Africa’s ‘Arc of Instability’
From Markham to Mogadishu and London to Nouakchott: A Toronto Star investigation into Africa’s “Arc of Instability” and why westerners are joining the jihad.

MOGADISHU, SOMALIA—Everyone in Mogadishu knew an attack was imminent. Double agents within Al Shabab had warned Somalia’s security services that something spectacular was coming. Shabab spies within Somalia’s security service were tracking the warnings.

Spying and talking, talking and spying, in a city where storytelling is legendary and fact and fiction become inextricably intertwined. Yet, there was no doubt Al Qaeda’s East African group was about to make a deadly statement. The British government issued a warning on April 5: “Terrorists are in the final stages of planning attacks in Mogadishu.”

No doubt.

Even so, a small group of men in khaki military uniforms were waved through the checkpoints and walked toward Mogadishu’s courthouse in the noonday sun on April 14.
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Bullet holes mark the door at the entrance of Mogadishu’s courthouse. An April assault by a team of Shabab commandos, led by Canadian Mahad Dhore, killed 29. zoom

Abdisalam Ali Matan, a Radio Mogadishu journalist known by the nickname “Daahad,” which means “honest,” remembers turning to stare at the men, wondering why they were coming to the courthouse on foot. “Two of the men were cuffed, like prisoners,” Daahad says. “People were asking themselves, ‘Who are these people?’”

According to four law enforcement and intelligence sources, the man leading the group, the one some described as wearing the shoulder lapels of a colonel, was a 29-year-old Canadian named Mahad Dhore .

In another life, Dhore was an average Canadian immigrant-turned-citizen. He grew up in a mixed income pocket of leafy suburbia in Markham, Ont.; he played high-school basketball and worked at the No Frills. He was a good friend, a kind sibling, a favourite of his “mama,” the elderly aunt who brought him to Canada from Somalia when he was 9; he was a young father and a history major at York University.

“Fortunately, some of the court officers inside had guns and this slowed them down — stopped (the Shabab) from killing everyone, because they were well-armed.”

A senior security source discussing the April attack on a Mogadishu courthouse

But in 2009, Dhore left Canada, travelled to Nairobi to visit an ailing grandmother and then slipped into Somalia, finding the Shabab and rising up the ranks to become a “logistics chief” in the Hiraan region, intelligence sources say.

Omar Hammami, the Alabama-born fugitive in Somalia, who has a $5-million (U.S.) bounty on his head for his Shabab involvement, knew Dhore and some of the other Canadian recruits. Throughout March and early April, Hammami wrote to the Toronto Star in private online exchanges. The correspondence ended on April 20. Two weeks later, on May 7, there were unconfirmed reports of Hammami’s death.

Hammami said he lived near Dhore for a period — although he couldn’t remember if it was 2010 or 2011. He said they resided north of Mogadishu in Suuq Xoolaha, an area known as the livestock market. Hammami knew Dhore by his nickname “Farhan.”
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“He used to carry 20L jugs of water to my house for my wife when the water pipes busted,” Hammami wrote in a private Twitter message. “Quiet, reserved guy.”

Dhore and the other men in uniform — at least four of them, maybe more — walked up the driveway to the tin gates of the three-storey legal compound on that April Sunday. The lead men passed their guns to the guards, as is normal procedure, Daahad recalled. Then the men behind began shooting. “The ‘prisoners,’ who had looked like they were cuffed, took (the guards’) guns,” Daahad said. “They got inside, closed the gate and that was when I heard an explosion.”

From London to Nouakchott

Aaron Yoon had hoped his family would not discover where he was. They knew he was far from his London, Ont., home, in Mauritania on Africa’s northwest coast. The 24-year-old had left for Morocco in the spring of 2011 with two high-school friends, telling his family he wanted to study Arabic and the Qur’an.

He seemed an unlikely convert to Islam, recalled David Hassan, the former executive director of the London Mosque, where Yoon prayed in 2010. He was, Hassan said, the first Korean who had joined the mosque. Knowing the transition to a new faith can be difficult, especially for those from devout Christian families, Hassan wanted to know why he chose to become Muslim.

Yoon said he wanted to be a better member of society, wanted the sense of community. It was a usual response for converts, Hassan said.

The same characteristics, added Hassan, could be attributed to Yoon’s friend Xris Katsiroubas , the quiet, lanky kid who donned a hooded sweatshirt every day. The hood was always up and he was never without a pair of bulky headphones blaring hip-hop. Katsiroubas went by the name Mustafa after he adopted Islam late in high school.

Katsiroubas, Yoon and another high-school buddy, Ali Medlej, were inseparable and they stuck together after arriving in Morocco. From there, they crossed the desert into Mauritania. Their names all appear on the registry at Al Sindibad, a seedy hotel in Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott. But soon after, they went their separate ways.

Yoon’s family didn’t know that in July 2012 Yoon had been sentenced in Mauritania for conspiring to join a terrorist group. He had convinced them during cellphone conversations from prison since his arrest in December 2011 that he was free and studying religion.

His lie began to unravel in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 16, when heavily armed militants loyal to an offshoot of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) shot their way into a well-guarded compound surrounding the Tiguentourine gas plant at In Amenas, Algeria, near the Libyan border.

The terrorists, dressed in military garb, gunned down those who tried to flee and took hundreds hostage. For four days, they laid siege to the sprawling gas installation , demanding the withdrawal of French forces from Mali, where they were battling Islamist extremists, including AQIM.

Irish survivor Stephen McFaul and others told reporters how their captors had tied Semtex plastic explosives around their necks, turning them into human bombs. Terrified hostages hid under beds, in false ceilings, wherever they could to remain undetected and make whispered calls to loved ones.

Amid the chaos, they heard one of the attackers calling out in perfect English.

About 30 hours after the siege began, the Algerian government ordered a special forces team to move in. Military helicopters attacked a convoy of trucks carrying hostages. In the chaos, many fled to freedom. The counterassault continued for three days, a brutal battle that left at least 37 civilians dead. All but one of the victims were foreign workers, from eight different countries, including Japan, France, the United States and Britain. Three surviving terrorists were arrested, as the bodies of the other 29 militants were counted.

As brazen as the attack was, what came as a shock was word that Canadians were involved. Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal had gone public, telling an internationally televised news conference: “A Canadian was among the militants. He was co-ordinating the attack.”

Sellal called the Canadian by only one name — Chedad or Shaddad. No officials would clarify. Canadian authorities suspect, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation, that Chedad was Yoon’s friend Medlej, a Beirut-born Canadian citizen. His passport, as well as one belonging to 22-year-old Katsiroubas, was found in the fiery carnage. An RCMP forensic team later identified their remains.

British Prime Minister David Cameron would later say the attack had clearly been planned well before French forces arrived in Mali, and authorities now suspect Canadians had a hand in those plans. Hostages said the attackers knew the facility’s layout well and moved with precision. One unconfirmed report states that Medlej had worked at the gas plant. A Canadian source says Medlej had taken a pipefitter course in Canada.

Yoon has maintained his innocence and denies any connection to his friends’ actions. His family was stunned to learn he was in jail. “Nothing he said made us think he was in trouble,” Yoon’s brother told the Star. “He was calling us pretty regularly, and he sounded OK on the phone.”

In a Mauritanian court this week, where prosecutors are trying to increase Yoon’s two-year sentence to 10, Yoon again professed his innocence. He repeated what he has said since his arrest. “I wanted to go to Mauritania because I was attracted by Mauritania’s reputation for the qualities of its (religious) schools and of the curriculum taught there,” he told police in 2012, according to notes of his interrogation viewed by the Star.
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