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Somalia and al-Qaeda: Implications for the War on Terrorism
By James Phillips
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James PhillipsSenior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs
Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign and National Security Policy
The United States has made considerable progress in its war against international terrorism, but it still faces contingencies that could complicate its goal of eradicating the scourge of global terrorism. The United States has uprooted Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda ("the Base") terrorist group--and the radical Islamic Taliban regime that protected it--from Afghanistan. Although al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants seek to regroup and challenge the authority of the U.S.-backed Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, bin Laden has lost his foremost safe haven and state sponsor.
1 Largely expelled from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda may seek to regroup in another country where it could count on some degree of local support.
2 U.S. intelligence officials believe that bin Laden owns a number of ships, one of which is suspected of transporting some of the explosives used in the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.3Shortly after September 11, U.S. intelligence officials received reports that bin Laden himself planned to move from Afghanistan to Somalia or had already done so.4
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6 The United Nations Security Council launched an emergency food relief operation in August 1992 but was unable to assure the distribution of food supplies because of the deteriorating security situation, particularly in the south. Somali warlords ruthlessly plundered relief supplies to feed and subsidize their own militias.
7 Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, many of these estimated 25,000 "Arab Afghans" returned home, where they fostered radical Islamic movements in many Muslim countries, including Somalia. According to U.S. intelligence reports, bin Laden sent Islamic extremists to Somalia in 1991-1992 to help the Somali Islamic radical group al-Ittihad al-Islamiya (Islamic Unity, or AIAI) to organize an armed militia, establish schools and clinics, and prepare to seize power.
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9 He dispatched several lieutenants, including Mohammed Atef, who is believed to have helped plan the September 11 attacks, to help train Somalis in military and terrorist tactics.
10 Several hundred foreign veterans of the Afghan jihad, expelled from Pakistan in 1993, also joined the Somali jihad after passing through Sudan.11 Tariq Nasr Fadhli, a radical Islamic leader from Yemen who fought under bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan, helped bring Yemeni mercenaries to fight in Somalia.12
13 In a 1997 interview with CNN, he gloated that al-Qaeda had trained and organized the Somali fighters who did the actual fighting.14 Al-Qaeda members are suspected of teaching General Aideed's militia how to shoot down U.S. helicopters by altering the fuses of rocket-propelled grenades so that they exploded in mid-air.15 This tactic, developed by the Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors) in their war against the Soviets, was the same one al-Qaeda forces used to bring down two U.S. helicopters near Gardez, Afghanistan, during Operation Anaconda in early March 2002.
16 This also reinforced his contempt for American staying power and fueled his ambitions to use terrorism to drive American influence out of the Muslim world: If the deaths of 18 soldiers could cause the withdrawal of 25,000 U.S. troops from Somalia, bin Laden had reason to believe that killing more Americans could lead to a similar pullout from Saudi Arabia.
17 Some of the members of the same Kenya-based al-Qaeda cell that helped train Somalis to kill U.S. soldiers in 1993 went on to carry out the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.18
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20 but its strength has declined significantly as a result of three Ethiopian military interventions in the last six years, provoked by AIAI terrorist attacks.
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23 travelling across Afghanistan to get there would be risky, even if bin Laden trusted Iran's divided government to protect him. Al-Qaeda also has ties to Iraq,24 but that country is more distant and more difficult to enter without being detected by the United States. Sudan, which still harbors some al-Qaeda members, is a possible sanctuary; but Khartoum already has shown bin Laden the door in 1996--and has placed his former mentor, radical Sudanese Islamic ideologue Hassan Turabi, under house arrest.
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27 Since the onset of its chronic civil war and the withdrawal of the U.N. presence, few Westerners and fewer Americans have had the opportunity to follow the tortuous twists and turns of Somalia's factional bloodletting. Little is known about the strength of the AIAI, which has dispersed and melted into its constituent clans since its military defeat by Ethiopia in 1997. Even less is known about the strength and disposition of al-Qaeda forces or the precise nature of their links to AIAI or other Somali groups.
28 Army special forces units assigned to the Central Command have practiced training missions against mock-ups of terrorist compounds, but according to a senior official, "There is not enough intelligence on Somalia right now on which to base an attack."29
30 U.S. soldiers should be employed to capture or kill terrorists, not to function as social workers.
- 31and the Puntland port of Bosaso reportedly was used to send Somali volunteers to Afghanistan to help bolster al-Qaeda,32 increasing numbers of Puntlanders are said to resent Ethiopia's domination of their political system.
33 Washington should keep all the factions at arms length and avoid being drawn into their political blood sport.
- Use covert CIA operations, special operations commandos, and precision air strikes as necessary to target al-Qaeda cells. For the U.S. military, Somalia is a more convenient battlefield than Afghanistan in geostrategic terms. It has a long seacoast that makes it more accessible to carrier-based warplanes, marine landings, and special forces operations. U.S. air power is more effective in finding and hitting targets in Somalia's relatively flat desert terrain, compared to the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. And the military probably has better advanced knowledge of the terrain, based on its deployment in 1992-1994, than it did going into Afghanistan last fall.
Politically, however, Somalia is much more difficult than Afghanistan. Many Afghans hated the Taliban and were willing to join the fight against it once it became clear that the U.S. air campaign was lethally effective. Somalis will feel threatened, not liberated, by the presence of foreign troops. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan was a battle-hardened force that had fiercely fought the Taliban for seven years without cracking. But the SRRC and other Somali coalitions can dissolve overnight and re-form in different configurations. Fortunately, this also will be a problem for bin Laden if he chooses to flee to Somalia.
A war against al-Qaeda in Somalia is likely to look much different from the war in Afghanistan. In Somalia, Al-Qaeda would need to function in a dispersed and hidden manner to avoid deadly air strikes with precision-guided munitions. It would seek to blend in with native Somalis and use civilians as shields. Conventional military operations, and even large special forces operations as in Mogadishu in 1993, could result in heavy civilian casualties.
Rather than take a sledgehammer approach, which would radicalize Somalis and win bin Laden greater support, the United States should attack isolated targets with small units operating stealthily at night. Lightning "snatch and grab" commando operations should be launched from bases outside of Somalia to limit the presence of foreign troops on the ground. Wherever possible, the United States should use Somali surrogates trained by the CIA and minimize the involvement of Americans on the ground. Moving large numbers of U.S. troops into Somalia would be a lightning rod that would provoke attacks and give al-Qaeda more targets without appreciably increasing the effectiveness of the anti-terrorism campaign.
Detecting and neutralizing dispersed al-Qaeda cells is more an intelligence problem than a military problem. The CIA should take the lead, supported by Somali paramilitary forces and U.S. special forces. The air war would be much more specialized, involving precision-guided munitions almost exclusively to limit civilian casualties and avoid provoking a backlash from the clans of unintended victims. Most U.S. military forces would be better deployed to deal with more pressing threats from Iraq or elsewhere.
After being evicted from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda may regroup in Somalia where it has longstanding links to the radical group al-Ittihad al-Islamiya. Washington's first priority should be to deny Osama bin Laden a base in Somalia by intercepting al-Qaeda forces before they reach that failed state. Meanwhile, the United States should increase its intelligence-gathering activities in Somalia to assess the strength of the threat al-Qaeda poses there.
Absent a growing al-Qaeda threat or the move of its leaders to Somalia, the United States should avoid making a sustained military commitment there, which would divert scarce military forces from more urgent missions in Iraq or Afghanistan. The scale of any U.S. military and political commitment should be calibrated to match the threat posed by the al-Qaeda presence in Somalia. If this presence is found to pose little threat to American interests, U.S. military forces should not be deployed there. Instead, the United States should cultivate local Somali allies to root out al-Qaeda.
The United States also should try to contain and defeat AIAI by giving diplomatic, economic, and intelligence support to Somali factions opposed to it, as well as to Ethiopia and Kenya, which are threatened by it. But Washington cannot afford to bog down its overburdened military forces in naïve nation-building efforts that are inherently risky, expensive, and doubtful. It should have learned from the collapse of the Clinton Administration's Somalia intervention in 1993 that no good deed goes unpunished. Nation-building exercises draw peacekeeping forces into the lethal politics of failed states and create new incentives for terrorism and new targets for terrorists to attack.
