Author: Jeffrey Gettleman
Publication: The New York Times
Date: June 11, 2011
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/africa/12somalia.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2&pagewanted=all
Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Al Qaeda's leader
in East Africa and the mastermind of the American Embassy bombings in Kenya
and Tanzania, was killed in a late-night shootout at a security checkpoint
in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, Somali and American officials said Saturday.
The killing, after Mr. Mohammed accidentally
encountered a Somali checkpoint, was a major loss for the terrorist network,
still reeling from the assassination of its founder, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan
last month.
"Fazul's death is a significant blow
to Al Qaeda, its extremist allies and its operations in East Africa,"
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said. "It is a just end for
a terrorist who brought so much death and pain to so many innocents in Nairobi
and Dar es Salaam and elsewhere - Tanzanians, Kenyans, Somalis and our own
embassy personnel."
Mr. Mohammed, who was one of the most wanted
men in Africa and had a $5 million bounty on his head from the United States
government, and another militant mistakenly drove up to a checkpoint run by
Somali government soldiers late on Tuesday night.
The Somali soldiers fired on their truck,
a black Toyota four-by-four, and the men fired back, Somali officials said.
Seconds later, Mr. Mohammed and the other militant were dead.
Somali officials said that DNA tests carried
out in Kenya "by our friends" - suggesting the Central Intelligence
Agency, which has been working covertly in Somalia for years - confirmed Mr.
Mohammed's identity on Saturday.
An American official said that the United
States identified Mr. Mohammed's body through DNA analysis. The official would
not say what DNA the United States used to compare with the body's.
"This was lucky," a Somali security
official said Saturday night. "It wasn't like Fazul was killed during
an operation to get him. He was essentially driving around Mogadishu and got
lost."
In recent years, American special forces
have killed other high-level Qaeda operatives in Somalia but American officials
said Saturday that no Americans were involved, only Somali soldiers.
Mr. Mohammed, a master of disguises and several
languages, is widely believed to have helped bring Qaeda-like tactics - suicide
bombs, roadside bombs and a pipeline of foreign fighters - to Somalia's often
messy and inchoate Islamist insurgency. According to Somali and American officials,
he imported bomb-making materials, raised money in the Arab world for the
insurgency and maintained a steady stream of hardened - or at least dedicated
- foreign fighters from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya and even the United
States.
He wore two hats, officials said, as the
leader of Al Qaeda's franchise in East Africa and a top field commander for
the Shabab, the Somali militant group that started as a homegrown insurgency
but has steadily drawn closer to Al Qaeda and expanded its ambitions, carrying
out a suicide attack in Uganda last summer that killed dozens. The Shabab
are often referred to as the Somali Taliban, sawing off thieves' hands, stoning
adulterers and even yanking out people's teeth, saying gold fillings are un-Islamic.
Sheik Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a former Somali
insurgent leader who joined the government a few years ago, has called Mr.
Mohammed "an expert at war."
Officials with Somalia's transitional government
hope that the killing could be a turning point against the Shabab, who once
controlled large tracts of the country but recently have been pushed back.
In the past few months, African Union peacekeepers and government-allied forces
have been taking the offensive, steadily routing the Shabab in several neighborhoods
of Mogadishu and some towns in southern Somalia.
Scores of Shabab fighters have been killed,
including many foreigners, and witnesses have described a growing desperation
amid Shabab ranks, which might explain how a top Shabab commander could err
so fatally as to drive into a heavily armed government checkpoint.
But it was not clear that Mr. Mohammed's
death on Tuesday had weakened the Shabab. On Friday, Somalia's interior minister
was killed in an explosion at his home in the small patch of Mogadishu that
the transitional government ostensibly controls. The Shabab claimed it placed
a bomb under the minister's bed. Somali officials said it was a female suicide
bomber, possibly the minister's niece, who was a secret Shabab agent.
As worrisome, perhaps, is the reliably dysfunctional
state of Somali politics. Just this week, the president and the speaker of
Parliament decided to settle a long and bitter feud by firing the prime minister,
who was widely considered one of the most professional prime ministers Somalia
has had in years. Hundreds of government soldiers rioted in protest, saying
the prime minister was the only honest leader in the government.
Many analysts have warned that the Shabab
could stage a comeback, unless Somalia's political leaders get their act together.
Mr. Mohammed, also known as Haroun Fazul,
was the third major Qaeda figure killed in the past six weeks. In addition
to the fatal shooting of Bin Laden in a Navy Seal raid last month, Pakistani
authorities confirmed that Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior operational commander
for the group, had been killed by an American drone strike in the northwestern
tribal areas early this month.
Mr. Mohammed was instrumental in Al Qaeda's
expansion into Africa. American officials said he was the mastermind of the
bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, which
killed more than 200 people. The attacks were the first by Al Qaeda on an
American target.
He was also wanted for bombing an Israeli-owned
hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002, killing 15 people, and an unsuccessful
attempt to shoot down an Israeli charter jet there.
He was indicted for the embassy attacks by
federal authorities, who offered a $5 million reward for his capture.
Mr. Mohammed, believed to be about 37, was
born in the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean, and had been living on and
off in Somalia since the mid-1990s.
According to an F.B.I. Web page listing the
most wanted terrorists, he "likes to wear baseball caps and tends to
dress casually. He is very good with computers."
Late Tuesday night, he and his comrade were
driving from Merca, a Shabab-controlled town, to the Shabab-controlled neighborhood
of Deynile in Mogadishu. The pair apparently got lost, ending up at the checkpoint
on Mogadishu's outskirts.
Few cars travel after dark in Mogadishu,
and it is not unusual for government forces to fire on vehicles that approach
their checkpoints, especially late at night. Photos provided by Somali officials
showed that several bullets pierced the Toyota's windshield. Mr. Mohammed
was apparently hit at least three times in the torso. No Somali soldiers were
hurt.
African Union officials said the soldiers
recognized that Mr. Mohammed was a foreigner and, after searching the truck,
found $40,000 in cash, along with several dozen Yemeni daggers. Officials
said several laptop computers, cellphones and photographs were also found
in the truck, which prompted further investigation.
The Somali information minister, Abdulkareem
Jama, said Mr. Mohammed was carrying a South African passport showing that
he had traveled from South Africa to Tanzania in March, but offering no indication
of how he entered Somalia.
His body remains with the Somali national
security agency, which is deciding whether to bury it or return it to his
family, Mr. Jama said.
- Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane and Elisabeth
Bumiller contributed reporting from Washington.
