Somalia on the Edge

By Alex Perry / Kismayo

On Oct. 3, 1993, a mob dragged the bodies of two U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. The soldiers had been killed in an intense street battle that was later immortalized in the book Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden. But soon after the firefight, U.S. troops were withdrawn from Somalia, and other places--Afghanistan, Iraq--became known as locations where young American soldiers risked their lives.

They're dragging bodies through the streets of Mogadishu once again. This time the dead men--paraded before a camera phone in November--were not American soldiers but Ethiopian ones. Yet the episode was a reminder of how dangerous Somalia has become. Last December the forces of Ethiopia, a prime U.S. ally in Africa and a major recipient of U.S. military aid, invaded Somalia to depose a radical Islamist regime, and Ethiopia received significant U.S. logistical support as the operation unfolded. But today the East African nation--indeed, the whole Horn of Africa--is again in chaos. Ethiopia and Eritrea, which split from Ethiopia in 1993, are on the verge of war (they fought a bitter conflict from 1998 to 2000), and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer has said that she is considering naming Eritrea a state sponsor of terrorism. Somalia itself is in the grip of a humanitarian crisis; according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 1.8 million Somalis are in dire need of assistance. And once again--if with less media attention than in 1993--the U.S. is involved in one of the world's deadliest regions. In many ways, the Horn of Africa has become, after Iraq and Afghanistan, a third front in the war on terrorism. How did that come about?

Deserts, Swamps and Jungles

On Jan. 9, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman confirmed that U.S. forces had carried out an air strike in Africa. An AC-130 gunship, he said, had targeted "what we believe to be senior al-Qaeda leadership." Whitman neither specified a location nor confirmed reports of other U.S. attacks. Asked about another air strike on Jan. 23--confirmed to TIME by a Pentagon officer--Whitman said, "We're going to go after al-Qaeda and the global war on terror, wherever it takes us." He continued: "I don't have anything for you on Somalia."

Most people don't have anything on Somalia. It is a hot, poor swath of desert and swamp, sparsely populated by camel herders, mango farmers and fishermen. But in the mental map of Islamic militants, it looms large. The oldest al-Qaeda training camp in Africa, Ras Kamboni, is perched on Somalia's southeastern tip, surrounded by swampy jungle that makes it as inaccessible as the hill caves of Tora Bora in Afghanistan. Radical groups like al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, funded and trained by foreign militants supplied by Osama bin Laden, have been in Somalia for years. The same bin Laden T shirts that fill Pakistan's bazaars are sold in the markets along Kenya's Indian Ocean coast.

Since the outbreak of civil war in 1991, Somalia has suffered from the kind of chaos that provides cover for militants. On Aug. 7, 1998, deadly car bombs detonated simultaneously next to the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people--just 12 of whom were Americans--and injuring more than 4,000. The FBI named three Somalia-based suspects: Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, originally from the Comoros Islands, off Mozambique; Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan; and bombmaker Tariq Abdullah, a.k.a. Abu Taha al-Sudani. The FBI said the men were members of the "Osama bin Laden network" and offered $5 million for Fazul's arrest or death.

Fazul's group allegedly struck again on Nov. 28, 2002, killing 13 people when gunmen attacked the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel near Mombasa, Kenya, and launched two missiles (both missed) at an Israeli airliner in Kenyan airspace. In 2003, staff at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi evacuated for a week following reports that Fazul wanted to level the new building, and in 2006 al-Sudani was implicated in a plot to attack a U.S. base in Djibouti. All of this means that in the fight against Islamic terrorism, Africa is an increasing worry. "If we're successful in denying al-Qaeda sanctuary in Waziristan and the North-West Frontier Province [in Pakistan], where are they going to go?" asks a retired senior U.S. special-operations commander. He answers his own question: "Africa."

To counter this perceived threat, in 2002 the U.S. opened a military base in Djibouti--the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa--and a Pentagon source says other moves are under discussion to enhance the U.S. support role across the continent. In 2003, Washington allocated $100 million to the East Africa Counter-Terrorism Initiative, an interagency task force focused on the continent. The U.S. Navy's Sixth Fleet, based in Gaeta, Italy, now spends much of its time patrolling the coasts of Africa. This year, using another $100 million allocated to Africa under the Global Peace Operations Initiative, U.S. soldiers will train and equip units from 13 to 15 African countries. The pattern of a growing U.S. military interest in the continent was confirmed on Oct. 1 with the opening in Stuttgart, Germany, of Africom, a 200-officer command dedicated to operations in Africa. The immediate focus of the new command is likely to be the Horn.

Friends in Addis Ababa

In fact, the U.S. has long been active politically and militarily in East Africa, and its presence dramatically increased after Sept. 11, 2001. In the summer of 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), an alliance of clerics and clan leaders that included several al-Itihaad al-Islamiya leaders, took over Mogadishu and imposed a form of law and order on Somalia, which had just gone through 15 years of civil war. But a few months later, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, the leader of the UIC, which had absorbed al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, declared a jihad on Ethiopian troops, who were regularly crossing into Somalia. "That was unacceptable," Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told TIME this year. The Ethiopians invaded Somalia on Dec. 24, and the advance was a quick and bloody triumph. Meles' forces killed thousands of UIC fighters within days, captured Mogadishu and installed the internationally recognized government in exile, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). In a Jan. 5 message, bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urged Somalis to "consume" the "crusader" Ethiopians "as the lions eat their prey." But he was too late. Thousands of UIC fighters and refugees were streaming south from Mogadishu toward Ras Kamboni and Kenya.

It was then that the U.S. seized its moment. "We saw what was happening as the chance of a lifetime," says a Pentagon officer--"a very rare opportunity for the U.S. to move directly against al-Qaeda and get these terrorists." Meles says, "U.S. air assets were used for bombing on two occasions." The first attack was on the night of Jan. 7, after U.S. special-operations forces picked up intelligence that Fazul and Aden Hashi Ayro--a notorious and ruthless Afghanistan-trained militia leader--were riding in a convoy close to Ras Kamboni. According to an Ethiopian officer who was present, a local herdsman was paid to walk past the convoy and drop an electronic beam, which guided the air strike. Ayro was wounded. Initial media reports said Fazul was dead, but U.S. officials now believe he was not in the convoy after all and is currently hiding in Kenya. U.S. Deputy Assistant of Defense for African Affairs Theresa Whelan said on Jan. 17 that eight people were killed in the attack. A Pentagon officer insists there were "no civilian casualties, no collateral damage." Meles says, "There may have been some family members of these radical Islamists with them, but this was not by any imagination a civilian or mixed convoy."

On Jan. 23, the U.S. struck again, close to the border with Kenya. (Though the nearest human habitation is the Somalian village of Waldena, GPS receivers show the strike site is just inside Kenya.) The wreckage of a convoy was plainly visible in June, with six 10-ton trucks flipped on their sides or backs and with shell casings and live rounds littering an area as big as three football fields.

It is not known who died there. But at some point in the operation, the U.S. got lucky. According to a Pentagon official, the U.S. and Ethiopians learned some months after the strike that al-Sudani, the bombmaker for the 1998 embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, had been killed. "Al-Sudani is dead, done for, six feet under and pushing up daisies," says the official. Witnesses say during operations in the south, Ethiopian helicopters and planes hit vehicles up and down the border, unwittingly killing al-Sudani. According to local villagers, his body now lies in an unmarked grave among the thorn trees and scrubland swamps.

The U.S. has not publicly acknowledged al-Sudani's death, nor has it been eager to disclose the scale and scope of American antiterrorist operations carried out at roughly the same time. But they were substantial, with a significant naval presence offshore, special-operations forces and missions flown from nearby airfields, all designed to degrade the capacity of local Islamist militants. In early January, says Abdirashid Mohamed Hiddig, a member of the Somalian parliament, the Ethiopians asked him to fly to Kulbio, Somalia. There, he says, U.S. plainclothes personnel and military personnel were sifting prisoners, looking for al-Qaeda. Human Rights Watch, a humanitarian organization based in New York City, says Ethiopian and Kenyan security forces detained hundreds of suspects without charge, though most were released in May.

By summer, Ethiopian and U.S. officials were claiming that the little war in Somalia was over. Though his troops remained in Mogadishu, Meles told TIME that the operation was a "tremendous success." But the violence never disappeared. On June 1, a U.S. warship unleashed an artillery barrage on Puntland in northern Somalia, reportedly killing eight jihadis. In a four-day battle in the capital in April, some 1,000 Ethiopians and Somali rebels died. Fierce fighting broke out in Mogadishu again last month, after which tens of thousands more refugees fled the capital.

The Risk of Regional War

The transitional government in Mogadishu has fractured, with clan loyalties trumping unity. In October, President Yusuf Abdullah fired Prime Minster Ali Mohammed Gedi. (On Nov. 24, in the latest attempt to forge a working government, Nur Hassan Hussain, the longtime president of Somalia's Red Crescent Society, was sworn in as Prime Minister.) Government forces stormed the U.N. World Food Program compound in October and briefly took its head of mission hostage. And the jihadis are regrouping. Ayro, now recovered, is back in Mogadishu at the head of the UIC militia. He recently issued a proclamation hailing bin Laden and calling on Somalis to target peacekeepers. In September the U.S. embassy in Nairobi publicly warned it had intelligence that Islamist terrorists were planning to kidnap Western tourists from beaches in Kenya.

The greatest risk is of a regional war, fusing conflicts in Somalia; the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia, where Eritrea-backed separatists are fighting the Ethiopian army; and across the Ethiopia-Eritrea border. Ken Menkhaus, a professor of political science at Davidson College, stresses "the danger ... that all these interlocking conflicts will ignite a larger conflagration." Eritrea is now the base for an alliance of Somali nationalist rebels, the UIC and separatist Ethiopian rebels from the Ogaden National Liberation Front. In July the U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia, based in Nairobi, said Eritrea was supplying Somali insurgents with "huge" amounts of arms. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has expressed serious concern about a military buildup along the Eritrea-Ethiopia border, where the U.N. has had peacekeepers since 2001. In Somalia, a small African Union peacekeeping force of 1,600 Ugandans is charged with keeping the factions apart. On Nov. 23, the U.S. State Department said it was committed to resolving the "political and humanitarian crises in Somalia by working ... [to] facilitate the urgent deployment of additional peacekeeping forces" there.

It is far from clear how the U.S. might do that. Yet, however terrible war in the Horn of Africa may be, experience suggests that hunger kills more people there than guns do. According to the U.N., since Ethiopia invaded Somalia, 503,000 refugees have fled Mogadishu to live in hovels of twigs and plastic bags in the bush. A year ago, there were 370 refugee families at a refugee camp 30 miles (48 km) from Mogadishu. Six months later, the camp sheltered 20,000 people. Hawa Abdi, a Somali doctor after whom the camp is named, told TIME this summer, "We need doctors. We need medicine. We need food. We need shelter. But for that, we need peace." It hasn't come yet.

With reporting by Kassahun Addis / Addis Ababa, Bruce Crumley / Paris, Christopher Thompson / London, Adam Zagorin / Washington