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| Africa: Horn |
| Somalia abuzz with sightings of al-Qaeda leader |
| 2004-05-04 |
| Cyberspace is the only sure place to find the man the United States says is Al Qaedaâs top Africa bomber, a master of concealment still at large despite a five-year-old manhunt. The baby-faced features of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed peer mockingly from the FBI Most Wanted website, which offers $25 million for help in hunting the Afghanistan-trained militant. The elusive Comoran-born Fazul, aged about 30, also masterminded an attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya in November 2002 that killed 15 people, US officials say. Failure to apprehend the slender militant has strained nerves along Africaâs eastern seaboard, where terror-related US travel warnings have hit once lucrative tourism income. The trail grows warmest in Somalia, the chaotic country where Fazul, an accomplished linguist and computer expert with at least 18 aliases, is believed to have been hiding for most of the past 12 months. In many ways the ruined country is a logical choice: After 13 years of militia anarchy it has no government or police and is too dangerous for Western investigators to visit often. But it has drawbacks for the Comoran too: It is a gossipy society where a strangerâs presence is quickly noted. In the most violent region, the south, it is not hard to find people who say they have seen Fazul. While the FBI reward might inspire unwelcome creativity in informantsâ reports, sightings of Fazul or his associates have sometimes proven very reliable. In March 2003 a suspected associate of Fazul, Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, a Yemeni, was captured in Mogadishu with the help of warlord Mohammed Dheere and is now in US custody. Hopes rose of a usable lead to Fazul, but he slipped away. In late 2003, some militia bosses and ordinary residents reported Fazul audaciously moving around Mogadishu with a team of bodyguards recruited from a variety of Somali clans. âWe get a look at him two or three times a week,â one of Mogadishuâs top warlords told Reuters in January 2004. âHe is guarded by a dozen or so bodyguards.â This year, militia sources say, Fazul has sought sanctuary among the mixed-race, minority communities that live in villages dotted along the coast between Mogadishu and the Kenya border. His Comoran looks blend in well with the coastâs Benadir and Bajuni people of mixed Somali, Arab, Persian, Portuguese and Malay ancestry. Some of these settlements - ancient communities a world apart from Somaliaâs major inland nomadic clans - speak a dialect of Swahili, one of Fazulâs five languages. Reliable or not, that account fits with Fazulâs known method of âhiding in plain sightâ: Adopting the guise of an itinerant Islamic preacher, he settled in a very similar isolated Kenyan coastal village, Siyu, in 2002, evading detection for months. âWe hear this man is wanted. Well, I can tell you he stayed here without a problem,â Aliyow Haji, an elder in Gendershe village south of Mogadishu, told Reuters in early April. Local residents said that every morning during a recent visit Fazul exercised on a beach near Gendershe before an outbreak of factional fighting prompted his team to leave for the Hamar Jajab district of south Mogadishu. In a report by a militia on his movements from February to mid-April, Fazul visited southern Kismayo port, the villages of Kudha, Madhomo, Darusalam and the inland town of Dinsor, where he apparently traded precious stones. âSome of those coastal communities are extremely remote, to the extent that he could hide but he couldnât do much. For Fazul it would be the equivalent of putting yourself under house arrest,â said US Somali watcher Ken Menkhaus. Somaliaâs political and militia leaders, themselves collectively responsible for 13 years of bloodshed among their own people, are hardly the most credible of informants. But the sightings by ordinary people beg the question: If Fazul is so visible, why does no one apprehend him? The answer comes in two parts, Somalia watchers say. US policy is that arrests of guerrilla suspects in east Africa should be made by the âhost nationâ in order to build a cooperative relationship with Washington and, in Somaliaâs case, perhaps also to avoid mishaps in a violent country where US military intervention has a sorry record of failure. That puts the responsibility squarely on Somaliaâs de facto government - the warlords. But they are reluctant to act. The militia bosses recall that Dheere became unpopular among many factions in Mogadishu because of Hemedâs arrest, which was seen as an anti-Islamic favour to imperialist Washington. Secondly, capturing Fazul could mean killing his bodyguards, which will involve clan blood feuds, and perhaps also complicate ties with hardline Islamist elements. Just to catch a suspected militant - a matter of no importance to ordinary Somalis simply struggling to survive - the risks just are not worth it. âWe will let him be... It will cause us a headache if we intervene,â the Mogadishu warlord said. Brigadier General Mastin Robeson, commander of a US task force based in Djibouti, told Reuters he did not know where Fazul was, adding that it was difficult to work discreetly on the ground with friendly forces. âThere are a number of people who have been allegedly sighted but when we investigate those with host nations, frequently those are not true,â he said. âAt this point we do not have him pinpointed,â he said of Fazul. âItâs difficult to get anybody who can âblend inâ to the countryside, particularly if what youâre trying to do is get host nations to take the lead.â |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 So, is there a way we might see his sorry ass, after having been kidnapped out of there to the Centcom prison in Qatar, having the lice pulled out of his scraggly beard at 4:00 AM on Fox News? What are the odds? |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-04 9:19:26 PM |