From al-Shabaab to Boko Haram: We ignore African terror at our peril
When we think of Islamist terror, we think of the Middle East. But, as Kim Sengupta explains, in parts of Africa groups like al-Shabaab have considerable power – despite fractures in their ranks
After fleeing al-Shabaab in Somalia, the two men hid for a month in the Lacta forests on the Kenya borderlands. There were other defectors there, some living off the land, others using their guns to rob villages and travellers. All of them were fearful of the vengeful fighters they had left behind and, also, the retribution of state forces.
Both the men are of Somali background. One, Yasir, grew up in Germany and lived briefly in Britain. The other, Tawfiq, was born and raised in Kenya. Both had gone to Somalia following the call of jihad; both claim to have become disillusioned; both say they are seeking a new life away from violence.
The accounts they give, in a meeting at a small town in Kenya, are at times contradictory and evasive. But a lot of what they say appears, after cross-checking with other sources, to be true. And their deep apprehension about the uncertainties and dangers which lie ahead seem to be genuine.
The two men are afraid of al-Shabaab tracking them down, as they have done many times in the past with deserters. They are also afraid of Kenyan security forces: some returnees have been shot dead; others have disappeared.
Yasir is afraid of being imprisoned for a long time if he went back to Europe. This is the prospect faced by western jihadis: one that brings a warning from Yasir. Denied a legitimate return to their families in the west by threat of prosecution, these men may instead seek to take jihad home, going back as bombers. “They are angry, desperate, they have nowhere to go, it is a way of hitting back,” he explains.
The meeting was arranged through an intermediary after prolonged negotiations through the encrypted messaging service Telegram. Yasir, with a roundish face and restless eyes, has traces of an urban English accent in his rapid delivery. Tawfiq, taller, thinner, shyer, is more nervous, pulling at his wispy beard, his gaze turning repeatedly to the few other customers at the other end of the room.
The T-shirts they wear – Tawfiq’s with a picture of a Mombasa sunset; Yasir with one of Bob Marley – are fraying but clean. Their jeans are coated with red road dust. The man who brought them in a car dropped them a long way off. He made trips into Somalia and was apparently worried about being secretly photographed.
The meeting takes place a few days before the assault on the DusitD2 hotel complex in the Kenyan capital, in which 21 people were killed, the most violent act of terrorism in the city since the siege of Westgate shopping mall five-and-a-half years ago .
There is no reason to believe the two men are linked to the attack which followed. They left Somalia seven months ago and were, they repeatedly insist, staying as far away from Islamists in Kenya as possible. They left their hideout in Lacta, they say, after reports of al-Shabaab units infiltrating there to hunt renegades.
“Things are really bad in Somalia, there are a lot of people who went to fight there who now want to get out; this has been going on for a while now, people getting out, trying to get out ” says Yasir. “But we don’t know what is going to happen to us. It’s very dangerous.”
I see Yasir and Tawfiq just days after the Somali government arrested Mukhtar Robow, the former deputy leader of al-Shabaab and one of the founders of the Islamist group, who had switched sides 18 months earlier and was running for a regional presidency in Somalia.
The UN envoy to the country, Nicholas Haysom, was expelled by the Somali government for protesting about Robow’s detention. This in turn led UK defence secretary Gavin Williamson to cancel a visit to Somalia and call off a meeting with president Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed.
Robow’s arrest was viewed by western officials as a blow against getting others in the Islamist hierarchy to change sides and join the political process in a country which, with ongoing strife, has been kept afloat through international aid.
Many Somalis, however, are not prepared to forgive and forget. I was in Mogadishu at the time of the row over Robow, and it was clear there was a strong feeling among many that it was wrong to absolve the violent Islamists for the blood they had spilt.
Abdirahan Mohammed Hassan, a businessman whose 17-year-old son was killed in a Mogadishu bombing three years ago, was adamant: “This man has never said he was sorry, he has never condemned violence. Why should someone like that be allowed to be in politics. Americans and British are fighting al-Shabaab, so why do they want to allow people like that to establish themselves in the country? This will only create big problems in the future.”
Staying in the fight brings huge risks for Islamist foot soldiers like Yasir and Tawfiq. The American military recently claimed they had “eliminated” 52 fighters in one airstrike. They announced the death of 62 Islamists in two strikes six weeks ago: around 560 people are estimated to have been killed in American strikes since the start of 2017.
Tawfiq and Yasir are worried about the risk of being in Kenya, a country which has repeatedly experienced atrocities by infiltrators from Somalia and where the security forces, it has been claimed, have taken brutal, sometimes lethal, revenge on any returnee jihadis.
Tawfiq, 30, claims he is in the process of entering a rehabilitation programme run by Kenya’s National Counter Terrorism Centre. But he is very aware others have gone missing after being arrested by security forces, or at times after being taken away by unidentified gunmen in balaclavas.
“We don’t know what happens, people are lost and then they become dead,” he says. “Sometimes the families bring the bodies back from police stations. They say, ‘oh he was shot because he was trying to get away’ or ‘he attacked us’. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
Human rights groups such as Haki Africa have alleged repeated extra-judicial killings by state forces. The accusations are strongly denied by Kenyan authorities.
Jihadis from the west may be able to escape Kenya and go back home, but they would not be returning to freedom, with the very real prospect of being charged under anti-terrorist laws and imprisonment.
“They make it impossible for us to go back to our people, our families”, says Yasir. “They are forcing people to keep fighting because they know if they go back to their countries they will end up in jail. They don’t believe that people change. So what happens? If they are not allowed back legitimately, will these people go back to their countries to bomb?
“The Somalis can go over to their government, but that is not possible for foreigners. The Americans, the British, the Arabs, the Turks, they are all in Somalia. A foreigner [fighter] would be put on a plane, he would be gone, sent to prison in Europe or America. “
Yasir says he got into Somalia on his second attempt after travelling from Berlin where he had been living at the time. Part of his life, however, was spent with an aunt in southeast England. He does not want the location published because “she had nothing to do with my decision to make this journey, and it will only cause her problems. I made up my own mind to go to Somalia. I met people who felt the same way, but I made up my own mind.”
Why did he seek jihad? His answer echoed lines used by others who had followed the path – dissatisfaction with life in Europe, anger at western forces in Muslim countries, the desire to live in a land where there is “pure Islam”. Tawfiq’s reasoning, too,was religious, but he also wanted to fight Ethiopian troops who had been deployed in Somalia against the Islamists. One got the impression that the fact that others they knew had joined al-Shabaab was a major driving factor.
Yasir had met a group of young men in London a decade ago who raised funds and disseminated propaganda for al-Shabaab. At least some of them, we know, went on to undergo military training in Somalia as early as 2006.
Some, like Lebanese-born Bilal al-Berjawi, died there in airstrikes. Others tried to get to Somalia but failed. Among them was the Yemeni-born Mohammed Emwazi, who was detained in Tanzania and sent back to the UK. He would later become internationally notorious as Jihadi John, the masked Isis beheader of helpless hostages in Syria.
Yasir stresses he does not know Emwazi and, he wants to add, he does not approve of killing innocent captives. The brutality of al-Shabaab was one of the main reasons he wanted to leave, he claims. Tawfiq says he felt the same way. “They did some very bad things. There were some frightening people there. Some of them wanted to cut heads as well, they would often talk about it – some of them had actually done it,” he says.
According to Yasir, his childhood was disrupted with his family sending him at first to relations in Germany and then to England. There, he says, he visited a number of mosques in northwest and south London, including one in Greenwich.
Both Emwazi and Michael Adebolajo, one of the two men who murdered Lee Rigby, are said to have attended the Greenwich mosque. Yasir does not remember meeting Adebolajo. But he recalls Abdul Qadir Mumin, a preacher of Somali background who built up a following among the young in both Greenwich and another mosque in Leicester.
Mumin, who was being investigated by the police and security services in the UK, fled to Somalia in 2010 and joined al-Shabaab. Five years later he announced the launch of Isis in Somalia and pledged allegiance to the “caliph”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This started an internecine war among the Islamists, with al-Shabaab starting a campaign against the newly formed group, and driving into a remote region of northeast Somalia.
The body of Mahad Moalim, Isis deputy leader in Somalia, was found on the beach in Mogadishu last year. His family blamed al-Shabaab sleeper cells for carrying out an assassination. The Egyptian Abu Anas al-Misri, a foreign jihadi who joined Isis, was also killed by al-Shabaab.
Airstrikes by the Americans – as well as operations by western special forces, Somali and African Union troops – have led to an increasing numbers of al-Shebaab fighters being killed. With the rising death toll has come more suspicion of foreigners.
“You have the drones, the Americans in Somalia, in Djibouti, there are missiles, they are killing a lot, a lot of people,” says Tawfiq. The losses are followed by inquests by the Islamist hierarchy and angry accusations of betrayal. “The foreigners get a lot of the blame. And if they leave Somalia then that is seen as proof that they were always getting paid by the ‘kufirs’,” says Yasir.
Not everyone wants to do all the risky things and not many people want to be suicide bombers, that is the reason so many are leaving
That was certainly the view of al-Shabaab official Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab.
“The so-called deserters, most of them were already working as spies for the apostate regime. Once their cover was blown they fled for fear of being executed. Others were successfully apprehended before they could flee and be put on trial,” he said recently.
There is certainly plenty of evidence that volunteers from abroad are under scrutiny by al-Shabaab much more than other jihadi groups. Al-Qaeda – an affiliate of al-Shabaab, Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, Iraq and Libya – appear to regard jihadis from abroad with much less mistrust. This is said to be partly because the complex tribal and clan structure of Somalia, and the loyalties they create, are cultural bars to full acceptance of foreigners.
Tawfiq says: “I was lucky because of my Somali family. But the others, not just those from Europe, even the Africans, the Kenyans, the Tanzanians, they have problems often.”
The foreigners are predominantly used by al-Shabaab’s explosives unit, Itishadi, and the commanders of its infantry, Jabha, to carry out the riskier operations, including suicide bombings. Hardly any make it to the group’s leadership or Amniat, the feared internal security service.
“Not everyone wants to do all the risky things and not many people want to be suicide bombers, that is the reason so many are leaving,” says Yasir. “You can understand that.”
Paranoia about foreign spies has resulted in brutal purges. Ten were executed in October. Five of the killings took place in one day, in the southern Somali town of Jilib. Among those killed was Awale Ahmed Mohammed, a 32-year-old British citizen who left England for Somalia in 2013.
As dusk fell, Yasir and Tawfiq head off to meet their companion with the car, walking fast, dust spraying around their trainers, shoulders protectively hunched against any adversaries, glancing side to side
The charge against him was that he was supplying information to MI6 and the CIA. Three others killed that day, Abdi Aziz Abdisalim Sheik Hassan, 22, Mohammed Abdullahi Awil, 35, and 36-year-old Jeylani Abdullahi Nur (all believed to be from east African states), were accused of being American agents. Five more were killed in December after being accused of spying for the Kenyan and Ethiopian governments.
Awale Ahmed Mohammed was under a terrorism prevention and investigation measure to restrict his movement in the UK when he disappeared in 2013 from the An Noor mosque in Acton, west London, after cutting off his electronic tag and putting on a burka.
Do Yasir or Tawfiq know Mohammed? “There aren’t so many foreigners in Somalia as there are in places like Syria, so people do get to know each other. People from Europe liked seeing each other. It was good to meet Somalis from all kinds of places, Sweden, Canada...” says Yasir.
He stopped as if he realised it was not in his interest to say anything positive about the Islamists. “But of course there were lots of bad things... I don’t don’t know anything about this guy’s death. I left long before it happened.” He had no knowledge, either, of Mohammed’s alleged relationship with western agencies. “They say all sorts of things, but once people start talking about you, it is very difficult to be safe, these killings have been going on for a long time.”
Were there other aspects of life he liked with al-Shabaab? “Yeah, they believed in what they did. They were also not as backward as they are made out to be, they have a court system, they are firm with criminals, the women have joined their men out of choice...”
He says he has no knowledge of Mohammed’s alleged relationship with western agencies. “They say all sorts of things, but once people start talking about you it is very difficult to be safe – these killings have been going on for a long time.”
In 2011, Mohammed Harun Fazil, an al-Qaeda linked fighter from the Comoros, an archipelago off Africa, was shot dead. Then came a string of killings on the orders of the group’s leader, 36-year-old Ahmed Abdi Godane, also known as Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr.
Among those to be hunted down and shot were Habib Ghani, also known as Osama al-Britani, a Briton of Pakistani origin from west London who was close to Samantha Lewthwaite, the “White Widow” of one of the London 7/7 bombers. According to some reports they had married. Also to die was Omar Hammami, a US citizen from Alabama, who had a $5m bounty placed on his head by the FBI. One of the last tweets he posted as al-Shabaab fighters closed in on him was: “Abu Zubeyr has gone mad, he is starting a civil war.”
It is not just supposed passing of information for airstrikes which has fuelled the wariness among the Somali Islamists about the foreign volunteers. Mukhtar Robow, who had fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan, is the most senior member of the group to be turned, the latest in a long line from a project to “turn” extremists, and in which Britain is said to have played an important role.
The fractures among the Islamists have been taking place for a while.
In 2006 I met Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, leading the Islamists under the umbrella of the Islamic Courts Union, in Mogadishu just after they had taken over the Somali capital. He later became the head of the Somali government. I also met Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, then on the US government list of terrorists. He parted ways with Sheikh Sharif and became the spiritual mentor of al-Shabaab. He too is now in Mogadishu and involved in politics.
There was also Aweys’s protege Aden Hashi Ayro, a young man with an unnerving presence. The Americans claimed he was Osama bin Laden’s lieutenant in the Horn of Africa and killed him in an airstrike two years later.
The signs were already there of a future split in the Islamists’ ranks. Sheikh Aweys backed Robow against the homicidal Ahmed Abdi Godane. Following bitter strife, Robow fled to his Rahanweyn clan. He was then contacted by western intelligence and persuaded to defect in 2017. One of those with knowledge of the mission, a former British military officer, described how Robow had to be extracted by US special forces as al-Shabaab fighters closed in. A second operation had to be mounted subsequently to get his wives and family out.
“If someone as big as him gets arrested then what would happen to people like us?” asks Tawfiq. “ We hope that things become more peaceful, maybe then there will be a chance that people like us would be accepted back.”
As dusk falls, Yasir and Tawfiq head off to meet their companion with the car, walking fast, dust spraying around their trainers, shoulders protectively hunched against any adversaries, glancing side to side.
The attack on the Nairobi hotel complex, with suicide bombings, grenades and shootings, took place the following week by jihadis linked to al-Shabaab. The US airstrike in Somalia, killing 52 fighters, followed that. There is little chance, in this cycle of deaths, of peace with jihad breaking out anytime soon.
The future for Yasir, Tawfiq and others like them continue to look uncertain and bleak.
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