The US Department of Defense (DoD) announced yesterday that longtime Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu was transferred to his native Kenya. The Ugandan-born Kenyan national was initially captured by Kenyan security in 2007 for his involvement in Al Qaeda’s East Africa network.
Bajabu was transferred to US custody at Guantanamo Bay later that year, where he remained in detention without charge or trial until yesterday. Bajabu was previously cleared for release in January 2022 alongside Somali detainee Guled Hassan Durad, another member of the network formerly known as Al Qaeda East Africa (AQEA). Durad remains at Guantanamo.
In May 2007, analysts working for the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) found Bajabu to be “a confirmed member of the East Africa al Qaida (EAAQ) network, the Council of Islamic Courts (CIC), and the Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK).”
They additionally assessed that the “detainee has ties to the al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAD)” and he “actively participated in operational planning, facilitation of illegal weapons, and terrorist activities against US and Coalition forces.”
Over the years, JTF-GTMO continued to recommend that Bajabu be held in “continued detention” until December 2021, when the Guantanamo detention center’s Periodic Review Board determined that this status was no longer necessary.
Unclassified documents related to Bajabu’s Periodic Review Board hearings note his cooperativeness, tolerance, and strong family bonds in Kenya and Somalia as reasons to support his release. The Review Board also noted a transition plan for Bajabu’s return to civilian life, working with the non-governmental organization (NGO) Reprieve.
Bajabu’s history and case also presents an interesting historical look into Al Qaeda’s early activities in East Africa, acting as a reminder that the African Jihad, currently the global hotspot of jihadist activity, has been decades in the making.
Failed commercial, military ventures before turning to religious extremism
According to the biography stated within JTF-GTMO’s 2007 assessment of Bajabu, he initially worked for several small businesses in and around Mombasa, Kenya, following his education in the early 1990s. However, after attempting to start his own business venture, it soon failed. Bajabu looked into joining the Kenyan military but was unsuccessful in his attempt.
After these failed ventures, Bajabu turned closer to Islam, beginning to attend prayers at Mombasa’s Sakina Mosque, where Aboud Rogo, a now-deceased preacher noted for his strong ties to Al Qaeda, preached regularly.
Around the same time, Bajabu joined the Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK), where one of its leaders, Sheikh Khalid Balala, was also an imam at Bajabu’s mosque. The IPK was heavily repressed by Kenyan authorities in the early 1990s, using Balala’s violent rhetoric as a justification.
Files from JTF-GTMO assessed it was these lectures from Rogo, as well as pressure from known Al Qaeda recruiter Abdikadir Ali, that influenced Bajabu’s decision to then travel to Somalia to join al Itihad al Islamiya (AIAI), a Somali jihadist group heavily tied to Al Qaeda, and receive military training. In Bajabu’s words, he “always wanted to be a soldier.”
In 1996, Bajabu made this journey, traveling to AIAI’s military training camps in Ras Kamboni in southern Somalia, just on the border with Kenya. It was here that Bajabu received military training, including the use of small arms, as well as additional religious education until the camps were shut down in 1997.
AIAI, founded by Somali jihadis, including some who had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets or traveled there to receive training from Al Qaeda, was Somalia’s main jihadist faction in the 1990s.
The Somali group received funding and support from Osama bin Laden. It benefited from military trainers sent by Bin Laden himself, including Sayf al Adl, who is currently assessed to be al Qaeda’s current overall emir. Some of AIAI’s fighters, including a few of its embedded Al Qaeda trainers, fought US forces in the infamous ‘Black Hawk Down’ battle in Mogadishu in 1993.
Fighting first in Somalia and later focused inside Ethiopia’s Somali Region (also known as the Ogaden), AIAI established a network of training camps, or sponsored others run by smaller outfits, including the camps in Ras Kamboni attended by Bajabu. Al Qaeda itself previously ran training camps inside the Ogaden in the early 1990s when the terror group was based in Sudan.
AIAI’s extensive activities in Ethiopia, which were reported on heavily by the early Al Qaeda magazine Al Jihad, eventually prompted the latter group to target AIAI inside Somalia in 1996, the same year Bajabu traveled to join it. By 1997, AIAI was largely defeated, prompting the closure of Bajabu’s training camp.
Remnants of AIAI remained, however, eventually merging into what was then known as Al Qaeda East Africa and subsequently the Islamic Courts Union and then Shabaab, Al Qaeda’s current branch for East Africa.
Becoming an Al Qaeda operative
Following the closure of the training camps in Ras Kamboni, JTF-GTMO’s biography of Bajabu states that he attempted to build a civilian life in Somalia, taking a wife and working various odd jobs and trying, but failing, to move to Yemen.
However, by the early 2000s, Bajabu linked back up with old colleagues from AIAI and started directly working with both Saleh Ali Nabhan, another Kenyan national, and Fazul Muhammad (or Harun Fazul), a native of Comoros, on terror plots.
Nabhan and Fazul were both key leaders of AQEA, working under the orders of Bin Laden to expand the jihad and commit various acts of terror on American and Israeli targets. Both men were linked to Al Qaeda’s 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
By Bajabu’s own admission, he worked alongside Nabhan and took part in the November 2002 attacks on Israeli civilians and targets, including a hotel and airliner, in Mombasa, Kenya. The Mombasa attacks, planned and carried out by AQEA, targeted the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel with two suicide bombings, killing 12 people, as well as firing a surface-to-air missile at an Israeli Arkia Airlines passenger jet. The plot was overseen by Nabhan, Fazul, and Abu Talha al Sudani, a Sudanese leader within AQEA.
Bajabu stated he helped procure the explosives used in the suicide car bomb attack on the hotel, as well as videotaping the later missile launch against the Israeli airliner. However, another detainee from AQEA, Salim Awadh Salim (who was held in Ethiopia), stated that the surface-to-air missiles were also procured and stored by Bajabu. Following these attacks, Bajabu and Nabhan fled back to Mogadishu together.
The JTF-GTMO file notes that following his return to Somalia, other individuals, including the aforementioned Somali detainee Guled Hassan Durad, noted that Bajabu continued to plot additional attacks against American and Israeli targets across East Africa with Nabhan and Fazul until at least late 2006 as a key member of Al Qaeda’s Mogadishu cell. Bajabu remained a close confidant of the two Al Qaeda leaders until his arrest in Kenya in early 2007.
While in Mombasa in February 2007 for unclear reasons—though alleged to have been scouting additional targets for a future terrorist attack—Bajabu was surveilled and eventually detained by Kenya’s US-trained Anti-Terrorism Police Unit. A month later, he was transferred to Guantanamo after allegedly becoming uncooperative with the Kenyan authorities.
Al Qaeda East Africa’s transformation
As mentioned above, though AIAI as a cohesive organization declined by 1997, remnants remained throughout Somalia (and Somaliland), where its cells periodically undertook attacks. They included the assassinations of several aid workers inside Somaliland in the early 2000s.
However, most of AIAI’s networks were folded into the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), referred to as the Council of Islamic Courts by JTF-GTMO. Like AIAI, the ICU, though having numerous purely local wings, was also heavily tied to Al Qaeda as an organization, as many leaders of AIAI subsequently became members of the ICU.
The AQEA network described within Bajabu’s JTF-GTMO file also documents Al Qaeda’s support to the ICU. Bin Laden apparently derided this support, as he scolded AQEA through a letter delivered by Fazul’s wife for expending too much time and resources on its support of ICU rather than additional terror plots.
The ICU, a coordinated network of militants and Islamic courts throughout Somalia, eventually formed a youth wing, Shabaab, around 2005. By 2006, the ICU reached its peak, capturing vast swaths of Somalia, including Mogadishu. In response, Ethiopia again invaded Somalia, backed by the United States, forcing the ICU out of Mogadishu and pressuring its eventual dissolution and fracture into various insurgent groups.
However, the ICU’s youth wing, Shabaab, remained a strong and significant fighting force, particularly in Mogadishu. The Al Qaeda operatives described above—Nabhan, Fazul, and Abu Talha—all eventually folded into Shabaab’s leadership, directly leading its forces while being dual-hatted AQEA leaders. However, Abu Talha was killed sometime in 2007 by Ethiopian forces.
It was Nabhan who first pledged allegiance to Bin Laden on behalf of Shabaab in a 2008 video. However, this pledge and subsequent pledges were never publicly accepted by Al Qaeda until after Bin Laden died in 2011. Regardless, Bin Laden privately accepted these pledges, making Shabaab officially part of Al Qaeda way before a public announcement.
By 2009, Ethiopia withdrew from Somalia again and Shabaab recaptured most of the territories it had been driven out of, including much of Mogadishu. AQEA remained operational at this time, driving the United States to conduct a special operations raid to kill Saleh Nabhan in southern Somalia in September 2009. Shabaab continued to control much of Mogadishu until 2011, when it was driven out by African Union forces, mainly led by Ugandan troops.
Shifting between cooperating and fighting with other Somali jihadist factions, primarily Hizbul Islam, these groups eventually merged into Shabaab, solidifying that group’s control and domination of much of southern Somalia.
From here, AQEA was able to plot additional attacks across East Africa, including in Kampala, Uganda, as revenge for Uganda’s intervention in Somalia. Though Shabaab claimed the operation, it is believed that Fazul likely planned it.
Fazul was killed in June 2011 when a Somali soldier happened to fired on his vehicle at a checkpoint without knowing his identity. At the time of his death, he was Al Qaeda’s top man in the African continent.
Following the deaths of all three senior AQEA leaders —as well the group’s promotion to Shabaab as the public branch of al Qaeda for East Africa—what was formerly known as AQEA shuttered, and Shabaab officially subsumed its mission. Since then, Shabaab has become one of Al Qaeda’s largest, wealthiest, and most successful global branches.
As made clear by Bajabu’s profile, however, this status was years in the making through Al Qaeda’s sustained presence in East Africa for over three decades.
