‘Nobody is watching’ : America’s hidden war in Somalia
Paul Salopek, Chicago Tribune, Nov 24 2008 (extracts)
BERBERA PRISON, Somalia – To glimpse America’s secret war in Africa, you must ask to speak to a prisoner named Mohamed Ali Isse. Isse, 36, is a convicted murderer and jihadist. He is known among his fellow prisoners as “the man with the American thing in his leg.” That “thing” is a stainless steel surgical pin screwed into his bullet-shattered femur, courtesy, he says, of the US Navy. How it got there, and how Isse ended up here, is a story that the US government probably would prefer to remain untold. Isse was a pharmacy owner from the isolated town of Buro in Somaliland, a parched northern enclave that declared independence from Somalia in the early 1990s. He is serving a life sentence for organizing the killings of four foreign aid workers in late 2003 and early 2004. Isse still maintains his innocence. Much of Isse’s account of his capture and imprisonment was independently corroborated by Western intelligence analysts, Somali security officials and court records in Somaliland, where the wounded jihadist was tried and jailed for murdering the aid workers. Those sources say Isse was snatched by the US after fleeing to the safe house of a notorious Islamist militant in Mogadishu. How that operation unfolded on a hot June night in 2004 reveals the extent of American clandestine involvement in Somalia’s chaotic affairs — and how such anti-terrorism efforts appear to have backfired.
“I captured Isse for the Americans,” said Mohamed Afrah Qanyare. “The Americans contracted us to do certain things, and we did them. Isse put up resistance so we shot him. But he survived.” Qanyare is a member of Somalia’s weak transitional government. Four years ago, his unit helped CIA create a mercenary force called the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism in Somalia. The unit cobbled together some clan militias — including gangs that had attacked US forces in the early 1990s — to confront a rising tide of Islamic militancy in Somalia’s capital. The Somalis on the CIA payroll engaged in tit-for-tat exchanges of kidnappings and assassinations with extremists. And Isse was one of their catches. He was wounded in a CIA-ordered raid on his Mogadishu safe house in June 2004, according to Matt Bryden, one of the world’s leading scholars of the Somali insurgency who has access to intelligence regarding it. They say Isse was then loaded aboard a US military helicopter summoned by satellite phone and was flown, bleeding, to an offshore US vessel. “He saw white people in uniforms working on his body,” said Isse’s Somali defense lawyer, Bashir Hussein Abdi, describing how Isse was rushed into a ship-board operating room. “He felt the ship moving. He thought he was dreaming.” Navy doctors spliced a steel rod into Isse’s bullet-shattered leg, according to Abdi. Every day for about a month afterward, Isse’s court depositions assert, plainclothes US agents grilled the bedridden Somali at sea about Al Qaeda’s presence.
Agency spokesman George Little declined to comment on Isse’s case. The CIA never has publicly acknowledged its operations in Somalia. The US Navy conceded Isse had stayed aboard one of its vessels. In a terse statement, Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet that patrols the Gulf of Aden, said only that the Navy was “not able to confirm dates” of Isse’s imprisonment. For reasons that remain unclear, he was later flown to Camp Lemonier, a US military base in Djibouti, Somali intelligence sources say, and from there to a clandestine prison in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Isse and his lawyer allege he was detained there for six weeks and tortured by Ethiopian military intelligence with electric shocks. Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and office of prime minister did not respond to queries about Isse’s allegations. However, security officials in neighboring Somaliland did confirm that they collected Isse from the Ethiopian police at a dusty border crossing in late 2004. “The man with the American thing in his leg” was interrogated again. After a local trial, he was locked in the ancient Berbera prison. “It doesn’t matter if he is guilty or innocent,” said Abdi, the defense lawyer. “Countries like Ethiopia and America use terrorism to justify this treatment. This is not justice. It is a crime in itself.” The CIA’s anti-terror mercenaries in Mogadishu may have kidnapped a dozen or more wanted Islamists for the Americans, intelligence experts say. But their excesses ended up swelling the ranks of their enemy, the Islamic Courts Union militias. “It was a stupid idea,” said Bryden, the security analyst who has written extensively on Somalia’s Islamist insurgency. “It actually strengthened the hand of the Islamists and helped trigger the crisis we’re in today.”
Niqnaq 