How leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa was killed

Soldiers show arms captured from combatants in Somalia. Monitor Photo

What you need to know:

Two battle fronts. Even though it has not been as widely reported, Amisom forces were fighting a war within a war; on the one hand you had the al-Shabaab as the more visible enemy, and then there was the international terrorist collective, al-Qaeda lurking in the shadows.

Mogadishu. Under pressure from NATO forces in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda elements had taken advantage of the chaos in Somalia to set up havens and form new alliances. The situational analysis of their presence in the Horn of Africa was alarming. It was understood that the wastelands of Somalia’s lawless and ungoverned frontier regions had become a hotbed for extremist activity.

Known high value al-Qaeda targets were believed to be hiding in Somalia where they had inserted themselves into the ongoing clan wars.

More than 10 years before the first Ugandan boots set foot in Mogadishu, suspected al-Qaeda operators, ghosting out of their Somalia bolt-holes had carried out a most heinous near-simultaneous attack in the East Africa region. Bombs set off by the group flattened buildings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

The bombings on August 7, 1998, killed 224 people, including 12 US citizens, and injured thousands in Nairobi. Ten people died and more than 70 were injured in Tanzania.

It is suspected that a similar strike on the US mission in Uganda had been averted, thanks to a higher state of vigilance of the security services here. No public affirmation has ever been made of this suspicion though.
And so, for 13 years, the American government had been hunting for one Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. An investigation had revealed that Fazul was the brains behind the East Africa bombings. American and East African lives had been lost; there would be hell to pay.

Wanted man
The Americans had placed a bounty of $5 million (Shs17b, at the current dollar rate) in 2001 on this terrorist’s head. Born in the tiny Indian Ocean island nation of Comoros, Fazul was considered by the US Federal Bureau for Investigation to be one of al-Qaeda’s “most dangerous and most capable leader” now that Osama bin Laden had all but disappeared from the face of the earth.

In absentia, Fazul was indicted by a New York district court for his suspected involvement in the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam outrage and placed very high on the list of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists.

The same Fazul was held responsible for the November 2002 terror bombing of a hotel in Mombasa and the attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner with surface to air missiles. This very dangerous man was also believed to have been amongst the planners of the deadly July 2010 twin bombings in Kampala.

As part of the global ‘war against terror’, the Amisom expedition, therefore, sought to both stabilise the country, while at the same time covertly working closely with US agents to ferret out al-Qaeda leadership targets known to be running riot in Somalia.

Sometime between 2010 and 2011, ‘intelligence chatter’ intercepted off al-Shabaab communications, disclosed the electrifying information that Fazul was in Somalia. Not only was the ‘butcher of Dar and Nairobi’ here, he was seated amongst the several non-Somalis who had risen to top leadership positions in the echelons of power, ‘deep cover’ sources inside al-Shabaab confirmed.

Fazul had had a long history of activity in Somalia, dating back to 2006 when he first popped up in the ranks of the Islamists.
Capturing or killing this person was a mission imperative in the context of the second shadowy war Amisom forces were waging parallel to their more publicised objective of sanitising Somalia.

In early 2011, the UPDF Battle Groups Six and Seven had set out on the ‘surge’ out of Mogadishu. Energised by the authorisation of offensive operations (a Chapter 7 peace enforcement mandate under the UN Charter), the Ugandans had neutralised the enemy firing positions at the notorious and deadly Kilometre 4 junction, liberated the terror outfit’s economic lifeline of Bakara Market and forced them into retreat out of Mogadishu.

So relentless was the coordinated advance of Ugandan and Burundi contingents, in spite of the sometimes limited resources and equipment at their disposal, that al-Shabaab was barely hanging on in Afgooye outside the capital Mogadishu.

On June 7, 2011, a unit of UPDF forces operating around Afgooye, acted on a tip-off, plotted for and lay in wait for what looked like a senior terrorist leader. Somali government forces set up a roadblock nearby. It was Fazul they would get, but they did not know it then.

On the morning of that day, Fazul was travelling in a Toyota Surf 4x4 with his driver, a one-legged man, and three or four others when they were stopped at the checkpoint southwest of Mogadishu at about 11:15pm The Toyota had been seen speeding from Afgooye towards Lido Beach in Mogadishu.

The Lido Beach area was known to be festering with large numbers of foreign fighters fighting inside al-Shabaab ranks.

Brig Paul L’Okech (then the over-all commander of the Ugandan Contingent in Amisom) recalls that Fazul and five others met their death in a hail gunfire at a place called X-Control Afgooye. X-Control was the junction connecting the road from Afgooye to Mogadishu.

Soldiers show arms captured from combatants in Somalia. Monitor Photo

Marked route
The tip-off earlier received by UPDF intelligence was that “strange people” had been using that route to slip in and out of the Somali capital.

So, Brig L’Okech, working closely with the former Somali government army Chief of Staff, Gen Abdikarim Yusuf Dhagabadan (Gen Dhagabadan was killed in November last year by al-Shabaab in a suicide attack), decided to stage a night ambush at the X-junction checkpoint.
“They (Fazul and group) didn’t know there was a roadblock when they saw the checkpoint manned by the government soldiers… ,” Brig L’Okech says.

When Fazul and his group reached the checkpoint, they were asked to identify themselves. The driver identified his passenger as an elder in the community. He was then asked to turn on the light inside the vehicle. He hesitated, then suddenly shifted into reverse gear and desperately tried to spin it back in the direction of Afgooye.

Hell broke loose, one of the five occupants lifted his weapon and let off a burst of automatic gunfire at the soldiers manning the checkpoint. The ensuing firefight was brief but brutal, with the one-legged man later reported to have put up quite a fight. Five occupants of the Toyota were soon dead, only one individual escaped alive. A number of Somali government troops at the checkpoint were injured in this exchange. The car was riddled with bullet holes.
Gen Dhagabadan, who had been monitoring the situation, briefed Brig L’Okech.

Equipment, money found
A quick check of the blood-soaked vehicle revealed quite a find. Very modern sniper rifles, $40,000 in cash and laptops were retrieved. The occupants were carrying American and Cameroonian passports. The American passport found on what would later be determined to be Fazul’s body had an issue date of April 13, 2009, and it indicated that he had left South Africa for Tanzania on March 19 and was granted a visa there.

The bodies were buried, but information retrieved from one of the laptops the next day revealed that one of the men who had been killed was not an ordinary terrorist.

With alarm bells ringing loudly, there was a flurry of communication between Amisom HQ, UGABAG field commanders around Afgooye, with the Somalis and American agents.

Orders were given for the bodies to be exhumed and secured until US forensic specialists arrived. “The Americans came and did DNA testing and found it was Fazul,” says Brig Lokech.

Other sources, who will remain anonymous, say that on top of revelations contained in the laptop, the Americans had tapped a phone conversation of someone calling from Canada in the hours following the X-Junction shoot-out, telling someone that Fazul had been killed.

Acting on that phone tap, they emphasised to Brig L’Okech and senior Somali army officers the need to secure the bodies of the people they had killed the previous day for DNA tests.

The DNA tests proved that the hunt for al-Qaeda’s top dog in East Africa was over. Fazul had been killed.
Of interest will be the fact that Fazul was eliminated just weeks after al-Qaeda’s supreme leader, Osama bin Laden was himself killed by an American SEAL team in Pakistan. Fazul’s death sent shock waves throughout the terrorists community in Somalia and East Africa.

Days after his killing, al-Shabaab fighters launched a spree of revenge attacks against UPDF positions. “There were a lot of attacks on positions around African Village. There were also suicide bombers at the Sea port and our positions on Maka al-mukarama Street and in Shigare,” says Brig L’Okech. But the Ugandans were valiant in defence and ultimately prevailed.

Fazul’s death occurred at a time when bitter wrangling was known to have broken out between foreign and local commanders of al-Shabaab. It is probable that the tip-off that led to his killing could have been sprung from that internecine strife.
Before Fazul was killed, the foreign fighters had started accusing al-Shabaab leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane (also known as Mukhtar Abu-Zubeyr) of not doing enough to stop the advancing Amisom forces and Somali government soldiers.

Infighting
Abu Yusuf al-Qaadi (spokesperson of the leader of Ahlu Sunna Waljamaa, a Sufi-based clan militia opposed to al-Shabaab), was in the same week quoted saying Fazul was set up by local Somali al-Shabaab commanders because of a power struggle. There are reports that Fazul was, in fact, set up by Godane.

The then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the death of Fazul as a big blow to al-Qaeda. In the same month of June 2011, American drones attacked al-Shabaab positions in Kisimayo, killing another senior foreign commander, Ibrahim Hajj Maal, an Afghanistani. The attack also wounded a British-born jihadist, Bilal el Berjawi.
With these spate of senior terrorists’ deaths, and losing ground to coalition forces, the Somali communities around further lost their already flagging confidence in al-Shabaab as a credible entity. Elders started opposing recruitment of local youths into al-Shabaab.

A key milestone had been marked in the story of the second front Amisom forces were fighting in, in Somalia …

Who was Fazul abdullah mohammed?

Multiple sources say Fazul, also known as Fadil Haruna, was born in 1974 in Comoros, off the Mozambique coast. He joined al-Qaeda after travelling to Pakistan in 1990. At the age of 19, he was a member of the al-Qaeda team that participated in the ‘Battle of Mogadishu’ in October 1993 that left 18 American soldiers dead.

He was responsible for planning the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the November 2002 attacks in Mombasa, Kenya in which a car bomb struck a hotel and missiles were fired at an Israeli airliner. The documents found on his body showed how al-Qaeda was planning attacks in London and the US.
Before his death, the FBI’s website stated that he “likes to wear baseball caps and tends to dress casually. He is very good with computers.”

The Islamist, who was fluent in five languages, served as the intelligence chief for the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) during its reign in 2006 before the Ethiopians flushed them out of Mogadishu. The reader will remember that al-Shabaab was born out of ICU.
In November 2009, Osama bin Laden named Fazul as the head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. He replaced one Nabhan, who was killed by US special forces.
Fazul’s promotion was announced at a ceremony hosted and attended by top al-Shabaab leaders, including Sheikh Mukhtar Abu Zubayr, the terror group’s spiritual leader.
“I will honestly perform my duties following my appointment to this new big position by Sheikh Osama bin Laden,” Fazul was quoted in the media then.

Fazul had previously thought to have been killed in a US naval strike in 2006 after Ethiopia invaded Somalia to bring down the Islamic Courts Union. He apparently survived that strike but could not dodge the bullet on June 7, 2011.