Kenya’s hide-and-seek war with Al-Shabaab

One Sunday a few weeks ago, the Kenya Defence Forces were patrolling the area around Tabda town, about 77 kilometres inside Somalia. Suddenly a young man stepped out of the bushes and stood in their way.

This encounter was far enough from the village marked as a permanent centre by the iron roofing sheets and the mosque to raise the soldiers’ suspicions.

The man was stopped, asked to identify himself, frisked by the soldiers and led towards the town, where the officer in charge, a lieutenant, was talking to the Transitional Federal Government forces that police the area.

The soldiers found that the man was wearing a pair of shorts under his trousers, had three mobile phones and a kitchen knife.

Their suspicions were raised further when they discovered a mobile phone SIM card sewn into a pocket and several packets of what appeared to be tobacco wrapped in pieces of dirty newspapers.

Questioned, the man claimed to have been with a group of herders originating from the town and was headed back home for something.

But to the soldiers, he might as well have been on reconnaissance, checking out the location of their patrol base on the instructions of Al-Shabaab.

Fortunately for him, one of the women in the village said she knew him, had seen him earlier in the day and could therefore offer a guarantee of sorts that he was not on a suspicious mission.

For the soldiers in the towns in the Central Sector that have been liberated from Al-Shabaab (Dhobley, Hawina, Tabda and Belesc Qoogani), anything that strays from the normal is checked thoroughly.

The population in some of the towns has increased since Operation Linda Nchi began in October 2011. Hawina was initially a ghost town but has come back to life and Hosingow’s population has tripled from 150 to 450.

While some may see this as reflecting the stability brought about by the removal of Al-Shabaab, there are signs that the militia retains a presence.

Two weeks ago, a KDF convoy was ambushed just outside Hawina on its way to Tabda.

One soldier was killed, another sprained his ankle and the rest were saved by their reflexes and the quick action of the lieutenant in charge, who shot one of the attackers as he took aim at the troops from a tree.

The patrol base at Tabda was under attack the same evening, with several mortar bombs fired from a distance.

The nature and execution of the two attacks suggest some element of coordination and intelligence, with the very possible chance there were Al-Shabaab operatives among the locals.

Al-Shabaab knew that there was a convoy on that route that day, and used their knowledge of the terrain to stage an ambush at a location that was conveniently bushy, making it difficult to see more than a few metres on either side of the road.

This coordination and intelligence is expected, given Al-Shabaab has controlled the area since it was pushed out of Mogadishu in the north in 2007.

Tabda administrators Abdirahman Shariff and Ibrahim Mohamud are naturally worried about the presence of Al-Shabaab sympathisers amongst the locals, most of whom migrated back when the militia lost control of the town.

It would be hard to tell them apart from the rest of the locals. Unlike a bunch of Al-Shabaab fighters that were killed when they attacked KDF in Hosingow two weeks ago, they do not wear military uniforms.

Those on reconnaissance missions rarely carry weapons. The kitchen knife would have served the man well in hand-to-hand combat.

There are about 80 families now resident in Tabda, and most of the pastoralists lost a large chunk of their livestock in the drought that ravaged the Horn of Africa region for most of last year.

Pastoralists switch their dependence from their livestock to relief food when there is no longer enough pasture for their hardy cattle and goats.

Last year, they lost more livestock and moved to the Dadaab Refugee Camp inside Kenya as Al-Shabaab banned humanitarian organisations from the areas it controlled.
The elders long for a return to the peace that has evaded Somalia since the collapse of the Siad Barre regime in 1991, and wish away the tendency to lurch from one crisis to another that has characterised its history in the last two decades.

“If there is a return to peace and the roads open to Afmadow and Kismayu, it would be possible for business to resume and life to come back to normal,” Shariff says optimistically.

Optimism aside, peace remains a forlorn hope if the liberated areas are not policed effectively and Al-Shabaab pushed away or eliminated.

Residents of Tabda say the mortar bombs aimed at the KDF patrol base were likely fired from beyond the town.

A mortar can be fired from up to four kilometres away and the residents suspect that Al-Shabaab chose the positions so that if any of their mortars or those fired back by the Kenyan army fell short of target, the claim could be made that civilians had been targeted.

The locals would not know whom to believe, but with Al-Shabaab being a guerrilla force, there would be a visible entity to blame in the form of the KDF patrol base within sight.

It would be difficult to deal with the resultant pro-Shabaab propaganda and the locals would be antagonised.

And in a war where conventions are cast aside, the Kenyan forces cannot afford to antagonise the locals as they are the source of the intelligence needed to track down and hit Al-Shabaab, says Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Nyagah, who is commander of KDF in the Central Sector.

In an unconventional war, where the enemy can neither be seen nor identified by his stripes, each side relies heavily on intelligence, says Lt Col Nyagah.

On the Kenyan side, intelligence gathered from the locals and a variety of other sources enables the KDF to carry out airstrikes on Al-Shabaab positions.

Al-Shabaab has resorted to the time-honoured tactics employed by guerrillas, who know they would not survive the face-to-face approach favoured by forces that are equal in military might.

Like Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab has been employing unconventional tactics; placing mines and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) is their signature approach.

The effects of an IED are on display at Tabda, where the mangled shell of a Toyota Land Cruiser lies. Six TFG soldiers died when the sturdy Japanese 4x4 drove over an anti-tank mine.

Lt Col Nyagah says each KDF patrol base assumes the stature of a legitimate target for Al-Shabaab, who bet on hitting a target as they fight “by trial and error”.

“This war does not have a frontage. It is hard to identify the force (Al-Shabaab) as they are not in uniform and do not carry their weapons openly if they are on a reconnaissance,” says Lt Col Nyagah.

Although, Al-Shabaab doesn’t have a well-established command structure, a local commander can carry out a mission without the knowledge or authorisation of his overall commander.

The Kenya Army refers to this scenario as “centralised control and decentralised execution of mission”.

“We have changed our operational tactics to remain ahead of Al-Shabaab and achieve total deterrence, denying them freedom of action and eventually degrade their fighting capability,” says Lt Col Nyagah.

The upshot of fighting in this manner also means that the war — the military prefers to call it an ‘operation’ — could be long and drawn out. KDF have also said they will not rush to take control of the bigger towns of Kismayu and Afmadow.

Lt Col Nyagah says they need to pacify the liberated areas to allow the locals to set up their administration and access humanitarian assistance.

The Kenyan commanders reckon that although the two large towns remain legitimate targets, pushing Al-Shabaab further away from the Kenyan border continues to serve the mission’s interests.

According to Lt Col Nyagah, although it would be easy to push Al-Shabaab farther with the right tactics, it would not be necessary as Al-Shabaab can be contained by cutting off its supply routes and bombing their bases.

Rushing forward could also create the opportunity for Al-Shabaab to go behind the approaching forces, take back the liberated areas and cut off supply lines.

Intensive foot patrols in the liberated towns and continuous pacification have also helped counter the threat posed by the bands of 15 to 20 fighters who organise the ambushes and roadside explosives.

Despite being considerably weakened, there are no signs that Al-Shabaab is giving up, though.

The patrol base at Tabda was woken up by the chatter of machine-gun fire at about 3.30am on a Wednesday morning as the soldiers in the trenches emptied their machine guns into the darkness.

It went on for about 10 minutes, meaning those were not the usual customary warning shots fired when a possible threat is detected.

In the morning, three camels lay dead a few metres from the first trenches, another on its knees and groaning, injured by the bullets. Its throat was slit by one of the local men later in the day.

Soldiers in the trenches said the camels appeared to have been deliberately herded towards the patrol base in the dead of the night.

They had seen about six figures using the animals as a shield. As the animals drew the soldiers’ attention, the attackers fired from the flanks.

A trail of blood and boot prints that led into the nearby bushes suggested someone had been hit.

The men would not have taken any chances. A herd of camels had crossed the ground before the patrol base minutes before the mortar bombs were fired towards it the previous Wednesday.

A week later, a recce company from the Somalia National Army unearthed an improvised explosive device 12 kilometres from Tabda on the road towards Belesc Qoogani.

It consisted of plastic explosives packed in a box measuring one square foot squared and about six inches thick linked to a small battery of the sort used in motorcycles, with the whole apparatus tied to the detonators with a bandage.

It had the capability to blow up a Toyota Land Cruiser to pieces or lift an Armoured Personnel Carrier a few feet off the ground, but not destroy it.