Members of the Al Shabaab Islamist rebel group in Mogadishu. Picture: File.  

Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government is declaring “fake victories” when it claims to be liberating territory from the Al-Shabaab insurgency, says a US journalist who recently exposed a secret CIA installation in Mogadishu.
Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill revealed that CIA personnel operate inside a walled compound at Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport.
The site consists of “more than a dozen buildings” adjacent to eight metal hangars. The US spy agency has its own aircraft at the airport, Mr Scahill said. His observations were based on two visits he made to Somalia last month outside the auspices of the TFG and its African Union defenders.
The CIA has also taken part in interrogations in a prison in the centre of Mogadishu, Mr Scahill reported.
He said that Kenyans and Somalis snatched off the streets of Nairobi are among the prisoners confined without charges in the dungeon-like basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency headquarters.
In an interview last week with The EastAfrican, Mr Scahill said the CIA has been unable to infiltrate Shabaab’s leadership in Mogadishu despite the agency’s presence in the Somali capital. He cited the apparently chance killing last month of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a top Al-Qa’ida operative long hunted by the US, as an indication that “the CIA has almost no intelligence about what’s going on in Mogadishu.”
The US is not running day-to-day military operations against Shabaab, Mr Scahill added. He said tactical decision-making is carried out by mostly US-trained Ugandan officers in the African Union’s military mission in Somalia (Amisom).
TFG forces and the Ugandan and Burundian troops who make up Amisom have lately been seizing some territory in Mogadishu from Shabaab, Mr Scahill noted. “But they’re not liberating those areas so people can return to them, but are instead forcing a total exodus from former Shabaab strongholds,” he said.
Mr Scahill said he witnessed a Shabaab atrocity on June 21. An explosive device apparently intended for an Amisom patrol instead blew up a passing bus filled with Somali university students. Mr Scahill said he followed as victims were taken to a hospital where he saw a decapitated man and three other bodies.
Having previously reported from Iraq on the activities of US-sponsored mercenaries, Mr Scahill noted that he has worked in war zones for several years but had never seen anything like Mogadishu.
He said he and his guides were repeatedly shot at by snipers in the vicinity of Mogadishu’s Bakara Market, a Shabaab stronghold that has come under pressure from Amisom.