Somali soldiers on October 15, 2017, securing the scene of the explosion
of a truck bomb in the centre of Mogadishu. This is Somalia’s deadliest
attack to date and it killed more than 500 people, showing the capacity
of Al Shabaab to take advantage of the flaws of the government of
Mogadishu. PHOTO | AFP
On the second day of my visit to Mogadishu, within a couple of
days of the October 14, 2017 truck bombing, I visited the site of the
explosion in the company of Prof Abdullahi Shirwa, the chairman of the
National Emergency Operation Centre.
At some point,
the man explaining things to me, glanced nervously around, and bent down
and picked up “something.” He said to me, “Here,” offering me whatever
it was that he had picked up from under a piece of wood.
I didn’t like his bothered look and so I asked, “What is it?”
“These are pieces of human flesh.”
Shocked,
I averted my eyes, not ready to accept the man’s extended hand and was
relieved when Prof Shirwa assured me that they were fragments of charred
metal strewn by the massive explosion.
Of the numerous
assaults and bomb attacks that will haunt every Somali’s mind, none has
been more dastardly than this one. A heinous act of incomparable
devastation, nearly 400 souls lost and an equal number of people
suffered serious injuries, many needing major surgery, with many others
either unaccounted for or missing.
The local terrorist group Al Shabaab had just served notice on
everyone that it was still capable of striking panic into the nation’s
heart, despite its territorial loss. As we mourned the dead, we sought
answers to the question we have been asking for the past decade.
Now
we ask again if this would be the watershed event that would drive the
African Mission in Somalia (Amisom) and the Somali National Army towards
a decisive final push to rid the country of Al Shabaab once for all.
'Lies have short legs'
The
terrorist organisation — masters in the dark arts of stonewalling — did
not claim ownership of the attack, fearing a popular backlash.
It
is worth remembering that the terrorists did not own up to the December
4, 2009, Hotel Shamo blast in which a male suicide bomber disguised as a
woman by wearing a hijab, detonated a device killing three government
ministers, two professors of medicine and nine students at a medical
school graduation ceremony. But even without taking credit for the
killings, everyone suspected them of being the perpetrators.
A Somali proverb says; Lies have short legs. And sooner or later, the truth will catch up with them.
And
so it was something of a relief when the truth caught up with Al
Shabaab’s taciturnity: The Somali Minister for Internal Security
released the names of the six men behind the October 14 truck bombing a
month after the deadly incident and two weeks following the Hotel Naasa
Hablood assault, in which 17 people died and 23 were wounded, which Al
Shabaab claimed to have carried out.
Mohamed Abukar
Islow, the minister for Internal Security, identified Osman Hajji aka
Maadey as the suicide bomber and driver of the truck. He also named five
other individuals, who are now in custody, accused of having had a hand
in the bombing: Hassan Adan Isack, the driver of the second car; Ali
Yussuf Wacays, aka Duaale, thought to be the second suicide bomber;
Abdiweli Ahmed Dirie, aka Fanax, the group’s head of explosive experts
in Mogadishu; Mukhtar Mohamed known as Gardhuub, a senior leader of the
team; and Abdullahi Abdi Warsame.
The minister added, “Apart from those in custody, our forces are hunting down the owner of the truck who is on the run.”
The
government also shared the CCTV recording showing the truck at the
moment it started colliding with other vehicles near the intersection,
with security cars in pursuit.
There is a lot we do not know and maybe we will never know. I questioned both the recently fired National Security chief
Abdullahi Mohamed Sanbalolshe and the minister of internal security
about how a truck loaded with about a thousand kilogrammes of explosives
was allowed to pass through numerous checkpoints, skirt the capital’s
security cordons, and enter the city without it being stopped.
Perhaps
the officers manning the checkpoints were corrupt, because they had not
received their salaries for months, I suggested, but neither man
agreed. Still, the versions given are in conflict with one another, but I
have reconstructed the stories as told by different sources.
Runaway truck
In
one version, the officers at the final police check point stopped the
truck and instructed the driver to park it and get out. Questioned about
the cargo and its owner, the driver volunteered the name of the
businessman who owned the consignment.
With no sniffer
dogs in situ that day, the most senior officer makes do: He had the
elderly businessman, who vouches for the driver and a younger man
arriving at the scene, and a nephew of the businessman stand in front of
the truck, and took photographs of them with the licence plate showing.
He attaches the photo to a signed affidavit.
While
the senior officer and the two men are busy with the paperwork, a
well-meaning young officer instructs the driver to move the truck
further along on the roadside to allow traffic to flow. The driver, once
in the truck, takes off towards the city.
The officers at the check point appraise the authorities of the now runaway truck before giving chase.
Within
minutes, the driver, as he approached the busy Zoobe Junction, crossed
the median smashing into oncoming traffic. But when he realised that he
was trapped, he detonated a bomb at the junction — he was surrounded by
other vehicles and by cataclysmic happenstance, a fuel truck was also
parked nearby. And just like that, 400 people lost their lives and
hundreds suffered life-threatening injuries.
Meanwhile,
another driver in a smaller vehicle, a Toyota Noah van, was waiting on a
side street, presumably to give or take instructions since neither his
rendezvous with the suicide bomber nor the encounter with the truck had
occurred. This driver was within the proximity of the Aden Abdulle
International Airport, with his engine idling.
A
police officer approached him to ask him to move along, and since the
driver was talking on the phone and did not react to the instructions,
the policeman moved closer to inspect the vehicle and that was when he
noticed a web of wires. The officer, now joined by his partner, yanked
the driver’s door open, grabbed the man by the scruff of his shirt and
dragged him away from the car. The bomb exploded. But the two officers
and the terrorist escaped unhurt. The terrorist was taken into custody.
Truck from Italy
According to Panorama,
an Italian magazine, the truck used in the bombing is one of Italy’s
army military vehicles that was dismantled piece by piece and bolt by
bolt, boxed and shipped to Somalia via Antwerp port in Belgium.
A
criminal group of Italians and Somalis working for an auto body shop in
the Province of Pisa had shipped the separate parts to Mogadishu, where
it was reassembled. In Italy, 16 people, four of them Somalis, have
been accused of involvement and arrested.
A man called
Abdullahi Ibrahim Hassan bought the military truck on August 18, 2017.
Nearly a month later, the truck driver made a number of dry runs from
Afgoi into the city. The intention was for the driver to familiarise
himself with officers at the various check points by ferrying quintals
of maize.
The first recorded trip was made on September
13, 2017. The Federal Minister of Internal Security claims a different
man called Abdullahi Abdi Warsame, currently in detention, paid for the
vehicle’s licence on behalf of the registered owner, who to date is
still on the run.
How the country got here
Alone
in my hotel room late that evening following my meeting with the
minister of Internal Security, his bodyguards hovering nearby, I
recalled a conversation I had in London with a leading British scholar
on Jihadi insurgency in Somalia.
My English friend
said, “Do you know why the majority Muslim countries like Somalia,
Pakistan and Afghanistan serve as religious battlefields, when no
majority Arab country has ever been torn apart by similar religion-based
conflicts until Isis appeared on the scene?”
“It is
because Qatar, United Arab Emirate and Saudi Arabia pay the wages of the
Jihadis on the proviso that all the religious battles are fought
elsewhere, away from their countries. Osama bin Laden operated from his
Afghan base until his stay in that country became untenable. Then he
moved his base to Pakistan,” he explained simply.
“Where does Somalia fit in?” I asked.
The
analyst claimed that it all began when Gen Mohamed Farah Aideed met
Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, at the latter’s retreat in
Soba, an ancient Nubian city about 20 kilometres away from Khartoum. In
1997, bin Laden would later tell two CNN journalists that his men had
trained the Somalis in downing the US military helicopters Black Hawks
by aiming at the tail rotors.
Bin Laden dispatched Abu
Hafs Al Masri, the Egyptian, to provide on-the-ground training to
Aideed’s militiamen on downing a helicopter. When the two met, bin Laden
was living openly in Khartoum and putting together a plan to launch the
twin attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. A few
years later his men carried out the game-changing 9/11 assaults on the
Twin Towers in New York.
Foreign interests
A
lot has happened in Somalia since the Black Hawk Down days caused the
US to withdraw its army. It seemed as if Somalis were left to their own
devices to deal with the nefarious interference in the country’s affairs
by Ethiopia, Kenya, Eritrea, Uganda, the US, the EU and a handful of
Arab states, each having its own self-serving design, some in an
underhand way, others with worrying blatancy.
A rap
sheet of crimes was committed against Somalia: The country’s wealth
looted, its seas emptied of fish, its shores polluted with nuclear and
chemical waste and the chance of it putting a government together
continuously sabotaged by one foreign party or another.
When
I visited Mogadishu in 1996 after a 22-year exile, I found a divided
city run by two warlords, each claiming a half as his fiefdom. And with
no government to provide civic amenities and no functioning state-run
schools, the Qataris, the Saudis and the Emiratis entered Somalia
especially in the education sector, as if to bring bin Laden’s plans
finally into fruition.
Under Siad Barre, Somalia had
been a secular state, quite unlike any other Muslim nation. Now the
Arabs had a free rein to impose their language, harden the Somalis’
moderate way of worship and change the traditional manner in which our
people dressed.
Unchallenged, the Saudis, the Qataris
and the Emiratis introduced their own school curricula, which was
adopted by the teachers whose salaries they paid. In 10 years, the
Islamic Courts Union exerted control over much of southern Somalia. The
US awoke to the “dangers” the Courts could present and gave its tacit
approval to Ethiopia to invade. And Al Shabaab, as the Court’s offshoot,
emerged.
Thus while the Arab states’ threat to Somali
sovereignty has its origin in bin Laden’s secret pact with Aideed
through a series of permutations, the snake ended up biting its tail —
morphing into Al Shabaab. Now with the appearance of Turkey on the
scene, the Arab subversion of Somalia as a self-governing state has
become more sinister and may lead to civil war.
The country today
Without
a federal government statement on the truck bombing and with Al Shabaab
also keeping mum, Somalis can only speculate about the perpetrators.
The Guardian ascribed a clan motive to the bombing and in
reaction to this, the elders from the fingered community condemned the
newspaper, stating that this made no sense, since this clan claimed to
have lost 180 of their kith and kin in the explosion.
The
Doha-based network Al Jazeera entered the fray, speculating that the
Turkish Military Academy was the bombers’ intended target. But the
rumour that the UAE was behind the bombing gained more currency by the
day among Mogadishians, with many Somalis describing the Emirates as the
agent of destruction, because of connections to the heads of the
regional governments. It is no secret that the Saudi and UAE governments
view Turkey with suspicion, a threat to their political designs.
The
truck bombing of October 14 was followed a fortnight later by another,
albeit less disastrous, assault on Hotel Naasa Hablood. This attack bore
all Al Shabaab’s signature traits: A small vehicle smashed the gate of
the hotel open creating panic and confusion, then a group armed with
assault rifles and wearing suicide vests walked in and finished the job.
That Al Shabaab could stage yet another attack so
soon after the massacre at Zoobe Junction shocked the nation and further
deflated the earlier sense of optimism about the country.
A
sense of hopelessness and defeat spread to the government, with
politicians rebuking state security for failing to protect the nation,
some asking for the president’s and the prime minister’s heads. So the
president went on a whistle-stop tour of the troop-contributing
countries; Uganda, Ethiopia, Burundi, Kenya and Djibouti, seeking their
assistance.
Amisom is anathema
Not
for the first time, Amisom came in for some serious blame, because both
its top officers and foot soldiers have been accused of blatant
corruption as well as indifference to the job at hand.
In an article published in The EastAfrican
on November 7, 2017, Charles Onyango-Obbo wrote, “There is a higher
level of consensus between the Amisom and Al Shabaab than between the
leaders of the contributing countries.” This is because “Amisom does
business with A Shabaab,” to whom the troops sell arms.
I
can attest to the thick-as-thieves-closeness between the Ugandans at
the airport and some of the Somalis they have dealings with. The UN
Monitoring Unit has accused the Kismayu-based Kenyan contingent of
making money from the sale of charcoal. And there is a feeling that
Ethiopia is in Somalia for its strategic reasons. This is why the
presence of Amisom is anathema to national self-esteem.
Matt
Bryden, the Canadian security expert on matters Somali noted to me that
the charitable view, which is not entirely incorrect, is that Amisom
has “secured” major Somali towns, especially Mogadishu and
regional/state capitals, and therefore established adequate physical
space for Somali political processes and institutions to evolve. Without
them, it’s hard to imagine the existence of the federal government,
state governments, or parliaments, whatever their shortcomings.
He
goes on; “On the other hand, Amisom forces have failed to achieve in 10
years what Ethiopian troops achieved in less than a week: domination of
Somali territory between Gaalkacyo and Ras Kamboni. Which is not to say
that the Ethiopian intervention was either desirable or a success:
simply that from the perspective of military effectiveness, Amisom
leaves much to be desired.”
I pressed him some more,
and he wrote, “We probably still need Amisom to protect major towns
until Somali forces are able to relieve them. But it’s unrealistic to
expect them to do so, because they are ill equipped in all respects to
take the fight to Al Shabaab and to pursue them into rural areas or
embark on some kind of counter-insurgency campaign. If they leave now,
this would almost certainly make things worse and end in disaster. Apart
from taking the remaining Al Shabaab strongholds of Jilib, Jamame and
Sakow, Amisom has probably reached the limits of its utility.”
Somali security structures
Confusion
reigns supreme when it comes to finding the panacea for Somalia’s
security frailties. Upward of 500 US Special Forces are in the country,
tasked with targeting Al Shabaab training camps and also to help train
Amisom and the Somali National Army.
On top of this,
thousands of Somali army units are receiving their training in Uganda,
the Sudan as well as Djibouti and thrown into the mix are a
Mogadishu-based UAE military facility and a Turkish military academy.
The worry is that, with Amisom’s withdrawal ongoing, there is no
uniformity or cohesion in the national army of the country.
Time
and again, the work of the security apparatus in Somalia has been found
wanting and the quality and efficacy of detection has been questioned.
In an opinion piece in the New York Times, Mr Sanbalolshe,
however, points a finger away from his men and women, explaining that
the country does not have forensic labs and lacks the necessary
expertise to deal with the investigative challenges arising from the
explosions.
He laments the dearth of technical skill
in the security structures, all the more made worse by the fact that
when the intelligence at the crime scene — explosive residues, the
detonators, the sim cards, the DNA of the perpetrators and fingerprints —
is gathered and removed by Somalia’s US, British and UN partners, the
results of the investigation are neither returned nor is the information
shared with Somalia intelligence.
Describing the
nation’s partners as unscrupulous carpetbaggers with unconscionable
meanness, he argues that this lack of information sharing is hampering
the decision-making of the security structures.
With
the Somali National Army not equipped to take over from Amisom, and
Amisom engaged in corruption and selling weapons to Al Shabaab, Kenya
accused of exporting charcoal, Ethiopia suspected of having its own
designs, the US, Britain and the UN’s information-sharing not
forthcoming, is there any wonder why there has been no tangible progress
in the fight against the terrorists in Somalia?
Unless
the arms embargo is lifted and there is cohesion in the way Somalia’s
partners collaborate with its security apparatus, my fear is that we
will witness an attack a lot worse than the one on October 14, at Zoobe
junction.
Nurddin Farah is a Somali novelist who lives in the US and South Africa.
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