Clan elders routing Al Qaeda in Somalia

Abdul Arts (who designed my blog header and whose cartoons I feature here) wrote to tell me that a key Al Qaeda leader in Somali, the person behind his brother's death, was killed by U.S. airstrikes. As today's New York Times reports:

Aden Hashi Ayro...was one of the most feared and notorious figures in Somalia, a short, wispy man believed to be in his 30s who had gone from lowly car washer to top terrorist suspect blamed for a string of atrocities, including ripping up an Italian graveyard, killing a BBC journalist and planning suicide attacks all across Somalia.

He was a military commander for the Shebab, an Islamist militia...Somalia officials said his death could be a key turning point in defeating the Islamists, who have seized several towns in recent weeks, and in bringing peace to the country.

“This will definitely weaken the Shebab,” said Mohamed Aden, consul for Somalia’s embassy in Nairobi, the capital of neighboring Kenya. “This will help with reconciliation. You can’t imagine how many Somalis are saying, ‘Yes, this is the one.’ The reaction is so good.”...

Indeed, to quote Abdul Arts: "Thanks America."

So who was this guy? How and why did he go over to the dark side? This is what the Times was able to gather:

According to Somali intelligence agents, he dropped out of school at a young age to wash cars and join one of the street-gang type militias that was fighting for control of Somalia in the early 1990s after the central government collapsed.

He became friends with a leader of his clan, Hassan Dahir Aweys, who arranged for him to go to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against American forces in 2001. He then returned to Mogadishu and trained fellow fighters in explosives, according to the International Crisis Group, a research organization that specializes in analyzing conflicts...

Now take note of how the U.S. located him: His clan elders set him up:

Mr. Ayro had recently gone to Dhusamareb with a band of his fighters to help set up a local administration. But clan elders rejected him, said Mohammed Uluso, a leader of the Ayr clan, because the elders “didn’t want to mix up their legitimate goals with something suspicious.” That might have been part of Mr. Ayro’s undoing, because Somali officials said that people in Dhusamareb provided American forces with up-to-the-minute intelligence on Mr. Ayro’s movements.

Again, it was his own clan. Translation: Not everyone is drunk on the kool-aid Al Qaeda distributes. There's a lot more wisdom out there than is way too often assumed.

P.S. Abdul Arts thinks he bears a striking resemblance to Ayro and is offering to play the lead role in what he suggests would be a great movie. As he writes, the Somalian version of the "amazing movie" The Kingdom. So, on that note....