Meria
Elder Lister
This book review took longer than the purge at Jubilee Headquarters, but we can finally announce the sighting of the white smoke over the chimney at Papa Roman’s cot.
When your teacher of English instructed you to open your dictionaries and search for the word ‘masterpiece’, you could have shown them the cover of this book, and there wouldn’t have been any difference.
Because we have to begin from somewhere, I will start this write-up with the assumption that we all know, or at least have heard of, Al Qaeda – and if you haven’t I’m sure your village has a famous dog called Osama, every village does, including mine. If we all know Osama, then Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are like Jacob Zuma and polygamy, Kalonzo and that red-green fruit, or Ruto and premium tears.
When Al Qaeda wanted to expand their caliphate beyond Afghanistan and its environs, it is to Somalia they looked to for a base in East Africa. Unlike many other African countries, Somalia's population was almost entirely Sunni Muslim, and many Somalis speak Arabic, the lingua franca of Al Qaeda. Tactically, the long coastline and porous borders between Kenya and Ethiopia made it easy to slip in and out of the Somalia. If Al Qaeda needed a country in Africa they could launch a base in, then Somalia had ticked all the boxes.
The story begins that long before Al Qaeda arrived, Somalia was marred in chaos, clan-infighting, and an irreversible breakdown of law and order. Mogadishu, the capital, in particular, was a living hellhole.
Rich people were being kidnapped for ransom, rich and poor paid fees to get past roadblocks erected by clan warlords. Every day of life was a high stakes gamble and the people of Mogadishu were sick and tired of it all. They needed someone who could rise and attempt to restore some semblance of order to their violent and lawless city.
Then up stepped the Islamic Courts Union.
The Islamic Courts were created in Mogadishu in the mid-1990s by clan elders and businessmen trying to reestablish order amid Somalia's anarchy and violence. Judges in the Islamic courts used interpretations of Islamic Law to handle everything - from property disputes, to divorce cases, to restitution claims for murders.
Over time, the clan-based courts gained influence and power and set up security forces to reduce crime. In 2000, they banded together as the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU, to better coordinate and mediate cross-clan affairs. In the absence of a working law enforcement or justice system in Somalia, the courts filled an important role.
Their prominence, however, made the courts a natural target for infiltration by young upcoming jihadists and Salafists. Using clan connections and influence, the jihadists gradually worked their way into the Islamic court system. Jihadist leaders who became court officials included Ahmed Abdi Godane, Ibrahim al-Afghani, Mukhtar Robow, Hassan al-Turki, Aden Ayrow and Hassan Dahir Arweys.
If you forget those names over there, never forget that Ahmed Abdi Godane remains Al-Shabaab’s best-known, longest-reigning, and most powerful emir. That’s how the Al Shabaab gained foothold in Somalia, before carving out a niche for itself as the most dreaded terror outfit North of Holili, South of Bosaso.
It might interest you to note that Al Shabaab is the Arabic name for “youth”. The full name for the terror group is "Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen" abbreviated as HSM. Al-Shabaab was started by those youths over there with the objective of the establishment of an Islamic state in Somalia, based on Islamic law and the elimination of what they called foreign 'infidel' influence.
This book deeply researched and offers a geopolitical view of the whole fight in the Horn of Africa. One of the greatest fallacies demystified in this book is that Al Shabaab is a ragtag outfit that is radarless, planless, idealess and all those things people in government had called those in the opposition before they personified the traits themselves.
You will learn quickly while reading this book that Al Shabaab might be a lot of things, but disorganization isn't one of them. These guys are one of the most organized terror outfits you can have around, and that every action they take (from beheading traitors, to bombing Nairobi's Westgate Mall) must be passed through an elaborate power structure up to the top dog himself.
the leader of the Al Shabaab is referred to as the Emir, and, for the longest time, this guy was Godane. Under the emir there is the Deputy Emir, they even have a Cabinet composed of Ministers in charge of all those dockets your ordinary government would have. Under the security docket these guys run Al Shabaab like any other well-oiled lynchpin.
They have a Department of Intelligence, Rapid Response, Police and the guy in charge of the Defense themselves. When you hear the Al Shabaab beheading those who go against their cause, it is their Police department who bring these people to "justice". And their police are more feared by locals than even their soldiers.
The most ruthless arm, and the most revered of them all is their elite assassination unit called Amniyat. These people are bad news. They're the guys who take the oath to constantly be on deathwatch. They lurk around Mogadishu tracking government officials until it is time to pick them out from the crowd with sniper fire.
These guys are so daring one day one of their fighters perched on an AMISOM truck going back to the Presidential Palace, without being noticed, got flagged through the first and second gates inside the Palace, and just when he had one more gate to go to get to the President of Somalia, he got excited and jumped down the truck to start spraying bullets. Of course he got converted into a sieve, but the President got a wakeup call, and the point had been made.
Another thing we learn from this book is the role Nairobi has played in shaping the geopolitics in Somalia. This book makes you see Nairobi differently. Most of America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials assigned to gather intelligence in Somalia work from here. They sign deals with warlords here; they exchange the dollars for counter-terrorism efforts here. That US Embassy in Nairobi might be serving American interests in Kenya, but almost all diplomatic cables being sent to Washington about Somalia are fired from Gigiri. And you could see the point.
From this book, we also learn that a considerable number of Members of Somali Parliament live and have families in Nairobi. They spend a lot of time in those restaurants in downtown Nairobi killing boredom and sharing intel. Now you know why each time Kenya attempts to slide down the path of anarchy, the global community are always quick to come down here and box us into a man-made truce. This country, in the eyes of the world, is too big to fall.
The most riveting section of I enjoyed about this book is that chapter on how the US intelligence tracked down Al Shabaab leader Ahmed Godane using his phone signal.
We learn from this book that the US intelligence eventually found a way to infiltrate Al Shabaab and use their own fighters to cannibalize themselves. All they needed to do is to give these Al Shabaab spies special tracking devices to plant on specific US targets. These tracking devices could be special GPS gadgets, or just phones to be dropped into the cars of these targets with instructions that the phones be turned on once the targets were on the move.
This was because most of these targets used to have their meetings in villages that had many people and the US didn’t want to send drones to bomb these people when they were inside a crowd, for obvious reasons. So the spies would plant the phones on the cars of these targets and immediately the meetings were over and the targets started using lonely paths back to their hideouts, they would switch on the phones and the US drones would do the rest.
We learn from this book that the US have military bases specifically for launching these drones, one in Djibouti, Seychelles, Ethiopia, Mogadishu and Kismayu. You’re driving a Toyota SUV in the remote bushes of Lower Shebelle only to be hit by an unmanned drone sent from the base in Seychelles.
That’s how Ahmed Godane met his long-overdue death.
This guy had been on the tail of US intelligence agencies for years, and each time the US bases received a signal to send a hit squad to his location, they would lose his signal. Godane was sharp, played tricks with the minds of his assailants, he even had body doubles dressing like him and assigned mobile phones he had used before, so it was always difficult knowing which exact cellphone was the real Godane using.
But the clue finally came in the simplest of ways.
As it turns out, it is your family who will always sell you out. One day, Godane was busy meeting Al Shabaab leaders in some region when he felt the urge to go visit his family after the meeting. As usual the US intel guys were busy flagging off all those phones Godane had used before and picking the chatter, before they stumbled on a goldmine that would change the game forever.
The US had been monitoring the phones of all of Godane’s relatives and friends, and so when one of the phones sent a text message to Godane’s wife asking her if the children had already slept and alerting her he was coming home in a few, everything at the US drone command centre in Mogadishu stopped and all trackers alerted to run the details of those two phones exchanging messages asap. The book says that for years, the US had over forty people working on the Godane case alone.
Godane did not get to reach home. Once the forty-man hit squad on the Godane hunt had confirmed that the phone was indeed Godane speaking to the wife, within minutes US drones had appeared from the sky and released hellfire that was heard in the entire region, bringing an end to the man who had run Al Shabaab like a typical crackpot dictator, killing his critics at will.
I would have said I’ve never read anything more informative on the Al Shabaab issue than this book, but you will say I am a salt adder, and so allow me to leave you with a quote that sums up this outfit that doesn’t seem to go away even after getting hits after hits.
“Jihadists tend to have a long-term mindset; the military ideology they practice is guerilla. Al Shabaab will defy predictions of its demise because militant groups are like weeds who regenerate when their roots remain in the soil.”
And may the day break.
