Somali Terror Victory

Al Qaeda loses a key operative in Africa, but the war is far from won.

As accidental victories go, the death of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed in Somalia last week is one to celebrate. The Comoros Islands native and al Qaeda's leader in East Africa had been on the FBI's most-wanted terrorist list for nearly a decade, after he masterminded the simultaneous bombings of America's embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Those attacks killed 12 Americans and more than 200 Africans.

But when Mohammed pulled up to a checkpoint in Mogadishu last Tuesday night and presented a South African passport, agents for Somalia's Transitional Federal Government didn't recognize him. They opened fire after finding a gun in his car, and it was only after they had buried the corpse that they began to question the eight mobile phones, two laptops, multiple weapons and stacks of documents found in his car. "[We] exhumed his body and took his pictures and DNA," Somali General Abdikarim Yusuf Dhagabadan told the Associated Press. "Then we had learned that he was the man wanted by the U.S. authorities."

After training with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Mohammed traveled to Somalia in the early 1990s, where he trained tribesmen for battle against U.S. and United Nations forces. In 2002 he lent his hand to the bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, which killed 15 people. And last year al Shabab, the al-Qaeda-linked Somali franchise for which Mohammed also served as a key leader, detonated a series of bombs in Uganda that killed 79 people, including patrons at a popular Ethiopian bar.

Reacting to Mohammed's death, Somali President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed told reporters on Sunday that "we have overpowered al Qaeda and al Shabab in Somalia." Mr. Sharif's government has regained some control of its territory over the past two years, mostly due to the efforts of thousands of troops from Uganda and Burundi. But jihadis still have their run of much of southern Somalia, a point al Shabab seemed to underscore on Friday when it claimed responsibility for assassinating Somali Interior Minister Abdi Shakur Sheikh Hassan in his Mogadishu home. East African terror networks don't appear to have run out of fresh recruits or charismatic leaders; see another al Shabab star, the rapping, Alabama-born Omar Hammami.

Both al Qaeda and al Shabab will be weaker without Mohammed and his knack for forgery, computers and bomb-making, and one day the history books may even mark his death as the beginning of the end of this miserable period. But as of today, neither Somalia's nor East Africa's long wars are close to over.

Source: The Wall Street Journal