The recruits gather in scorching desert hideouts in Somalia, use portraits of US President Barack Obama for target practice, learn how to make and detonate bombs and vow allegiance to Osama bin Laden.
Training camps in the lawless nation of Somalia are attracting hundreds of foreigners, including Americans, and Somalis recruited by a local insurgent group linked to al-Qaeda, local and US officials say. US officials and private analysts say the camps pose a security threat far beyond the borders of Somalia, including to the US homeland.
In interviews, former trainees gave rare details on the camps, which are scattered along desert footpaths, rutted roads and coastal dens. They say the recruits are told the US is the enemy of Islam.
US and Somali officials say Somalia’s al-Shabab jihadist, or holy war, movement is growing, and uses foreign trainers with battlefield experience from other conflicts.
The threat posed by the training camps was underscored in US Federal Court documents unsealed on Nov. 23 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, home to a large Somali-American community. An indictment against several Somali-Americans who allegedly fought in Somalia said trainees at one camp included dozens of ethnic Somalis from Somalia and other African countries, Europe and the US.
“The trainees were trained by, among others, Somali, Arab, and Western instructors in ... small arms, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and military-style tactics,” said an affidavit from FBI Special Agent Michael Cannizzaro Jr that was unsealed with the indictment.
CAMP LIFE
Former al-Shabab fighter Hassan Yare, who works in Mogadishu, said life in the camps is austere. Recruits sleep on plastic sheets and sometimes eat only one meal a day — often maize cooked with water. Phones are confiscated. Recruits are only allowed to speak to their parents once every other Friday — Islam’s holy day.
“The message is simple,” Dahir Muhiyadiin, 18, said three months after finishing his training at a camp run by Somalia’s main insurgent group. “We are taught how the Western infidels want to eradicate pure Muslims, about how the US government does nothing as Israel harasses our Muslim Palestinians.”
Al-Shabab — “the youth” in Arabic — controls much of Somalia’s southern region and holds large parts of Mogadishu. It wants to overthrow the government and install a strict form of Islam. Analysts say the group has between 2,000 and 3,000 fighters.
Among al-Shabab’s ranks are an estimated 200 to 400 foreigners from Pakistan, Chechnya, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and other countries — many of them veterans of fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, said Mark Schroeder, an Africa analyst at the global intelligence firm Stratfor.
The proliferation of jihadist training camps raises concerns that Somalia will become the next Afghanistan — a sanctuary for al-Qaeda-linked groups to train and plan attacks. The Somali government seems powerless to do anything about it.
“The threat posed by al-Shabab is something that we pay very, very close attention to,” Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, the deputy commander for the US military’s Africa Command, said at the command’s headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.
The government is backed by 5,000 African Union peacekeepers but controls only a few blocks in Mogadishu. The insurgents are so confident that they stage executions of suspected spies there.
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