The masked gunmen who infiltrated Nairobi's Westgate mall arrived with a set of
religious trivia questions: As terrified civilians hid in toilet stalls, behind
mannequins, in ventilation shafts and underneath food court tables, the
assailants began a high-stakes game of 20 Questions to separate Muslims from
those they consider infidels.
A 14-year-old boy saved himself by jumping off the mall's roof, after learning
from friends inside that they were quizzed on names of the Prophet Muhammad's
relatives. A Jewish man scribbled a Quranic scripture on his hand to memorize,
after hearing the terrorists were asking captives to recite specific verses.
Numerous survivors described how the attackers from al-Shabab, a Somali cell
which recently joined Al Qaeda, shot people who failed to provide the correct
answers.
Their chilling accounts, combined with internal al-Shabab documents discovered
earlier this year by The Associated Press, mark the final notch in a
transformation within the global terror network, which began to rethink its
approach after its setbacks in Iraq.
Al Qaeda has since realized that the indiscriminate killing of Muslims is a strategic
liability, and hopes instead to create a schism between Muslims and everyone
else, whom they consider "kuffar," or apostates.
"What this shows is Al Qaeda's acknowledgment that the huge masses of Muslims
they have killed is an enormous PR problem within the audience they are trying
to reach," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the
Study of Terrorist Radicalization. "This is a problem they had documented
and noticed going back to at least Iraq.
And now we see al-Qaida groups are really taking efforts to address it."
The evolution of al-Shabab is reflected in a set of three documents believed to
be written by the terrorist group, and found by the AP in northern Mali earlier
this year. They include the minutes of a conference of 85 Islamic scholars,
held in December 2011 in Somalia,
as well as a summary of fatwas they issued last year after acceptance
into the Al Qaeda fold.
Baptized with the name al-Shabab, meaning The Youth, in 2006, the group began
as an extremist militia, fighting the government of Somalia. As early as 2009, it began
courting Al Qaeda, issuing recordings with titles like, "At Your Service
Osama."
Until the Westgate attack, the group made no effort to spare Muslim civilians,
hitting packed restaurants, bus stations and a government building where
hundreds of students were awaiting test results. And until his death in 2011,
Osama bin Laden refused to allow Shabab into the Al Qaeda network, according to
letters retrieved from his safehouse in Pakistan. The letters show that the
terror leader was increasingly troubled by regional jihadi operations killing
Muslim civilians.
In a letter to Shabab in 2010, bin Laden politely advised the Somali-based
fighters to review their operations "in order to minimize the toll to
Muslims." Shabab did not get the green light to join Al Qaeda until
February 2012, almost a year after bin Laden's death.
In an email exchange this week with The Associated Press, it made its intentions
clear: "The Mujahideen carried out a meticulous vetting process at the
mall and have taken every possible precaution to separate the Muslims from the
Kuffar before carrying out their attack." However, even at Westgate,
al-Shabab still killed Muslims, who were among the more than 60 civilians
gunned down inside.
Their attack was timed to coincide with the highest traffic at the upscale mall
after 12:30 p.m. on Sept. 21, a Saturday. More than 1,000 people, including
diplomats, pregnant women with strollers and foreign couples, were inside when
the fighters armed with grenades and AK-47s burst in and opened fire. At first
the attack had the indiscriminate
character of all of Shabab's previous assaults.
Rutvik Patel, 14, was in the aisles at Nakumatt, the mall's supermarket which
sells everything from plasma TVs to imported kiwis, when he heard the first
explosion. "They started shooting continuously, and whoever died,
died," he said. "Then it became calm
and they came up to people and began asking them some questions. If you knew
the answer, they let you go," he said. "They asked the name of the
Prophet's mom. They asked them to sing a religious verse."
Just across from the Nakumatt supermarket, a 31-year-old Jewish businessman was
cashing a check inside the local Barclays branch when he, too, heard the
shooting. The people there ran to the back and shut themselves in the room with
the safe, switching off the lights. They learned, via text messages, that the
extremists were asking people to
recite an Arabic prayer called the Shahada.
"One of the women who was with us got a text from her husband saying, they're
asking people to say the Islamic oath, and if you don't know it, they kill
you," said the businessman, who insisted on anonymity out of fear for his
safety.
He threw away his passport. Then he downloaded the Arabic prayer and wrote it
on his palm.
Al-Shabab's attempts to identify Muslims are clear in the 16-page transcript
from the conference of Islamic scholars held in the Somali town of Baidoa, an area known to be under Shabab control in 2011, according
to Somalia specialist
Kenneth Menkhaus, a political science professor at Davidson
College in North Carolina. The scholars issued
several fatwas defining exactly who was a Muslim and who was an apostate.
The document states it is halal, or lawful, to kill and rob those who commit
crimes against Islam: "The French and the English are to be treated
equally: Their blood and their money are halal wherever they may be. No Muslim
in any part of the world may cooperate with them in any way. ... It leads to
apostasy and expulsion from Islam," it says. Further on it adds:
"Accordingly, Ethiopians, Kenyans, Ugandans and Burundians are just like
the English and the French because they have invaded the Islamic country of Somalia."
Former FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who investigated the bombing
of the United States
embassies in East Africa as well as the attack on the USS Cole, said that the
gathering of dozens of religious scholars in an area under Shabab control
harkens back to an Al Qaeda conference in Afghanistan around 1997. That
conference defined America
as a target, Soufan said, leading to the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
"You see something very similar here," said Soufan. "It's the
same playbook."
In a second document dated Feb. 29, 2012 -- just two weeks after al-Shabab
joins Al Qaeda -- the organization warns Muslims to stay away from buildings
occupied by non-Muslims, chillingly predicting and justifying the death of
Muslims at Westgate.
"And so all Muslims must stay far away from the enemy and their installations
so as not to become human shields for them, and so as not to be hurt by the
blows of the mujahedeen directed at the Crusader enemies," it says.
"There is no excuse for those who live or mingle with the enemies in their
locations."
Yet at the same time it says: "The mujahideen are sincere in wanting to
spare the blood of their brother Muslims, and they don't want a Muslim to die
from the bullets directed at the enemies of God."
This is a concession for an organization that since its inception had killed
people constantly, said Rudolph Atallah, who tracked Shabab as Africa counterterrorism director in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense from 2003 to 2007.
"They would just go and mow people down," Atallah said. "They
are now sending a clear message that, 'Look, we're different ... We're no longer
indiscriminately killing. We're protecting innocent Muslims and we are trying
to kill quote-unquote 'infidels,' onbelievers."
A similar tactic paid off in January after Al Qaeda-linked terrorist Moktar
Belmoktar attacked a gas installation in Algeria, Atallah said. When his fighters
freed hundreds of Muslim employees, a Facebook page dedicated to him exploded
with "Likes."
Several hours after the gunshots at Westgate Mall, the people cowering inside
the Barclays bank heard a commotion. As the attackers approached, the Jewish
businessman spit on his hand to erase the words he had by then committed to
memory.
The door opened.
He exhaled. It was the police.
Several floors above, 14-year-old Patel looked for a place to hide on the roof.
When the jihadists came up the stairs and threw a grenade, he didn't hesitate.
He jumped, crushing his ankle on the pavement below.
He said he would not have known how to answer their questions.