Counterterrorism Blog

On yesterday's America’s Newsroom on Fox, Bill Hemmer asked me if Somalia was the next battleground in the war on terror, in re to a newly release video of an American known as Abu Mansour who is helping train the Somali mujahidin aligned with al-Qaeda. I could only respond honestly: No, it likely will be overshadowed by Iraq for years to come. But Somalia has been a smoldering battlefield since the early 1990s, as we all recall the basis for "Black Hawk Down."

On October 3 and 4, 1993, two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were downed by al-Qaeda-trained Somali militants. 18 US military personnel, from a team of Delta Force and Army Rangers on a mission to capture Mohammed Farah Aidid, were killed when the helicopters were shot down. Muhammad `Atif, killed in November 2001, participated in training Somali combatants in the use of shoulder-fired rockets. (See indictment in USA v bin Laden; USA v. Wadih el-Hage, both 1998.)

Moreover, Fox news carried a story on Feb 14, 2007 about an American convert, Daniel Maldonado, who traveled to Somalia to join the caravan of Mujahidin fighting the Ethiopians and other apostates, as Zawahiri encouraged in videos in the months before his arrest. Hence, Abu Mansour is not the first American to join the Somali jihad.

Somalia will likely continue to be a smoldering battlefield, as it is overrun by warlords that often make it too difficult for al-Qaeda to operate there, as recently declassified documents from project Harmony have demonstrated.

The more troubling long-term news is that Tarek bin Laden, Osama's half-brother, is building a bridge from Yemen (their father's ancestral home) to Djibouti, linking the Arabian peninsula to the Horn of Africa. Indeed, the horn will face serious security concerns in the coming years as AFRICOM sets up to take over from EUCOM and the other commands previously overseeing the region. Olivier and I covered this in our Terrorism Monitor article yesterday, "Proposed Yemen-Djibouti Bridge Threatens AFRICOM Security"