By Jack Detsch, a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Friday August 25, 2023
Inside the U.S.-led training program which aims to finally eradicate al-Shabab.
Members of the Danab Brigade graduating class wear blindfolds while field-stripping their weapons as part of a demonstration during the graduation ceremony at Baledogle Airfield in Somalia on Aug. 3. STAFF SGT. ENRIQUE BARCELO/U.S. AIR FORCE
BALEDOGLE MILITARY AIR BASE, Somalia—In about a month’s time, a group of 350 Somali men and women will be sent to fight, and perhaps die, against one of al Qaeda’s wealthiest terror franchises.
The recruits will face an enemy they won’t often be able to see. Hiding in camps deep in the thicket of the Somali bushlands, al-Shabab uses the dense savannah to keep the commandos on the ground guessing before leaping out to ambush and kill them. But the new soldiers graduating from the U.S.-supported training program deep in the desert will face a terror group that’s armed with more than just guerrilla tactics. The fresh troops will face complex improvised explosive devices, 500-pound truck bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, and even human waves of al-Shabab suicide bombers running at them. In spite of the odds, Somalia’s military commanders insist their troops will keep moving forward.
“When you are in a fight, you will have losses,” said Maj. Mohammed Aydarus, the commander of the Danab Brigade. “But we are determined to defeat the enemy and continue the operation. Every year, we continue to recruit new forces.”
For the better part of a decade, the Danab Brigade, trained by U.S. troops and contractors to be an elite strike force, has been the tip of the spear for Somalia’s fight against al-Shabab. Named after the Somali word for lightning, Danab is trained to elite standards to run through al-Shabab’s camps in raids, helicopter insertions, and close-quarters combat.
And the fight for Somalia’s future depends on those lightning raids yielding more ground. An offshoot of an Islamist uprising that came out of the Somali civil wars of the 1990s, al-Shabab later hitched its star to al Qaeda and has made a killing out of taxes in the meantime. The group taxes everything that sails, rolls, or moves—an extortion racket with plenty of arms, thousands of fighters, and little government to contend with. But it does have Danab to deal with.The Somalia from which the 2,000 or so Danab fighters come from is not much different from the villages controlled by al-Shabab, which got its start from the ashes of Islamic organizations that appealed for justice for the poor and were driven back by the Somali government during a mid-2000s civil war. U.S. contractors recruited this batch of trainees from Somalia’s poorest communities with the promise of Somali government salaries and U.S. stipends; al-Shabab gets its conscripts at gunpoint.
These are the elite of Somalia’s military, but they are coming straight off the street. Nearly half of them were illiterate when they were invited to join the U.S.-backed training program at Baledogle, an airfield first built in the 1970s with money from the Soviet Union. As the graduates listen to Somalia’s defense minister, resplendent in his plaid suit, they are not a picture of resolve. Some are fidgeting. Others gossip with their neighbors. One young man appears gripped with fear, contemplating the battle to come.
U.S. special forces get more than a year of training on top of basic training before they are assigned to military units. But when your country is at war against a terror group that overran your capital a decade ago, you don’t have that kind of time. The Danab get just three months of basic training and another month of special courses with U.S. Navy SEALs before they are thrown into the fight against al-Shabab. And after a year of constant military campaigning, the force is getting worn out.
“The Danab is a 72-hour quick strike force,” said Will Meeker, the Africa director with Center for Civilians in Conflict. “It’s not meant to do this again and again.”
From a dusty hilltop at Baledogle, Jim, a squat, grizzled contractor from Bancroft Global Development, a nonprofit security firm made up of ex-Western special forces hired by the U.S. State Department to train the Danab, has a running commentary as the young recruits hustle through a live-fire exercise.
“Run under cover of fire,” he shouts as about a dozen soon-to-be Danab fighters stumble up the embankment. Dozens of U.S. troops are watching the exercise, and a team of U.S. Navy SEALs, some of the American military’s most highly trained killers, have been converted to chaperone duty, ferrying around the delegation in dusty Toyota Hilux trucks with several inches of dirt coating the inside of the cabs. The outside probably doesn’t get washed at all.
The Pentagon has helped Somalis, and the Danab, retake territory from al-Shabab with drone strikes, but the stated goal is to make the Somalis more self-reliant. U.S. contractors may be supervising the action, but they said the Danab has taken over about 60 to 70 percent of the three-month basic training course, during which Somali civilians learn to shoot and move.
But al-Shabab has been a force in Somalia since before many of the new recruits were in grade school. By 2006, after a couple decades of lawlessness, the Islamic Courts Union was an effort to bring justice to a lawless place—but with a Salafist flavor. Al-Shabab grew out of that—and then it got guns. And it has been on the rampage ever since. In 2012, it formally allied itself with al Qaeda.
Somali forces have been on the offensive for nearly a year, part of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s pledge to rid the country of al-Shabab. The terror group has ambitions of striking the United States and Europe, and already has American blood on its hands: the 2013 attack by masked gunmen on a mall in Nairobi, Kenya, and a pre-dawn raid on a U.S. airfield on the Kenyan coast at Manda Bay in 2020 that left two U.S. contractors dead.
Mohamud’s offensive, spearheaded by the Danab, has helped the weak central government, considered one of the world’s most corrupt regimes, secure its largest foothold in al-Shabab country since it wrested control of Mogadishu from the terror group with the help of African Union troops in 2011. Clans once loyal to al-Shabab are splitting from the terror group as the Danab chews through its turf.
Mohamud is presiding over what U.S. officials believe could be an “Anbar Awakening” moment in Somalia, a fleeting once-in-a-generation chance for Mogadishu to unify the war-torn country, or at least to sit down at the bargaining table with a winning hand. But even if that doesn’t happen, they insist that the fractious country—where even the military has been split along clan lines—is more unified than it has been in the last two decades of fighting.
“When we came to power, the first thing that we wanted to do was to put pressure on al-Shabab,” said Hussein Sheikh Ali, Somalia’s national security advisor. “And we figured the military and the security forces were not in the best shape, and they were divided. It was very hard to build the confidence [of] units to fight together, because just months ago, they were fighting each other.”
Members of the media report in front of building destroyed after a deadly siege by al-Shabab jihadists at Hayat Hotel in Mogadishu on Aug. 21, 2022. HASSAN ALI ELMI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
After they receive their diplomas and get pictures with Somalia’s top military official and defense minister, the Danab recruits will get a monthlong breather in their villages. When they return to base, the SEALs will give them crash courses in specialized skills, such as rappelling out of helicopters and securing landing zones.
But the biggest key to the fight remains Somalia’s warring clans. Somalia’s rival factions have torn the country apart twice since the collapse of Mohamad Siad Barre’s Soviet-backed military dictatorship in 1991, but the clans are increasingly frustrated with al-Shabab’s punitive tax scheme and brutal brand of Islamic justice.
By last August, that frustration reached a boiling point, especially among the Hawiye, Somalia’s largest clan. The country faced its worst drought in almost 40 years, sending nearly 200,000 refugees packing, and making al-Shabab’s punitive tax feel unbearable.
“This was local militias taking up arms against al-Shabab,” said U.S. official. “They reached out to Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and said, ‘can the federal forces come out and help us? We are gaining ground here.’”
Mohamud and Somalia’s government did not anticipate all-out war. They agreed to send troops for a couple of weeks. But the Hawiye clans, nomadic farmers that claimed the center of Somalia extending from Mogadishu, weren’t pushovers. Even under al-Shabab’s boot, the pastoral communities of camel herders had stayed armed to the teeth. By August, a year into the fight, Mohamud’s government had reclaimed the entire Hiran region, up to the Ethiopian border.
“They are natural warriors,” said Sheikh Ali. “Everyone wants to have a gun if they want to survive.” With no police force, Mohamud’s government is also depending on the clans in the liberated areas to fend for themselves, with Mogadishu supplying ammunition and logistical support.
The clans still aren’t taking orders from Mogadishu, and using local forces as hired muscle draws inevitable comparisons with the Somali Civil War of the 1990s, when the country broke down into a lawless enclave of rival fiefdoms. The difference between now and then, the U.S. official said, is that the Somali government is more aware of the risks and is looking at giving the clans a clearer path into the security forces. But experts aren’t convinced the ad hoc plan will hold up.
“This seems to have been done in a very hurried, rushed manner,” said Joshua Meservey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “What do [the clans] want after this?”
And even officials who believe in the clan-led approach admit that fighting is not their day job. “The challenge is, every clan has their own militia,” said Col. David Haskell, the commander of the U.S. joint special operations task force in Somalia. “That’s not their full-time job. They all have AKs—they can all come together.” The Somali National Army, Haskell said, is meant to be the “hammer” in case the clan center doesn’t hold.
The United States is focused on striking deeper into the al-Shabab’s heartland. The Danab has fought across about one-quarter of Somalia in the first phase of the offensive, clearing about 90 percent of that, according to Somali government estimates. But the United States has no influence on the rank-and-file of the Somali National Army, and limited insight into how the clan militias are operating. Turkish-trained Gorgor forces are also active in the offensive. Even former officials believe the Danab is being held together solely by U.S. weapons and salaries. The U.S. government sent about $237 million to Somalia last year to cover salaries, training, and weapons.
Earlier this month, Mohamud kicked off the extension of the offensive to clear three major districts in Galmudug, a province that lies in the geographic center of Somalia. The government hopes to finish the operation by late fall. Then the Danab forces would turn south, toward Jubaland, the heart of al-Shabab country, which sports checkpoints protected by the Ugandan-led African Union Transition Mission, known as ATMIS, surrounded by terrorist enclaves. There, south of the Jubba River, clans are less organized, less armed, less resourceful, and likely less eager to take the fight to the terror group. Ali said the government is banking on militarily weakening al-Shabab enough that local clans can finish them off.
On the flip side, al-Shabab’s military strategy has been heavily predicated on holding off the government offensive, which hasn’t worked so far. Al-Shabab may have as many as 14,000 fighters left—almost double what it was just three years ago—but not all of them are die-hard fighters. Many of them are forced child conscripts, and the government has set up a program to prepare for a wave of defectors. “They will not all want to die,” said Sheikh Ali. “The defection will increase.”
On the flight back from Baledogle airbase, the rumbling old C-130 military transport plane carrying U.S. troops and diplomats to Mogadishu seems to hang over the ocean for what feels like an eternity. A pilot can’t land at Aden Adde International Airport like they’re touching down at JFK: Under 26,000 feet, al-Shabab anti-aircraft fire is effective.
By the government’s count, it’s retaken 70 villages in Central Somalia since the start of the offensive last year, though Western estimates have a much higher figure. It’s a country the size of the entire eastern seaboard of the United States, and Mohamud’s government isn’t even sure how much territory it has regained. Mogadishu may not have control over much, or even an idea of what it does control, but it does have government ministries—more than 700. What they minister is anyone’s guess.
If there is to be a life after al-Shabab, though, it will depend on the government controlling more turf. It’s not a lucrative drugs enterprise that has allowed al-Shabab to net billions and become one of al Qaeda’s richest terror franchises. It’s tax money. A rice truck going through al-Shabab territory will pay for the truck itself, and then for every bag of rice inside. And then again at the next checkpoint.
The taxation racket extends deep into the heart of government-controlled territory. The U.S. believes that al-Shabab makes up to $100 million a year in Mogadishu alone, and even civil servants and small businesses have to pay it off. Every container that comes into the Somali capital needs to be paid for to get out of the terror group’s hands.
“Al-Shabab is very much an extortion racket,” said Stephen Schwartz, the U.S. ambassador to Somalia until 2017.
The next phase of the offensive, Somali and Western officials said, will require taking and holding roads, bridges, and checkpoints before African Union troops, who are departing their forward operating bases a few thousand at a time, leave the country for good in 2024.
Ask any U.S. or Somali official, and they will insist they are winning that fight. “I think Somalia is winning this war,” said Ali, the country’s national security advisor. “This is our plan, to finish them off before August of next year.”
But as they push further, they are pushing further into a country that most Americans will never see or understand. Just three years ago, former U.S. President Donald Trump ordered all 900 American troops out of Somalia. The Mogadishu green zone parameter shrank. The U.S. military folded up most of its housing at Baledogle Air Base, leaving the Soviet-era facility a partial ghost town.
U.S. troops may have left, but Somalis are left behind. And what is their endgame? Experts don’t believe that al-Shabab will prevail in the long run, especially after this offensive, but neither will Mohamud’s government.
“They’ve killed a bunch of bad guys,” said Meservey, the Hudson Institute expert. “Well, OK, where is this going? What are the plausibly achievable steps after this offensive that will get us to a place where al-Shabab is truly diminished and no longer an existential threat to the government of Somalia? I just don’t see that path at all.”
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @JackDetsch