Target of U.S. raid is Shabab plotter

Officials believe the commander, Ikrima, has been key to the Somali group’s bid to wage attacks abroad.

WASHINGTON — The target of the weekend Navy SEAL raid in Somalia is a militant commander who ordered an attack on a United Nations compound that killed 14 people in June and has ties to Al Qaeda operatives, officials said Monday

U.S. officials confirmed that the SEALs were hoping to grab Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir, better known by his nom de guerre, Ikrima, when they slipped ashore in the coastal Somali town of Baraawe early Saturday morning. But a gun battle broke out at the home where Ikrima supposedly was staying, and the U.S. forces withdrew to minimize civilian casualties.

Pentagon spokesman George Little described Ikrima as a top commander in the Shabab, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Somalia that has claimed responsibility for the Sept. 21 attack on a Nairobi, Kenya, shopping mall that left nearly 70 people dead. It’s unclear whether Ikrima had a role in the attack, but other officials said he helps coordinate foreign fighters for the Shabab.

Although the SEALs failed to get their quarry, they “conducted the operation with unparalleled precision and demonstrated that the United States can put direct pressure on Shabab leadership at any time of our choosing,” Little said in a statement.

Kenyan intelligence officials believe Ikrima, a Kenyan national of Somali origin, has been central to the Shabab’s efforts to strike international targets outside Somalia for at least two years.

United Nations officials said Monday that their security analysts had received information this year that Ikrima had ordered attacks on two U.N. locations in Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

Several weeks later, on June 19, Shabab militants blew up a Toyota van packed with explosives outside one of the U.N. offices, then stormed the compound. The assault triggered a firefight that killed at least 14 people plus all seven attackers.

U.S. officials declined to say whether they had specific intelligence suggesting Ikrima was planning attacks against U.S. facilities or interests. They said the raid Saturday followed months of planning but refused to elaborate on its timing.

They said it was just a coincidence that the foray in Somalia occurred the same day that an Army Delta Force team carried out an operation in Tripoli, Libya, seizing an Al Qaeda member who faces U.S. terrorism charges in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. The suspect, Abu Anas al Liby, is reportedly being interrogated aboard a modified Navy transport dock ship in the Mediterranean before he is brought to court in New York.

“It is a part of our ongoing efforts to degrade and disrupt Al Qaeda and associated elements of Shabab,” a senior administration official said.

Ikrima is a less significant figure, but he won support from Al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan in 2011 for an ambitious — but ultimately foiled — series of attacks on Kenyan political and military targets and the U.N. office in Nairobi, according to a Kenyan intelligence document leaked to reporters.

The document said Ikrima’s plot involved operatives trained by Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, Al Qaeda operatives who also were sought in the 1998 embassy bombings. Nabhan was killed in a Navy SEAL raid in 2009; Mohammed died in a shootout with Somali forces in 2011.

The plot was intended as retaliation against Kenya for conducting military operations against the Shabab in southern Somalia. It called for attacks in late 2011 and early 2012 against Kenya’s Parliament and army camps, as well as assassinations of senior political and security figures.

By December 2011, the planners had received money and logistical support from South Africa, acquired safe houses in Nairobi and the coastal city of Mombasa, trained attackers and begun assembling explosives, according to the intelligence report. That month, Kenyan police busted the scheme, arresting two suspects and killing a third.

In April 2013, Ikrima sought to target a small airport in Mandera in northeastern Kenya, near the Somali border, with 11 attackers, according to the report. The attack didn’t take place, and the report offers no additional details.

According to Norway’s Channel 2, Ikrima had traveled to Norway in 2004 and sought political asylum while living in Oslo. He received travel documents but left in 2008 before a ruling on his asylum request. Two Swedes whom he met in Norway later joined him at Shabab training camps in Somalia, the TV station said, adding that a Swedish member of the Shabab was killed in the SEAL raid.

Morten Storm, a Dane who said he has worked for several Western intelligence agencies, told CNN that he helped pass messages between Ikrima and Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen between 2008 and 2012.

Ikrima communicated directly with Anwar Awlaki, the American-born Al Qaeda leader in Yemen who was killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike, about going to Yemen but never made the trip, Storm said. Instead Ikrima, who speaks Norwegian, became a key handler of Shabab recruits from the West.

Ikrima also appears to have written for Inspire, the English-language online magazine that Awlaki helped found. In the November 2010 edition, Ikrimah al Muhajir, a pseudonym Ikrima is known to have used, wrote a rambling article on how to conceal bombs from airport security.

The article refers to the failed 2009 attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear on a Detroit-bound f light, and a separate failed attempt to smuggle a bomb hidden in printer cartridges aboard a U.S.-bound cargo airliner.

“Do you think we have nothing to send but printers?” he wrote. Later, quoting Osama bin Laden, he warned that “we will continue our war against you.”