Jeremy Scahill: Al-Shabab’s Nairobi Mall Rampage Tied to “Disastrous” US Meddling in Somalia

Kenya has begun three days of mourning for at least 67 people killed in the siege of the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. The death count could still rise if more bodies are found in the rubble of the mall’s three floors. The Somali militant group al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for the attack, calling it retaliation for Kenyan military intervention in Somalia. We’re joined by independent journalist Jeremy Scahill, who reported from both Kenya and Somalia for his recent book and film, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. Scahill says the Bush administration’s decision to back Ethiopia’s overthrow of Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union in 2006 helped fuel al-Shabab’s growth into the dominant militant group that it is today: “Al-Shabab was largely a non-player in Somalia and al-Qaeda had almost no presence there. The U.S., by backing [Somali] warlords and overthrowing the Islamic Courts Union, made the very force they claimed to be trying to fight.”

TRANSCRIPT:

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Kenya, which has begun three days of mourning for at least 67 people who were killed in the siege of the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. The Somali militant group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for a coordinated attack. The death count could still rise if more hostages and their attackers are found buried in the rubble of the mall’s three floors that collapsed. On Tuesday, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta declared final victory four days after the attack began.

PRESIDENT UHURU KENYATTA: Ladies and gentlemen, as I had vowed earlier, we have ashamed and defeated our attackers. That part of our task has been completed by our multi-agency security team. Five terrorists were killed with gunfire. Eleven suspects are in custody in connection with the attack. Intelligence reports had suggested that a British woman and two or three American citizens may have been involved in the attack. We cannot confirm the details at present, but forensic experts are working to ascertain the nationalities of the terrorists.

AMY GOODMAN: Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. Since the attack on the Westgate Mall, survivors have started to share their accounts of what happened. This is Aleem Manji, who, along with his wife, was helping to run a children’s cooking competition at the mall before the attackers struck. Aleem Manji

ALEEM MANJI: He turned and he said you did not spare our women and children, why should we spare yours? And his colleague opened fire. They weren’t shooting to scare. They were shooting to kill. They aimed low at where the people were crouching and they just opened fire, completely and absolutely. This is not Islam. Islam is something all else altogether. Islam is peace. Islam is about togetherness, humanity. What I saw there was not Islam. If you ever, ever think for a minute that those people represent us, they don’t, they never will, and please don’t let them win by thinking it.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the victims in the attack on the mall in Nairobi. The Somali militant group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack via Twitter. In a series of messages, the group described the assault on the mall as revenge for Kenya sending troops into Somalia in 2011. To talk more about the situation there we are joined by Jeremy Scahill, National Security Correspondent for The Nation, producer and writer of the documentary film and book “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.” He has spent time in both Kenya and Somalia while working on “Dirty Wars.” Jeremy Scahill, welcome back to Democracy Now!. It’s great to have you here. Can you talk about what’s happened there?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right now, there is not just one al-Shabab. There has been a real fracture within the organization, and a few weeks ago the most high-profile American jihadist that was operating with al-Shabab, Omar Hammami, who is from Alabama, and was sort of like a rapper and propagandist for al-Shabab, was killed. And it appears he was killed by a rival faction of the group. I think part of what we are seeing is that the section of Shabab that is more aligned with the global vision of what was Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s mission, is trying to make a mark for itself and I think that it’s a group that is very much in trouble internally in Somalia and I think it is trying to project that it has a more globalist, jihadist agenda. So, this attack on the Westgate Mall, I think was indicative of the fact that there are multiple versions of al-Shabab. One part al-Shabab is primarily focused on Somali politics and taking power within Somalia, and the other is intent on sort of making a name for itself as a global terrorist player. I think that is part of what we saw here at Westgate Mall.

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of Americans involved in al-Shabab?

JEREMY SCAHILL: There has been anywhere from a couple dozen to 50 or 60 Americans that have gone to Somalia to work alongside or fight alongside al-Shabab or other militant organizations. Many have come from the state of Minnesota, and the Somali-American community — I was there recently — is really caught in a difficult position because, on the one hand, they are being targeted by federal agents and they are being targeted by surveillance and they have their mosques and their community organizations being surveilled. On the other hand people in that community are very concerned about the fact that young people are being recruited from Minneapolis to go to Somalia. There have been several young Somali-Americans who have acted as suicide bombers trying to blow themselves — or blowing themselves up at the gates of the U.S.-backed African Union forces that are in Somalia or attacking Somali Government ministries.

On the one hand, this is a real problem that you have these young people that are being recruited and going over there. On the other hand, there has been this incredible overreaction to it. I think a lot — immigrant communities are being targeted for this. In the whole scheme of things, it is a relatively small problem. But, I think there is — Representative Peter King has just been — who is the informal chair of the Islamaphobe caucus in Congress has really sort of tried to paint this as some kind of bogeyman on steroids. It is a real issue, but I think that the fact that the Somali community in Minneapolis is under this kind of intense scrutiny right now, is unjust on the one hand. on the other hand, they have really been unified in speaking out and demonstrating against what happened at the Westgate mall.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: What you think, Jeremy, contributed to the expansion of al-Shabab and to the splintering of which you spoke?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, I mean, all of a sudden now we have like sea horses where you pour the thing in and it creates sea horses. We have that with like the terrorism expert industry now; everybody knows everything about al-Shabab, and yet there is very little context given to this. One of the things that I get into in my book, in “Dirty Wars,” is where al-Shabab came from.

In the early 2000’s, the Bush Administration made a disastrous decision to put all of these warlords on the CIA payroll and they came up with this name called The Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. I tracked down some of these warlords when I was in Somalia and in Kenya. They, basically, had them acting as an assassination squad. Most Somalia experts said that there were no more than a dozen Al Qaeda-connected individuals in Somalia right after 9/11. So, the CIA hires these warlords ostensibly to go in and hunt these people down. Well, they end up murdering vast numbers of people who were imams or religious scholars, and in some cases, I was told that they would literally like chop peoples heads off and then bring them to their American liaison and say this is so and so, and I’ve killed them.

So, you have this utterly thuggish collection of warlords murdering people and doing so, they believed, with the backing of the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world. That sparked, then, a revolt against the warlords. So, what happened was that these coalitions of religious figures from different regions of Somalia formed something called the Islamic Courts Union, and basically it was 12 Sharia courts, meaning that there were 12 regional authorities who had imposed some version of law in the areas that they controlled. They came together and united as one body and they started to pool their resources in an effort to overthrow the CIA’s warlords from Mogadishu.

There was a 13th unofficial member of the Islamic Courts Union and that was Harakat al-Shabab Mujahideen which is al-Shabab. So, at al-Shabab that was the only faction within the Islamic Courts Union that had any presence of foreign fighters, and they were the least powerful, they had the least credibility in Somalia, the least visibility. So, when Islamic Courts Union took Mogadishu they expelled the CIA warlords, they imposed a brutal but effective form of governance on Mogadishu, effective in the sense that it stabilized the city. Crime rates plummeted, they reopened the ports. There were also all sorts of vicious, violent punishments meted out against people who violated what they perceived to be the tenets of Islamic Sharia law. But, it was — almost everyone except probably Bush-era officials would agree that it was the only moment from the time Siad Barre’s regime fell in the early-1990’s until 2006 that there was anything vaguely representing stability in Mogadishu.

The CIA’s warlords are kicked out, the Islamic Courts Union is in control. The U.S. then covertly partners with the Ethiopian dictatorship and Ethiopia launches an overt invasion of Somalia to overthrow of Islamic Courts Union. The fact that they were called Islamic probably — you know, Bush is like batting a ball of yarn in the back while Dick Cheney is running the country and they hear Islamic and it’s like, oh, we got to overthrow them. So, I mean, that’s basically what happened. It was this knee-jerk reaction. If you actually look at the people who made up the Islamic Courts Union, there was a mishmash of people. Yes, there were people who were extremists, but most of them were not. Most of the them were people that more closely represent the Taliban Government, not the Taliban movement, but the Taliban Government. I mean, it’s, by all standards a brutal form of government, but, these were not people who wanted to attack the United States at all. There was no U.S. interest in doing this except this for except for knee-jerk sort of neo-con reactionary politics.

So, they overthrow that government and then JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA use the cover of this over-invasion to go in and start hunting people, and they want to take out all of the leaders of the Islamic Courts Union. They are looking for people who were attacked — involved with the 98 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and they start this assassination campaign. They use drones and they’re using AC-130 gun ships, and basically the Islamic Courts Union is totally dismantled.

Somalia then returns or reverts to this state of brutality and civil war, and you then have the Ethiopians committing rape, murdering civilians, torturing peoples, setting up their own prisons, rendering people back to Ethiopia, it becomes an utter disaster. What ends up happening is that Shabaab, this group of relative nobodies for so many years, who were sort of on the periphery of this movement, start to say, well, we will be the vanguard in the fight against the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion, and we will take up arms we will defend Somalia. And they started mixing together the ideas and rhetoric of Osama bin Laden with a sort of Somali nationalist politics and end up getting a tremendous amount of support because they were the only people fighting. So, what happened there, I mean, this is incredible, is that Osama bin Laden tried to take credit for the Black Hawk Down incident in the early 1990’s, and it was a complete lie. They had nothing to do with it. Maybe there was some people that were — could reasonable be called jihadists that were involved with that, but, it was not Osama bin Laden’s plot, and yet, Osama bin Laden tried to take responsibility for it.

AMY GOODMAN: Where 18 U.S. soldiers were killed, but also thousands of civilians.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oh yeah, I mean, thousands and thousands of Somalis were killed. It is basically one of the only things most people know about Somalia, was Black Hawk Down. Most people don’t even know. It is like when we talk about the Vietnam War, people know that there were 65,000 U.S. troops killed. Do people know that multimillion Vietnamese were killed? It’s the same with the Black Hawk Down incident. I mean, thousands of Somalis were butchered in the aftermath of that.

AMY GOODMAN: When the U.S. helicopters came in to —

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, the U.S. helicopters in they were hunting —

AMY GOODMAN: This is under George H. W. Bush.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, President Clinton ended up pulling the Army Rangers and the whole U.S. presence out of Somalia, but they were hunting Mohamed Farrah Aidid, this warlord, who had basically destroyed Mogadishu and created the situation where you have the civil war in Somalia. The point I’m getting at here is that al-Shabab was largely a non-player in Somalia and al-Qaeda had almost no presence there. And the U.S., by backing these warlords and then overthrowing the Islamic Courts Union made the very force that they claim to be trying to fight the most powerful force in Somalia.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: What is at stake for the U.S. in East Africa and the Horn of Africa? What are their interests there?

JEREMY SCAHILL: I think, initially, it started with a sort of knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. The fact was that there were major terrorist events that happened as a result of Somalia’s lawless situation. There were people being harbored in Somalia that were involved with the 1998 embassy bombings. I think that Rumsfeld and Cheney, early on after 9/11 developed this program called Next Steps, and they were citing all these countries that they intended to go into, and Somalia was on the early list of countries. And you had the State Department, Colin Powell and others, cautioning against it, and saying we shouldn’t go in here, but there were people in the Pentagon who wanted to run the deck all over the world and wanted to send people in there.

So, I think part of it — there are natural resources. It has the largest coastline of any nation in Africa. There is a very, potentially lucrative fishing industry that exists there. It is part of why you see the rise of piracy, is that European and other shipping companies are coming in they’re dumping the Somali waters. But, also Illegal fishing is happening all the time. When people eat lobster and they are told it is Kenyan lobster, it almost certainly is actually from the Somali coastline or from the Somali waters. So, I don’t think there is some nefarious conspiracy behind the scenes, but Somalia — if Somalia was a stabilized country, there is tremendous natural resources and wealth in Somalia. but, I think it has more to do with this narrow U.S. view of terrorism being this epic global threat and reacting in that way constantly or consistently.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, I want to turn to a clip of your film and then we’re going to talk about President Obama’s address yesterday at the U.S. General Assembly.

And one correction, Black Hawk Down, as you said, that happened, that period in 1993, was under President Clinton. But, in your new documentary that’s now just going to be released on DVD, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield” you meet the notorious Somali warlord, Indha Adde, who is working with the United States. This is a clip.

JEREMY SCAHILL: [narrating] In an earlier life, Indha Adde had been America’s enemy, offering protection to people on the U.S. kill list, but the warlord has since changed sides. He was now on the U.S. payroll and assumed the title of General.

JEREMY SCAHILL: So he’s saying that the fiercest fighting that they’re doing right now is happening right here? OK.

JEREMY SCAHILL: [narrating] The men fired across the rooftops, but, it didn’t make sense to me what we were doing here, or what the Americans were doing here in Somalia, arming this warlord-turned general for what seemed like a senseless war.

SOMALI SOLDIER: We’ve got to move.

JEREMY SCAHILL: [narrating] So, these were Shabaab fighters you buried here.

GEN. INDHA ADDE: [translated] If we capture fighters alive, we give them medical care, unless they are foreigners. The foreigners, we execute.

JEREMY SCAHILL: If you capture a foreigner alive, you execute them on the battlefield?

GEN. INDHA ADDE: [translated] Yes. The others should feel no mercy.

AMY GOODMAN: From the film “Dirty Wars,” written by Jeremy Scahill, directed by Rick Rowley. Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: This is part of what the U.S. is doing right now. They have this huge counter terrorism base that they’ve built at the airport in Mogadishu and they’re paying Somali thugs, basically, to go out and do the bidding of the United States. So, we are basically back to where we are when Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney and others decided to start arming and backing warlords. It is just — Somalia is just in utter hell and it’s some of the greatest suffering on planet Earth and the U.S. has played a very significant role in destabilizing Somalia for many, many years.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break then come back to talk about President Obama’s address of the U.N. General Assembly. Our guest is Jeremy Scahill; independent journalist, National Security Correspondent for The Nation, Democracy Now! correspondent and producer and cowriter of the documentary “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battle Field.”