AF-SOOMAALI

The Purge # 4 : HOW SO­MA­LI­A’S AL SHABAAB TURNED AGAINST ITS OWN FOR­EIGN FIGHT­ERS


WHEN HE FIRST started to be­lieve Shabaab was cor­rupt­ing the cause that brought him to So­ma­lia, Ibrahim says, “at that time I felt like in my heart I could just sense that some­thing was wrong, but I was­n’t open about it. I did­n’t want to talk about it. I was try­ing to keep it to my­self and some­how over­come it.” But soon, he says, “These crimes just be­came open. We felt like the for­eign fight­ers were no longer wel­come and some­how we were not re­spected and we were cat­e­go­rized as sec­ond-class cit­i­zens.”

If you look at it, the growth of al Shabaab and mak­ing it an in­ter­na­tional move­ment, the re­al­ity is the for­eign fight­ers, they’re the ones who built this,” Ibrahim says. “At the be­gin­ning, Shabaab was ba­si­cally a lo­cal-based or­ga­ni­za­tion. When the for­eign fight­ers joined in with Shabaab, that’s when Shabaab started im­prov­ing them­selves. The me­dia, the train­ing camps, all these things, the in­ter­na­tional cause. They made it an in­ter­na­tional is­sue in­stead of a lo­cal is­sue.” That era, Ibrahim says, is over.

Ibrahim likened life in Shabaab ter­ri­tory to what he un­der­stands of North Ko­rean so­ci­ety: se­cret tri­als, no ap­peals, pub­lic ex­e­cu­tions, tor­ture. Only the group’s lead­er­ship is al­lowed ac­cess to the In­ter­net or in­ter­na­tional news. Cell phone logs are mon­i­tored by Shabaab. Cam­eras and cam­era phones are for­bid­den.

Ibrahim says he wants to warn So­ma­lis in the U.S., Britain, Canada and else­where. “I want my voice to be heard. I don’t want oth­ers to make the same mis­take I did. Es­pe­cially to the youth who are in the West, I just want to tell them, don’t come to So­ma­lia. This is ad­vice from the bot­tom of my heart. You will not im­prove your­self, first of all, and you will not im­prove the Mus­lim Ummah in gen­eral.”

When asked if he wants to re­turn to his coun­try of ori­gin, Ibrahim an­swers no. “I’m not say­ing I miss where I came from. That’s not the point. I don’t re­gret choos­ing this path. The thing I don’t like is the peo­ple I’m work­ing with. That’s the main point.”

Ibrahim pre­dicts that years from now, Shabaab will be like the FARC in Colom­bia — a for­mer po­lit­i­cal group that has trans­formed into a crim­i­nal en­ter­prise.

Rep. El­li­son com­pares the cur­rent U.S. gov­ern­ment ap­proach to rad­i­cal­ized West­ern­ers like Ibrahim who join Shabaab to the U.S. war on drugs in its short­sight­ed­ness. “In the mid­dle of the drug war, even peo­ple who ques­tioned it knew that drugs hurt peo­ple, drugs are bad, drugs are not healthy. But do we re­ally want to lock up peo­ple for it or do we want to in­tro­duce some treat­ment op­tions here?” He adds, “Same thing now with this. There’s no doubt that all these groups, like al Shabaab, Boko Haram, ISIS and all the rest are hor­ri­ble, malev­o­lent groups, but how do we de­feat them? Is just gun­ning them down and us­ing mil­i­tary and prison against them go­ing to ul­ti­mately de­feat them? Or maybe we have to find a way to de­feat and un­der­mine the ide­ol­ogy it­self.”

To­ward this end, cir­cu­lat­ing sto­ries like Ibrahim’s would be ex­tremely use­ful, he be­lieves. “The Amer­i­can peo­ple don’t know enough about the mind­set of any­body who would be at­tracted to a ter­ror­ist re­al­ity. We just think that there are bad peo­ple and there are good peo­ple,” says El­li­son. “The truth is there are kids that hate Gitmo, that hate drones, they don’t like our na­tional for­eign pol­icy, that are highly crit­i­cal of it, but that does­n’t make them a ter­ror­ist.”

So­ma­li­a’s min­is­ter for in­ter­nal se­cu­rity says the gov­ern­men­t’s amnesty pro­gram has been a suc­cess. Ab­d­i­rizak Omar Mo­hamed es­ti­mates that in the past month, a dozen Shabaab fight­ers have en­tered the pro­gram, join­ing a de­fec­tor cen­ter for re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion. And he said that one of the dri­ving fac­tors en­cour­ag­ing de­fec­tors are the kinds of ex­pe­ri­ences de­scribed by Ibrahim. “The peo­ple that have been at­tracted to Shabaab have re­al­ized that the kind of ide­ol­ogy that they have seen and the ac­tions of the lead­er­ship of al Shabaab is con­tra­dic­tory to what they were ex­pect­ing,” Omar told The In­ter­cept. “These are young kids who have been brain­washed. I think if they come to their senses, I think peo­ple need to be given a sec­ond chance, amnesty.”

The U.S. gov­ern­ment has taken a very dif­fer­ent ap­proach. In­stead of of­fer­ing amnesty, it has meted out long prison sen­tences to So­mali-Amer­i­cans and oth­ers who have trav­eled to So­ma­lia, on charges of ma­te­r­ial sup­port to a ter­ror group. When asked whether the So­mali gov­ern­ment would hand over U.S. cit­i­zens wanted by the gov­ern­ment if they asked for amnesty in Mo­gadishu, Omar said: “That’s a le­gal ques­tion, but we will not sur­ren­der them as long as they are here to co­op­er­ate with the gov­ern­ment and pro­vide in­for­ma­tion and give up the ide­ol­ogy. They do have rights to be pro­tected.”

I asked Ibrahim what he thinks the U.S. should do. “Amer­ica is the key player. I think the U.S. should re­vise their pol­icy to­ward So­ma­lia. Be­cause I don’t think things are im­prov­ing.”

While rec­og­niz­ing that Shabaab has con­ducted deadly at­tacks out­side of So­ma­li­a’s bor­ders — such as a 2010 bomb at­tack in Uganda dur­ing the World Cup and the 2013 siege on a shop­ping mall in Nairobi, Kenya that killed more than 65 peo­ple — Ibrahim be­lieves the U.S. is over­stat­ing Shabaab’s global ca­pa­bil­i­ties. He be­lieves the U.S. has given too much cre­dence to the claims made in Shabaab’s pro­pa­ganda videos and by its me­dia wing, al-Kataib. The U.S. re­sponse to Shabaab, he says, has el­e­vated the group’s sta­tus in the global ji­had move­ment, mak­ing the group more at­trac­tive to West­ern­ers.

Ibrahim says he is still com­mit­ted to the larger cause of es­tab­lish­ing a Shariah state, but not through the meth­ods em­ployed by al Shabaab. “The only way I see to clear these is­sues is we have to prac­tice the Shariah 100 per­cent,” Ibrahim says. “Al Shabaab, at the be­gin­ning, they took this kind of po­si­tion, ‘If we change So­ma­lia, we will be able to be un­der the Shariah.’ At the be­gin­ning it was beau­ti­ful, but some­how they messed it up.”

* “Ibrahim” is a pseu­do­nym.

——
Shee­lagh Mc­Neill con­tributed re­search to this re­port.