• [SW News](East African ) Somalia 'Next US Target' After Taliban : Posted on [22 Nov 2001]

 Somalia 'Next US Target' After Taliban

US intelligence officials suspect that remnants of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network may try to recoup by expanding its presence in Somalia following the organisation's eviction from its bases in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has longstanding links to Somalia, US officials say, suggesting that lawlessness in much of the country makes it a likely destination for terrorists on the run. 

The United States has already struck a financial blow against what it describes as an Al Qaeda funding source headquartered in Somalia. Al Barakaat, the country's largest finance company, was forced to suspend operations last week after the United States accused it of "raising, managing, investing and distributing funds" for Al Qaeda. The accusation prompted American and British businesses to sever ties with Al Barakaat, which also had its assets frozen in the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, Tanzania's central bank has frozen 65 bank accounts of companies allegedly related to Al Qaeda. 

Sources in the banking industry in Dar es Salaam said the accounts belonged to several banks on the initial list issued by the US government of 20 globally sought after international companies that are said to be Al Qaeda businesses. Most of the companies were said to have branches in Tanzania and Kenya, having moved here when bin Laden left Sudan in 1996. 

The source said that another list of over 20 companies had been circulated to Tanzanian banks and financial institutions to check if they operated any suspect bank accounts.

US officials said that Al Barakaat may have sent as much as $25 million a year to Al Qaeda. According to US sources, the funds are skimmed from fees Al Barakaat charges for handling remittances for Somalis at home and in refugee communities in Kenya and Ethiopia.  

Al Barakaat's manager, Mr Ahmed Nur Jumale, is said to have fought alongside bin Laden against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. 

US intelligence officials say that bin Laden and Mr Jamale are both connected to Al Itihaad al Islamiya (Unity of Islam), a Somalia-based militant group. The United States branded Al Itihaad al Islamiya a terrorist organisation soon after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. 

Speaking before a US Congressional panel on November 15, a Washington strategist warned: "Al Qaeda elements and sympathisers may seek refuge in central or northern Somalia, in league with Al Itihaad, and with possible linkages to ethnic Somali communities in Kenya. 

"That could invite a strong US military response in Somalia and possibly new cross-border interventions by Ethiopia," added Mr J. Stephen Morrison, a scholar at the non-governmental Centre for Strategic and International Studies. A spillover into Kenya could occur as well, Mr Morrison implied. 

"Supported by wealthy Saudi elements," he said, "Al Itihaad has strong ties to ethnic Somalis inside Kenya, especially in Eastleigh, Nairobi, and within Kenya's Coastal Muslim community." 

Addressing the same session of the House of Representatives Africa Subcommittee, Ms Susan Rice, the Clinton administration's Africa policymaker, called Somalia a "terrorist haven." Ms Rice told US lawmakers that Somalia had become "the continent's proverbial black hole: an ungoverned, lawless, radicalised, heavily armed country with one of the longest undefended coastlines in the region." 

The alarm was loudly sounded again in comments made to The New York Times last week by Prof Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert who is advising the State Department. "There certainly is a growing sense that Somalia is going to be a second tier in the US campaign," Prof Menkhaus said. 

Such intimations of impending US military action are clearly worrying the fledgling central government of Somalia, which controls only a small portion of the country's territory and seeks to cultivate normal relations with Washington. 

Somalia's United Nations Ambassador Ahmed Abdi Hashi told the UN General Assembly last week that his government "hosts no terrorists nor offers bases or training camps for them." Mr Hashi said his government would co-operate fully with the campaign against terrorism and would give no sanctuary to Al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan. 

But bin Laden's organisation has a well established presence in parts of Somalia ruled by local warlords, according to US officials. Al Qaeda is said to make use of an Al Itihaad base on Ras Kamboni Island near Somalia's border with Kenya. 

According to testimony in the East Africa embassy bombings trial, Al Qaeda members trained clan fighters in Somalia who battled US troops in 1993, eventually forcing an American withdrawal and the collapse of a UN peacemaking operation. 

In her presentation to the Africa Subcommittee, Ms Rice said that US policymakers had not yet decided how to respond to the threat of terrorism posed from within Somalia. "Certainly, there is no consensus on what the policy objective ought to be, much less how to fulfill it," Ms Rice said. 

Terrorism in Somalia and elsewhere in Africa can best be combated in the long run, she said, by vastly increasing the amount of development aid that the United States supplies to sub-Saharan nations. 

"Much of Africa is a veritable incubator for the foot soldiers of terrorism," she told the House subcommittee. "Its poor, overwhelmingly young, disaffected, unhealthy and undereducated populations often have no stake in government, no faith in the future and harbour an easily exploitable discontent with the status quo. For such people, in such places, nihilism is as natural a response to their circumstances as selfhelp." "We will have to pay the price, billions and billions, to help lift the peoples of Africa and other underdeveloped regions out of poverty and hopelessness," Ms Rice declared. 

She also called on the Bush administration to supply African governments with many millions of dollars worth of terrorism-fighting equipment and training. 

While agreeing that the US must aid Africa more generously, Mr Morrison urged that political pressure be maintained on sub-Saharan countries to bring about reforms. "Washington should not desist, for example, from pressing aggressively for curbs on Kenyan governmental corruption and for an orderly and transparent national electoral transition into the post-Moi future," Mr Morrison said.

Banking sources in Tanzania declined to name the companies on the suspect accounts list, but other sources said they could number over 65 as the list keeps growing. 

Asked to comment on the freezing of such bank accounts, the Bank of Tanzania deputy director for public relations, Mr John Kimaro, said: "Go back to your source, he might be in better position to answer your questions." 

However, The EastAfrican has learnt that the banks were under instructions to scrutinise all bank transactions in a bid to establish if they were connected to Al Qaeda.  

A source at one of the commercial banks said that most of the companies on the list were foreign. "Most are foreign, but some have Tanzanian names," he said.

Investigators in Tanzania have since September 11 been seeking people linked with bin Laden. One of the top ten most wanted terrorists in the world, Khalfan Ghailani, is a Tanzanian from Zanzibar with a residence is Dar es Salaam. 

Tanzania police and the FBI have been interrogating businessmen suspected to be linked to bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The police have zeroed in on oil marketing firms and and transport companies.

Some of the suspected businessmen were said to have been shoeshiners or cobblers only 15 years ago, but now own heavy-duty trucks, factories and chains of filling stations.  

Police sources suspect that bin Laden's Sudan operations moved to Tanzania after the US bombed a Khartoum pharmaceutical plant in retaliation for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.

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