How shortage of equipment, operation flaws cost Amisom 19 soldiers

Amisom troops display some of the weapons captured from al-Shabaab in Marka, Somalia, recently. DPU photo

What you need to know:

  • Special report. It is a year since al-Shabaab fighters killed 19 Ugandan soldiers and overran their base in Somalia. In yesterday’s special report, we revealed how chronic shortages of key equipment and operational mistakes were behind the attack. Today, we reveal how communication gaps and disagreements among commanders saw UPDF lose many men.
  • Two days after the attack Col Mutambi was suspended, alongside Maj Mwesigye and Capt Ayesiga. Both the UPDF and Amisom appointed separate boards of inquiry into the attack on Janaale. The UPDF board of inquiry placed responsibility for the attack on the commander of BG XVI and the commander of the 13th Battalion

Kampala. Significantly, relations between Col Mutambi and Maj Mwesigye had also suffered. “Let’s just say they were not the best of friends,” a military source said, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Although of junior rank to the BGXVI commander, Maj Mwesigye was believed to enjoy the ears and confidence of higher ups in the UPDF echelons, which made it difficult to deal with the litany of complaints that continued to pour forth from his charges.
This icy relationship and the events immediately after the meeting of August 27 were to have fatal consequences. The meeting at the BG headquarters near Marka had ended mid-morning and Maj Mwesigye was given a set of IFVs to transport him to Quoryoole detachment where he was to assess the situation by 5pm and attack the al-Shabaab positions the following day.
However, Maj Mwesigye only arrived in Quoryoole at 8pm when it was dark and too late to make an assessment for the attack. The convoy had lost more than 40 minutes when the vehicles got stuck on a slippery road between Balidamin and Mashalay but a subsequent report on the mission would allege “unwillingness of the commander to execute the mission by creating unnecessary delays”.
There were further delays on August 28 due to a visit to the area by Lt Gen Charles Angina, the UPDF’s deputy Chief of Defence Forces (D/CDF), and on August 29 when the Somali President similarly visited, forcing the commanders to temporarily hand over to his use and protection the only set of IFVs they had.
The operation resumed on August 30 at 2pm when the Amisom fighters pulled out of Quoryoole with two tanks and 30 soldiers in three APCs headed for Tawakali-Baseri village, a forested area where al-Shabaab fighters had been spotted.
Eight kilometres into the journey, one of the APCs got a flat tyre that took an hour to fix. A kilometre later, one of the tanks broke down – this required an hour-and-a-half to fix. By nightfall, the soldiers were still a kilometre from Cerejedes, a small town before Tawakali and decided to encamp for the night.
A little after 7am on the morning of August 31, the armed convoy rolled into Cerejedes. As soon as the drove past the small outpost, however, they came upon a thick forest as well as a canal across which lay a small bridge too flimsy to take the weight of the heavy military vehicles.
The Ugandan soldiers sent in a drone to recce Tawakali but they had already lost the element of surprise and the spy plane only caused excitement among the locals – hardly the stuff of covert intelligence operations. The al-Shabaab fighters were nowhere to be seen. The Ugandan soldiers turned back only two kilometres from their objective, and headed to their base to plan afresh.
An internal report would later blame the failed mission on lack of proper guides, the poor state of the roads and the vehicles, the timing of the visit of the Somali President, as well as “unwillingness to execute the mission” on the part of the commander.

Amisom troops during an operation in Somalia recently. Photo by DPU


“The commander had mixed feeling on the mission and he thought the deployment was a ploy to let him not meet with the D/CDF who was coming the following day,” the report noted. “He was even [heard] by almost all officers in Quoryoole talking to the D/CDF on phone that he was diversionary [sic] taken to Quoryoole and there was no enemy in his [area of responsibility]. This resulted in a lack of cohesion as he could not listen to all the staff officers he was given to work with from the BG HQs.”
The UPDF’s official inquiry into the matter would note an “untamed breakdown” of communication between Maj Mwesigye and his fellow officers in the BG HQ. He would accuse them of refusing to take his telephone calls and they, in turn, would accuse him of being insubordinate and not being a team player.
But that post-mortem was yet to come. The in-fighting within the 13th Battalion, coupled with the entire battle group having to share only one set of IFVs had allowed the al-Shabaab fighters to melt away into the forests. They were to reappear like angels of death.
Trojan horses
September 1, 2015, was the first anniversary of the death of al-Shabaab leader Godane. It was highly likely that the militant group would try to mark the day with a show of might and intent. After successfully attacking military detachments and convoys belonging to the Burundi and Ethiopian soldiers, the Ugandan contingent was a likely next candidate.

The previous day, as the pre-emptive mission fell apart in Tawakali, three Somali locals visited the detachment at Janaale. One of them, Abdulai, had previously worked as an interpreter and also sold food to the Ugandan soldiers. He had disappeared on June 15 when the previous battalion rotated out but had turned up with his father and uncle.

After initially being denied entry, the three men were let in and allowed to spend the night at the detachment, where they reportedly spent most of the night communicating on their mobile telephones. An inquiry would later note “a high likelihood” that the trio coordinated the attack that started later that night, by giving al-Shabaab invaluable information on the state of alertness at the detachment as well as the location of the support weapons.
Daybreak brought death and destruction. The Ugandan soldiers fought bravely. Many of them were highly experienced fighters who had seen combat in Somalia and in the Central African Republic, but many variables were not in their favour. The detachment at Janaale had previously been occupied by battalion-sized troops, somewhere in the range of 500-800. When BGXVI arrived there were only 61 soldiers at Janaale. Col Mutambi had deployed an extra 59 to raise the force level to 120 but the position was still too big for them to defend.
In addition, the detachment was less than 100 metres away from a major road next to which was an old disused canal that gave the attackers cover. The killing ground had also not been cleared as directed and to the east of the detachment was a grove of mango trees that allowed the attackers to spy on the position and gave cover to the snipers. To the south lay a swamp that trailed off to River Shabelle whose three major bridges were neither protected nor secured.

Al-Shabaab had started their attack by targeting two major bridges and blowing them up with donkeys laden with explosives. This hemmed in the Ugandan soldiers in a detachment that was already isolated and made it even harder to reinforce. As the attack on the base raged and as daylight appeared rapidly, it became clear that the rising sun was setting on the lives of many fighting men.

No retreat, no surrender
As soon as the dreaded call came in from Capt Ayesiga, Col Mutambi scrambled troops under the command of Lt Col Moses Kibirango, the battle group’s second-in-command, to reinforce those under attack at Janaale.
The reinforcements set off within 30 minutes of the distress call but were struck by an IED in Gondwe as separate al-Shabaab fighters ambushed them to slow them down. Two tanks were scrambled with the faster APCs in the lead but the personnel carriers got stuck in the mud.

The tanks then took the lead but one was then also struck by an IED. The first breakdown took three hours to fix, the second two hours. Eventually the damaged tank was removed from the road and the reinforcements proceeded but as they approached Janaale, the tank in the lead fell into the River Shabelle, only two kilometres from the base under attack. It was not raining but for the Ugandan soldiers fate was pouring misfortunes.
Over in the detachment, the soldiers had been hamstrung by the lack of second-line ammunition and had fought with their backs to the wall while effecting a tactical withdraw. The Ugandans held off the attackers but at around 8am the al-Shabaab militants took out the 14.5mm anti-aircraft gun and the battle was effectively over.

The delays
Pinned back by the IEDs, the ambush, the poor state of the roads, the poor mechanical state of the IFVs, and the loss of a tank in the river, it took the reinforcements nearly nine hours to cover a distance of 25 kilometres. By the time the reinforcement arrived at Janaale in the afternoon, al-Shabaab had charged guns, ammo and assorted materiel and withdrawn. Nineteen Ugandan soldiers lay dead, according to an official inquiry later by the UPDF. It was the highest number of soldiers killed in a single battle in the war. Another 19 had been wounded (a separate report from Amisom put the dead at 21 and the injured at 27) and one, Sgt. Joseph Yazid Masasa, was missing in action.
Details of al-Shabaab casualties weren’t clear but Amisom intelligence sources put them at 45 killed in action and over 60 wounded. The official UPDF inquiry put it higher at around 100, citing its own intelligence sources. The attackers did not have time to line up and parade the bodies of the dead Ugandan soldiers, as they had done in previous incidents, with one account putting this down to the need for them to remove their own dead before reinforcements arrived.

Epilogue
Two days after the attack Col Mutambi was suspended, alongside Maj Mwesigye and Capt Ayesiga. Both the UPDF and Amisom appointed separate boards of inquiry into the attack on Janaale. The UPDF board of inquiry placed responsibility for the attack on the commander of BG XVI and the commander of the 13th Battalion.
“The BG Commander had sufficient information about the attack on Janaale and did nothing more than send a message to the commanding officer 13 Battalion to be on the alert and asked him to request for what he needs to respond to the attack,” it noted.
“The commander 13th battalion had sufficient information about the impending attack, he too should have responded by taking extra operational measures to reinforce and increase military presence.”
Col Mutambi was demoted to Lt Col in May 2016, arrested in July and arraigned before the General Court Martial in August. Maj Mwesigye, who was in charge of the battalion, is yet to be arraigned.
The UPDF boards of inquiry, however, noted structural challenges in its deployment in Somalia. The large area of responsibility assigned to Uganda “overstretched the UPDF to unimaginable extents” according to the inquiry report, while the poor state of equipment has also cost Amisom troops lives.
“No single convoy can travel and make it to its destination without a breakdown of the IFVs. The constant breakdown of IFVs is contributory to the delayed delivery of reinforcement in case of attack,” the report notes. “In fact this is what delayed the reinforcement for Janaale.”
In addition, the UPDF decried the lack of air power, including helicopter gunships, which could have come to the rescue of the troops in Janaale faster. Gathering moss on the cold, rainy slopes of Mt Kenya, the crashed UPDF helicopters had, in their absence, claimed more lives in Somalia, several hundred kilometres away.


Postscript
Less than five months after the attack on Janaale, al-Shabaab fighters attacked a Kenya Defence Forces detachment at El Adde, killing dozens of fighters.
A report issued by the International Peace Institute, a New York-based think tank, detailed the shortcomings.
They included a poor operational set up, a small number of troops holding a large and poorly sited defensive position, poor relations with locals, poor coordination among Amisom troops, and the lack of support weapons, including air power. It could easily have been a report about Leego or Janaale. The more things had changed the more they had remained the same.

How al-shabaab attacked

The fighters. Al-Shabaab mobilised a formidable force of between 300 and 500 fighters. They came in three waves.

1. Fresh recruits. At the front crawling through the long grass, were fresh recruits whose job was to sneak as close as possible to the razor-wire-and-sandbag perimeter of the detachment then lob hand grenades inside.

2. Experienced fighters. Providing covering fire behind the fresh recruits was a formation of more experienced fighters armed with PK assault rifles – a Soviet-made general-purpose machinegun – as well as AK-47 and G3 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and 82mm B10 recoilless rifles, which pack enough punch to knock out a tank.

3. Snipers. Lurking at the rear were snipers in helmets and body armour, some suspected to be foreign-born fighters, who picked off their targets with deadly precision.
Fighting vehicles. To support the infantry were three Toyota Land Cruisers and a Mitsubishi Fuso lorry mounted with 12.7mm and 14.5mm single-barrel anti-aircraft guns and converted into “technicals”, the Somali version of rugged 4x4s modified into improvised fighting vehicles.