Before Afghanistan: The Somalia Debacle (Part One)

“Good intentions notwithstanding, the United States found itself mired in a vicious quagmire in the Horn of Africa” in 1992-1993, wrote Yossef Bodansky in his 1999 book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America. The then director of the House Taskforce on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare examined how the United States unwittingly entered a cauldron of jihadist forces while pursuing a peacekeeping mission in Somalia.

As Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow James Phillips wrote in 2002, President George H. W. Bush in the last days of his administration faced a “floundering U.N. food relief operation” in famine-wracked Somalia. He thus initiated on December 9, 1992, Operation Restore Hope, an American-led military humanitarian intervention in support of the United Nations (UN). The operation ultimately involved 25,000 American military personnel in an unstable Muslim land riven by tribal loyalties.

This mission of mercy had ominous auspices. As Bodansky explained in retrospect, “all the local parties would have liked and therefore did their utmost to manipulate the American forces into doing their killing for them while legitimizing their own hold on power.” He elaborated:

By late 1992 the United States was committing military forces into an area that was in the midst of a vicious and escalating tribal and religious power struggle. The protagonists consolidated their power on the bodies of their people. The famine was their most effective instrument for influencing the tribal and ethnic character of the population they controlled, a weapon of choice in physically eliminating the tribes, clans, and subclans they opposed.

Meanwhile anti-American/pro-jihadist forces across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) mobilized to oust American influence from Somalia in what Bodansky called a “strategic alliance between Iran, Iraq, and Sudan.” “The strongest forces in the region—Iran and Sudan—had long been fierce enemies of the United States and considered the mere presence of the United States a grave threat to their paramount strategic aspirations,” he noted. In this context, wider

events showed an Islamist camp overcoming profound conflicts, such as those between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and between Iran and Iraq, in order to mobilize all available resources in confronting the United States over an area of great geostrategic importance—the Horn of Africa and southern access to the Red Sea. Toward this end the Islamists, the sponsoring states, and their underlings established a strategic command-and­control system, trained and moved thousands of fighters between South Asia and Africa, clandestinely moved large sums of money for the support of covert operations, and ultimately successfully engaged the mighty United States.

These somewhat strange bedfellows encompassed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whose initial secular leanings during his rule distanced him from orthodox Muslims, and the guiding intellectual light of Sudan’s Islamic regime, Hassan al-Turabi. The historically secular Arab nationalist Hussein, the Sunni Turabi, and the Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran made common cause with veterans of the 1979-1989 jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, so-called “Afghans.” As Bodansky observed:

In early 1993 Iraq embarked on a revitalization of its terrorist campaign under an Islamist banner, with active support from Turabi and Sudan. Baghdad was using ‘Afghans’ who had been retrained in camps run by Iraqi intelligence and special forces near Baghdad. These Iraqi-controlled Islamist terrorists were now operating in close cooperation with the Iranian-controlled Islamist international terrorist system.

In spring 1993 Hussein developed the Iraqi embassy in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, as a headquarters for the developing offensive against the Americans in Somalia, Bodansky explained. The “Iraqi Embassy in Khartoum was expanded by the arrival of several intelligence and special forces experts, including members of Saddam Hussein’s own Special Security Agency,” Bodansky wrote. There they met with the Americans’ nemesis in Somalia, the warlord Muhammad Farah Aided.  The Somali “operation became so important to Baghdad that Saddam Hussein nominated his son Qusay to personally supervise the anti-American operations in Somalia and the Horn of Africa as a whole,” Bodansky highlighted.

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was similarly active during this period. Phillips recalled:

Bin Laden, who lived in nearby Sudan from 1991-1996 under the protection of the radical Islamic regime in Khartoum, regarded the American humanitarian intervention in Somalia as a colonial occupation and a threat to Islam. This mirrored his hostile view of the deployment of U.S. troops to defend Saudi Arabia in 1990 after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He deemed the U.S. intervention to be an intolerable occupation of his Saudi homeland and a crusade against Islam.

Bin Laden acted accordingly, Phillips noted, and in 1993, “issued a fatwa (religious edict) calling for Somalis to attack U.S. forces and drive them out of the country. For any Americans envisioning themselves as Good Samaritans in Somalia, bin Laden and his allies would prepare a fiery welcome. This would have tragic consequences in the months to come, as a future article will explore.