Posted on 05/06/2003 10:10:05 AM PDT by knighthawk
Some see haven for drug running, terrorist training camps and al-qaeda
Traditional violence and instability in region could prove sticky, entangling US in mesh of bloody rivalries
BEIRUT: Not too long ago a man named Issa al-Hayatt carrying a South African passport was lying in the Kaysaney Hospital in downtown Mogadishu, the lawless capital of Somalia, a constant battleground between clan-based warlords. Around about March 11 or 12, he’d been shot in what appeared to be an attempt by militiamen to kidnap him. On March 18, six armed men, identified as Americans by witnesses, swept into the ward with several local militiamen, including a translator, and dragged away the man known as Issa.
They drove him out to Aisaley Airport near Mogadishu, put him aboard an aircraft which had flown in the Americans the day before, and took off for Nairobi, capital of neighboring Kenya, where he was placed under arrest by the country’s anti-terrorist police unit.
A few days ago, the man known as Issa was formally handed over to US authorities as a suspected member of al-Qaeda. Kenya’s National Security Minister, Chris Murungaru, named the man as Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, believed to be a Yemeni but who also held Somali and Tanzanian passports. The minister said he was believed to be a high-ranking Al-Qaeda operative who was linked to the Nov. 28 suicide bombing of the Paradise Hotel in the Indian Ocean resort of Mombasa, in which 11 Kenyans and three Israelis perished, and the August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es Salaam which killed 231 people, 12 of them American.
The Kenyans maintained the fiction that the suspect had been seized by Mogadishu militiamen paid by the Americans, hence his well-publicized handover to US officials in Nairobi. But, in fact, he was grabbed by an American team, probably Federal Bureau of Investigation agents or US special forces, after the militiamen had apparently failed to kidnap him themselves.
Whoever the suspect is, Murungaru said: “He’s a leading organizer of terrorism in the East African region and beyond, and he’s provided us with very useful information.”
Word of the hospital raid did not get out until March 20, the day the Iraq war began. That grabbed all the headlines and the raid passed almost unnoticed. Yet it was the first known covert operation in volatile Somalia since a ragtag army of militiamen chopped up a unit of elite US Army Rangers in 1993 when the troops tried to captured the late warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed. Osama bin Laden has hailed that battle, in which 18 American soldiers were killed, as Al-Qaeda’s first victory in its jihad against the United States.
However, the March raid is unlikely to be the last, given that last September the Bush administration gave US intelligence agencies the green light to conduct covert operations, including assassinations, against Al-Qaeda leaders and those who support them. So the stakes are getting higher as the Americans increasingly turn their attention to the Horn of Africa and East Africa, where Al-Qaeda supposedly has taken root among the Muslim communities along the Indian Ocean coastline.
Islam was carried to the region centuries ago by seafarers from Oman. In the 17th century, Oman was a major maritime power at the confluence of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea and its religious domain ran as far south as Zanzibar.
The US military presence in the Horn of Africa, one of several such deployments around the globe since Sept. 11, 2001, is involving the Americans ever deeper in a region that is inherently unstable, where Islam is widely practiced and political rivalries are rife and often violent. The US runs the risk of becoming entangled in these rifts, using one “partner” in the counter-terrorism war against another, or providing fresh targets for Muslim extremists.
Somalia, a Muslim country, has been without an effective government since the 1991 fall of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. The state collapsed into a patchwork of feuding factions, ideal as a sanctuary for groups like Al-Qaeda. The Mombasa attack, along with an attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner with shoulder-fired missiles that narrowly missed, showed that Al-Qaeda was operating in the region again despite a CIA-military hunt for its personnel following the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Al-Qaeda is alleged to have strong links with a Somali group, Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya (Islamic Unity) that was formed in the early 1990s with the aim of establishing an Islamic state.
To counter the Al-Qaeda threat, the US has deployed some 2,000 troops, mainly Marines but with some army special forces units, in the former French colony of Djibouti, across the Arabian Sea from Yemen, bin Laden’s ancestral home and a hotbed of Al-Qaeda support. There is also a CIA team there tracking known or suspected operatives in Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It was this team that was responsible for the assassination of a leading Al-Qaeda figure, Sunian al-Harithi, and five of his people on Nov. 4.
They were killed when a laser-guided Hellfire missile fired by remote control from a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle launched by the CIA in Djibouti hours before to track Harithi’s car on a dirt road in the province of Marib, 200 kilometers east of Sanaa, the capital. The operator in Djibouti was given the coordinates by a source in Yemen who reported in by cell phone.
The operation was also intended “to light a fire under Ali Abdullah Saleh,” Yemen’s president, who was dragging his feet in cracking down on Al-Qaeda operatives and their Islamic tribal allies who have been responsible for several attacks on US targets, including the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor which killed 17 sailors.
“It had the desired result,” said one source. “Saleh became much more cooperative.”
Still, Yemen has long distrusted the US and tolerated religious extremism. Bin Laden recruited thousands of fighters from Yemen to fight with Afghanistan’s mujahideen against the Soviets in 1979-89. So Saleh knows that domestically there are limits to how far he can go. One of his predecessors was assassinated in 1978 in what many believe was a plot by tribal leaders angered by Sanaa’s meddling in their affairs. Yemen’s central government remains weak, so Saleh may not feel he is strong enough to challenge two overlapping constituencies: fiercely independent tribes and the country’s religious leaders.
The aerial ambush in Marib was the first such attack against Al-Qaeda outside Afghanistan. That operation underlined the impact of the increasing level and quality of intelligence the Americans are now gathering about Al-Qaeda operatives, their hideouts, travel networks, much of it obtained by agents on the ground, in this case probably Yemeni mercenaries.
The activities of the US forces are largely classified and little is known about them. But they appear to be wide-ranging. There have been reports that US special forces teams have probed deep into Somalia from covert bases in Ethiopia. Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor, a weekly newsletter published in London, reported that raids planned and coordinated with the joint task forces had been carried out by Ethiopian troops against al-Ittihad in Somalia, with US aircraft used to infiltrate the soldiers and extract them.
Lieutenant General Michael DeLong, the US Marine general in overall command of the Horn of Africa operations, disclosed last Friday that his forces had recently captured several mid-level Al-Qaeda operatives in various places within his operational area. He gave few specifics, saying that these successes had been kept “low key” at the request of the governments concerned.
The US forces in Djibouti are mainly based at a former French Foreign Legion headquarters, Camp Lemonier, near the capital’s international airport. This is where the Marines, including men from the Small Craft Company of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, are deployed. Earlier this year, the USS Mount Whitney, a hi-tech command and intelligence vessel arrived in Djibouti to coordinate operations by the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, or CJTF-HOA in Pentagonspeak.
It is backed by the US Army’s High Speed Theater Support Vessel-1X, a strike craft that has been spotted entering Djibouti harbor several times in recent months, presumably to refuel.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted during a December visit to Djibouti that US forces would be deployed in the region for several years because “this is where the action is. There are a number of terrorists just across the water in Yemen and the southern part of Saudi Arabia, for example.”
General Jim Jones, NATO’s supreme commander, said last week that the US plans to bolster its military presence in Africa to respond to new threats.
There are, he said, “a certain number of countries that can be destabilized in the near future, large ungoverned areas across Africa that are clearly the new routes for narco-trafficking, terrorist training and hotbeds of instability.
He foresaw “carrier groups and expeditionary strike groups may “spend half their time going down the west coast of Africa.”
The Americans have moved into a hornet’s nest of tribal feuding and inter-state rivalries among some of the world’s most impoverished states, and the US is again playing footsy with some nasty regimes in the name of fighting terrorism. This is a pattern, established during the Cold War, that is being repeated and which militates against the Bush administration’s insistence that it spread democracy to all and sundry. Indeed, the regional rivalries in some cases are so sharp that they could cripple the US “war on terrorism” in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.
For example, tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea, who fought a bloody two-and-a-half-year war along their 1,000-kilometer border that ended in December 2000, is simmering again, with both rivals playing off each other in a bid to get more benefits from the US. Though neither seems prepared at this stage to abrogate the peace agreement, both are striving to exploit the US military’s need for calm in the region.
Eritrea has offered its main seaport of Asmara, of the Red Sea’s western shore north of Djibouti, as a US base. So far the Americans have not taken it up on that offer, although during the Cold War the US maintained an electronic listening post there known as Kagnew Station that kept an eye on the Soviet Navy operating in what was then Marxist South Yemen.
Djibouti’s president, Ismael Omar Guelleh, a staunch Islamist, has parlayed his new relationship with the Americans to his country’s advantage even though much of the Muslim world disapproved of his alliance with Washington. US aid has risen from $3 million a year pre-Sept. 11 to $10 million now and is expected to rise further. But Guelleh must also worry about his neighbors who have long cast coveteous eyes on his strategically placed country that sits on the Bab al-Mandeb, the southern gateway to the Red Sea across the waterway from Yemen. Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia all would like to get their hands on Djibouti’s deep-water port.
Djibouti is Ethiopia’s only outlet to the sea and allied itself with Addis Ababa during Ethiopia’s war with Eritrea. That angered the Eritreans, who have conducted incursions into Djibouti. Ethiopian premier Meles Zenawi was sufficiently concerned to warn Eritrea he would not tolerate any Eritrean presence in Djibouti. For its part, Somalia maintains that historically or at least until the French moved out it was part of “Greater Somalia” and has long campaigned to incorporate the tiny enclave within its border.
Not true. They were after Adid's top lieutenant, who they did succeed in capturing.
With the correct applications of force, whole regimes will topple like dominos without massive soviet support.
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