Army Times: JSOC closes chapter on al-Qaida leader: Somalia raid nets body of man wanted in bombing
By Sean Naylor
The commando raid that killed a leading al-Qaida figure in Somalia offers a rare public glimpse of a campaign that has been waged largely in the shadows.
Published reports said Saleh AliSaleh Nabhan died on Sept. 14 when several helicopters flew ashore from a Navy ship and attacked the vehicle convoy in which he was riding near the coastal town of Baraawe. The most comprehensive account of the attack came on the Web site longwarjournal.org, which said the operation, named Celestial Balance, had been approved Sept. 4 “after U.S. intelligence determined that Nabhan was shuttling back and forth” between the port cities of Merka and Kismayo, which are both under the control of the Shabab, a Somali insurgent force with links to al-Qaida.
Nabhan was a Kenyan who had been living in Somalia since 2002. He was wanted in connection with his role in a truck bombing of a resort in the Kenyan city of Mombasa and an unsuccessful effort to shoot down an Israeli air liner in Kenyan skies on the same day.
The Sept. 14 attack bore all the hallmarks of a mission by Joint Special Operations Command, which runs the U.S. military’s most secretive commando operations. JSOC and the CIA have been waging a low-level struggle against Islamist extremist groups in the Horn of Africa region since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, operating from Ethiopia and Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, among other locations.
The helicopters used in the attack were likely from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), based at Fort Campbell, Ky. The longwarjournal.org account says two AH-6 Little Bird attack helicopters strafed the convoy, after which other helicopters landed Navy SEAL commandos, who got out and grabbed the bodies of Nabhan and at least one other fighter. Some reports said the U.S. troops also captured two other wounded fighters.
The tactics used in the latest raid “have been well tested” in previous JSOC combat operations, a special operations soldier said. “After eight years of war, that unit has developed tactics and techniques for intercepting vehicles … with those helicopters that are phenomenal.”
Several sources said that the mission must have been based on very specific, “actionable” intelligence. “It’s all driven by the intelligence,” said the special operations soldier. “If they can identify where the target is going to be moving and they can get helicopters within range, it gives them the assurance to get the target.”
The special operations soldier said that this was the third operation in Somalia since Sept. 11, 2001, in which U.S. military forces had killed people. He cited the March 2008 firing of two submarine-launched Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles at a target in southern Somalia, and a 2006 AC-130 Spectre gunship attack.
“Now you’ve seen three ways of targeting,” the soldier said. “Of all three of those, the helicopters are the most reliable and proven, because that technique was used throughout dismantling al-Qaida in Iraq.”
However, an operation using the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flying from Navy ships would not have been conducted on the fly, the soldier said. “You’ve got to preposition those airframes, and we don’t have a lot of airframes; they’re fully committed in other theaters,” the soldier said.
“That means … if you’ve got a target that you want to build towards, it takes a long time to position helicopters like that … They could probably do it in as quick as a week, but you’ve got to have the ships in position, you’ve got to move the helicopters into position. … Getting them out to the ship, and then getting the ship into position where it’s within range, it’s not as easy as it sounds. … So what that tells you is they’ve been thoroughly planning this for a while, and that was their best course of action.”
The officer familiar with special operations missions in Somalia said that AC-130 gunships had been used more frequently than the soldier suggested. “Back in 2007 when JSOC was operating in Somalia with Ethiopia when they were taking down the Islamic Courts Union [a fundamentalist Islamic force that the U.S. government feared was close to al-Qaida] … the AC-130 gun ships were doing good work there. At one point in time they thought they had gotten Nabhan then, in an AC-130 gun strike, and it turned out not to be true.”
Indeed, the killing of Nabhan closes a long chapter in JSOC’s east African campaign, sources said. “We’ve been chasing Nabhan for years … and he’s always gotten away, but apparently he didn’t this time,” said an officer familiar with special operations missions in Somalia.
“They’ve been watched for a long, long time,” said a retired Special Forces officer. “A lot of different scenarios were considered, but the difficulties resided in part [with] the political issue — are they governed or ungoverned spaces all the way up and down the [Somali] coast? — and then all of the resources you have, what could be used, what are the likely outcomes?”
“One of the hardest things was getting a close fix on any target,” the retired Special Forces officer said.
In addition to JSOC’s work with the Ethiopian military, U.S. forces work with a variety of actors in the Horn of Africa in order to gain actionable intelligence on al-Qaida targets, sources said.
“As fragmented and ungoverned as that whole abysmal mess within Somalia is, there are authorities within Somalia and the breakaway states that used to comprise greater Somalia, like Puntland, for example, where there are efforts to maintain contacts with … forces that could be useful to us,” said the officer familiar with special operations missions in Somalia. “There may be organizations or breakaway states within Somalia that don’t want to have the al-Qaida threat inside their country and are willing to work with us in that regard.”
The sensitivity of conducting a military attack against a target in a country with which the U.S. is not officially at war means authorization for such a mission would have required the highest possible authorization, the special operations soldier said. “That operation would have been approved by the president,” he said. Something like that, going into a country like Somalia, would have been approved by the president himself.”
Evelyn Farkas, a senior fellow at the American Security Project who provided oversight of U.S. Special Operations Command — JSOC’s higher headquarters — as a Senate Armed Services Committee staffer from 2001 to 2008, said the nature of the attack raised serious questions about whether the Obama administration’s conduct of what used to be called the Global War on Terrorism differs substantially from that of the George W. Bush administration.
“These are like summary executions,” she said of the Sept. 14 mission. “Who’s giving authority? Who’s making the [target] lists? Is it a kill or capture [mission], or is it a kill mission?”
“Has our policy shifted at all since the previous administration?” she said. “My sense is ‘no.’”
