administration is focusing too much on the potential terrorist threat from Somalia at the expense of supporting economic development initiatives that could provide alternative ways of living for young men other than picking up a gun or dabbling in fundamentalist Islamic ideologies. Somalia experts and Somalis have also said there has not been enough substantial support for building a new government after 15 years without one.

“If the real problem is Somalia, then what have we done to change the situation inside Somalia?” asked Ted Dagne, the leading Africa analyst for the Congressional Research Service in Washington. “Are we funding schools, health care or helping establish an effective government?

“We have a generation of Somali kids growing up without education and only knowing violence and poverty. Unless there is a change, these could become the next warlords out of necessity for survival. That’s perhaps the greatest threat we have yet to address.”

04 June 2006