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01/20/2004: Breaking News Breaking News

Spliffs, Football, and Al Qaeda
War On Terror On the Island of Lamu
from The New Republic

The sunburned Englishman sat at the bar of the Peponi Hotel in Lamu, nursing a vodka-and-grapefruit-juice cocktail and sucking on an Embassy cigarette. A former resort owner who sold out a couple of years ago but still pays regular visits to this island off the Kenyan coast, Gerald had recently returned from a fishing trip to the neighboring island of Kiwayu--a journey that had turned up unsettling evidence of the changes creeping into the region. The Kiwayu beach hotel was deserted, he said, except for a pair of FBI agents who had converted their bungalow into a listening post. According to Gerald, the men were providing backup for CIA operatives and American Special Forces troops who had recently snuck across the border into Somalia to kidnap a Yemeni, known as Sheik Jaylani, who is linked to the suicide boat-bomb attack against the USS Cole in Aden three years ago. "You could tell from their pasty faces that they weren't there to go fishing," he said.

This one is worth reading all the way through.


Copyright 2004 New Republic, LLC
The New Republic

January 26, 2004

SECTION: Pg. 11

LENGTH: 1619 words

HEADLINE: Out of Joint

BYLINE: by joshua hammer

HIGHLIGHT:
Lamu Dispatch

BODY:

Joshua Hammer is Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and author of A Season
in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place (Free Press/Simon & Schuster).

The sunburned Englishman sat at the bar of the Peponi Hotel in Lamu, nursing
a vodka-and-grapefruit-juice cocktail and sucking on an Embassy cigarette. A
former resort owner who sold out a couple of years ago but still pays regular
visits to this island off the Kenyan coast, Gerald had recently returned from a
fishing trip to the neighboring island of Kiwayu--a journey that had turned up
unsettling evidence of the changes creeping into the region. The Kiwayu beach
hotel was deserted, he said, except for a pair of FBI agents who had converted
their bungalow into a listening post. According to Gerald, the men were
providing backup for CIA operatives and American Special Forces troops who had
recently snuck across the border into Somalia to kidnap a Yemeni, known as Sheik
Jaylani, who is linked to the suicide boat-bomb attack against the USS Cole in
Aden three years ago. "You could tell from their pasty faces that they weren't
there to go fishing," he said.

First made popular by Mick Jagger in the 1970s, this sleepy island just off
the Kenyan coast has long been a favorite retreat for Europeans, both
entertainment royalty and low-end backpacker tourists, all of whom want to
escape the real world. During the past year, however, the real world's problems
have crept in. The Thanksgiving Day 2002 suicide attack on the Paradise Hotel
near Mombasa and the simultaneous attempted downing of an Israeli jetliner with
shoulder-fired missiles have badly damaged Kenya's tourism industry: Though in
1996 Kenya attracted more than one million tourists, the Kenya Tourist Board
says that it drew roughly 480,000 between January and November of 2003. The
attacks also gave Lamu a new--and more sinister--reputation. Several of the men
who planned and carried out the November bombing, it turned out, were members of
an Al Qaeda-affiliated cell that used Lamu and other remote islands along the
Kenyan coast as way stations and hiding places while they plotted. In fact, Lamu
has quietly become a breeding ground for militant Islam. Now, Kenyan and
American law enforcement officials have descended on this paradise, moving into
Lamu's hotels, conducting interrogations, and frantically searching for Al Qaeda
members.

When I visited Lamu in early December, it was difficult at first to notice
the changes on the island. The unpolluted waters still teemed with sailfish,
marlin, dolphins, and turtles. Waves lapped onto white-sand beaches wedged
between rolling dunes and coral reefs. On the seaside patio of the Peponi, a
small, family-run hotel on Shela beach that's the social center of the island,
there was the usual crowd of Europeans and the occasional American who gossiped
over stiff drinks while Kenyan beach boys in Rastafarian hairdos proffered rides
on old wooden sailing dhows, traditional ships that historically plied the
coasts of Africa and Arabia. The most obvious disruption remained the annual
Christmas arrival of Monaco's Princess Caroline and her notorious husband,
Prince Ernst August of Hanover, who built a $3.5 million villa and landscaped
gardens next to the hotel six years ago and who are fond of holding raucous
parties at their beach house with several dozen of their aristocratic friends.
Peponi regulars still talk with a mix of horror and amusement about New Year's
Eve 2000, when a drunken Prince Ernst beat up the German owner of a discotheque
on nearby Manda Island after claiming that the disco's lights and noise were
ruining Lamu's tranquil atmosphere. The owner ended up in intensive care.

But, in the dank warrens of Lamu Town two miles down the beach, there are
more serious problems. The residents of Lamu Town are primarily Muslim traders,
fishermen, boat-builders, and coconut farmers. Most do not share in the island's
tourist-generated wealth and have felt neglected for decades by the
Christian-dominated Kenyan central government. In fact, the money from tourism
has benefited only a handful of property owners in Lamu who rent their houses to
wealthy Europeans, some Christians brought in to work at such resorts as Peponi,
and a few Muslim boatmen, furniture-makers, and antiques vendors. But, for the
most part, the Europeans on the island inhabit their own private world, while
Lamu Town remains a filthy, garbage-strewn place with open sewers and donkey
feces in the streets. Worse, years of neglect by the regime of corrupt former
Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, a Christian who left office in late 2002 after
24 years in power, deepened the town's poverty and fostered resentment toward
the Kenyan government and the West, which backed Moi. In fact, Lamu Town voted
overwhelmingly for the opposition party in Kenya's last national election.

And, though Lamu is hardly a hotbed of Islamic extremism, Moi's mistakes and
the dichotomy between Western tourists and the Lamu Town poor have created a
welcoming atmosphere for Muslim extremists' anti-Western message. As I wandered
past black-veiled women and scrawny children in Lamu Town, I confronted graffiti
on the ancient walls celebrating Osama bin Laden and warning, bush, prepare for
another attack. Omar, my guide, told me that two of Lamu's dozen mosques--one
Shia, one Sunni (which have become known as fundamentalist hotbeds) erupted in
celebrations after the World Trade Center terrorist attacks two years ago. "The
police made a lot of arrests after September eleventh, and they keep a close
watch on those known to be [Al Qaeda ] sympathizers," Omar told me. "That's
driven many of them underground, but they're still there."

Lamu residents told me that the imams in the hard-line mosques are locally
trained, but Al Qaeda clearly has stepped up efforts to recruit Muslims in the
region. Al Qaeda operatives typically marry into Kenyan families and then use
the hundreds of mosques that dot the coast to recruit locals angry with the
Kenyan government, which has long had close ties not only to the United States
but also to Israel. Anarchic Somalia, 60 miles to the north, typically serves as
a training ground for these recruits.

But Al Qaeda members also take shelter on these islands off the Kenyan coast.
Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a deeply religious native of the Comoros Islands who
received terrorist training in Afghanistan and Somalia, hid out for most of 2002
on the remote Kenyan island of Pate--a six-hour speedboat journey from Lamu.
There he married into a local family, taught at an Islamic school, and even
started a local soccer club that he called Kabul, which competed with the island
's other team, known as Al Qaeda. And, according to both Kenyan and FBI
investigators, while not teaching soccer, Mohammed planned and carried out the
Thanksgiving Day attack in Kenya with eight Kenyans he'd recruited. Among them
was Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan from Mombasa, who built the bomb used to destroy the
Paradise Hotel and then hid out in Lamu for a week with relatives before fleeing
to Somalia. In fact, Kenyan investigators believe all the terrorists who
survived the November 28 attacks regrouped on Lamu and left two days later for
Somalia by dhow. And terrorist cells reportedly remain active in the area.
Kenyan police recently arrested and interrogated a group of terrorist suspects
in the Lamu area, who allegedly revealed that Al Qaeda had developed a plan to
blow up the newly constructed U.S. Embassy in Nairobi last June using a truck
packed with explosives and a small aircraft carrying a bomb. Ultimately, the Al
Qaeda cell aborted the planned bombing.

Lamu's unfortunate new reputation has drawn cops from all over the world. The
week I visited the island, the U.S. government issued a terror alert for Kenya,
prompting the evacuation of the Hilton Hotel and several other buildings in
downtown Nairobi where foreigners are known to congregate. Kenya's
anti-terrorism police now are frequent visitors to Lamu, and the FBI recently
set up shop at the Peponi during joint U.S.-Kenyan exercises near the Somali
border. Members of the regional anti-terrorist task force, led by the U.S.
military and based in nearby Djibouti, also have been searching the Lamu region.
And, according to The Times of London, the FBI and Kenya's anti-terrorism police
squad launched a massive combined manhunt for Fazul Abdullah Mohammed along the
Kenyan coast in May 2003. They have been busy interrogating relatives of
Mohammed's who live in the Lamu area.

Though militant Islam may be gaining favor here, most locals on Lamu don't
like to talk about the creeping fundamentalist influence. With Kenya's tourism
industry still reeling from the November 28 attacks--Abercrombie and Kent, the
country's largest luxury tour operator, significantly scaled down its operations
last month--there's a fear that drawing attention to the problem on Lamu will
scare away even the few remaining die-hards. Omar, my guide in Lamu Town, turned
visibly angry when I asked him to lead me to the Nabhan family. "They don't live
here anymore," he insisted.

Other Lamu locals have developed their own unique methods for coping with the
threat of terrorism in paradise. At sunset one evening, I hired a dhow for a
cruise around Lamu and the neighboring islands. With his bleached blond hair
tucked beneath a multicolored Rastafarian cap, Captain Abdul, the skipper,
expertly guided the craft through inlets lined with mangrove trees while sucking
hard on a joint the size of a Cohiba cigar. "Just have some of this spliff," he
said, offering me the marijuana. "Pretty soon, you won't even remember that Al
Qaeda exists."