WASHINGTON — President Biden has signed an order authorizing the military to once again deploy hundreds of Special Operations forces inside Somalia — largely reversing the decision by President Donald J. Trump to withdraw nearly all 700 ground troops who had been stationed there, according to four officials familiar with the matter.

In addition, Mr. Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda, three of the officials said. Since Mr. Biden took office, airstrikes have largely been limited to those meant to defend partner forces facing an immediate threat.

Together, the decisions by Mr. Biden, described by the officials on the condition of anonymity, will revive an open-ended American counterterrorism operation that has amounted to a slow-burn war through three administrations. The move stands in contrast to his decision last year to pull American forces from Afghanistan, saying that “it is time to end the forever war.”

Mr. Biden signed off on the proposal by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III in early May, officials said. In a statement, Adrienne Watson, the National Security Council spokeswoman, acknowledged the move, saying it would enable “a more effective fight against Al Shabab.”

“The decision to reintroduce a persistent presence was made to maximize the safety and effectiveness of our forces and enable them to provide more efficient support to our partners,” she said.

Ms. Watson did not indicate the number of troops the military would deploy. But two people familiar with the matter said the figure would be capped at around 450. That will replace a system in which the U.S. troops training and advising Somali and African Union forces have made short stays since Mr. Trump issued what Ms. Watson described as a “precipitous decision to withdraw.”

The Biden administration’s strategy in Somalia is to try to reduce the threat from Al Shabab by suppressing its ability to plot and carry out complicated operations, a senior administration official said. Those include a deadly attack on an American air base at Manda Bay, Kenya, in January 2020.

In particular, the official said, targeting a small leadership cadre — especially people who are suspected of playing roles in developing plots outside Somalia’s borders or having special skills — is aimed at curtailing “the threat to a level that is tolerable.”

Asked to square the return to heavier engagement in Somalia with the American withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, following through on a deal Mr. Trump had made with the Taliban, the senior administration official argued that the two countries presented significantly different complexities.

For one, the official said, the Taliban have not expressed an intention of attacking the United States, and other militant groups in Afghanistan do not control significant enclaves of territory from which to operate and plan.

Given that Al Shabab appears to pose a more significant threat, the administration concluded that more direct engagement in Somalia made sense, the official said. The strategy would focus on disrupting a few Shabab leaders who are deemed a direct peril to “us, and our interests and our allies,” and maintaining “very carefully cabined presence on the ground to be able to work with our partners.”

Some outside analysts criticized the move, including Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group who is the lead author of an upcoming report on U.S. policy in Somalia. The United States had been trying to curb Al Shabab using military force for 15 years, and it had not worked, she said; it might have even prolonged the conflict.

“Sending in more U.S. troops and honing in on a small number of senior Al Shabab leadership is narrow in its aims and by definition cannot end the broader military fight absent more concerted and effective diplomatic and political efforts by the United States and others,” she said.

Intelligence officials estimate that Al Shabab has about 5,000 to 10,000 members; the group, which formally pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in 2012, has sought to impose its extremist version of Islam on the chaotic Horn of Africa country.

While Al Shabab mostly fights inside Somalia and only occasionally attacks neighboring countries, some members are said to harbor ambitions to strike the United States. In December 2020, prosecutors in Manhattan charged an accused Shabab operative from Kenya with plotting a Sept. 11-style attack on an American city. He had been arrested in the Philippines as he trained to fly planes.

Mr. Biden’s decision followed months of interagency deliberations led by the White House’s top counterterrorism adviser, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, over whether to accept the Pentagon plan, maintain the status quo or further reduce engagement in Somalia.

In evaluating those options, Ms. Sherwood-Randall and other top security officials visited Somalia and nearby Kenya and Djibouti, both of which host American forces, in October.

The administration’s deliberations about whether and how to more robustly go back into Somalia have been complicated by political chaos there, as factions in its fledgling government fought each other and elections were delayed. But Somalia recently elected a new parliament, and over the weekend, leaders selected a new president, deciding to return to power Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who led the country from 2012 to 2017.

An incoming senior official on Mr. Mohamud’s team welcomed the Biden administration’s move.

It was both timely and a step in the right direction because it “coincides with the swearing-in of the newly elected president who would be planning his offensive on Al Shabab,” the official said.

For months, American commanders have warned that the short-term training missions that U.S. Special Operations forces have conducted in Somalia since Mr. Trump withdrew most American troops in January 2021 have not worked well. The morale and capacity of the partner units have been eroding, they say.

Of each eight-week cycle, the senior administration official said, American trainers spend about three unengaged with partner forces because the Americans were either not in Somalia or focused on transit — and the travel in and out was the most dangerous part. Other officials have also characterized the system of rotating in and out, rather than being persistently deployed there, as expensive and inefficient.

“Our periodic engagement — also referred to as commuting to work — has caused new challenges and risks for our troops,” Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. “My assessment is that it is not effective.”

Intelligence officials have raised growing alarm about Al Shabab over the past several years as it has expanded its territory in Somalia. In its final year in office, the Obama administration had deemed Al Shabab to be part of the armed conflict the United States authorized against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Once Mr. Trump became president, he loosened controls on airstrikes there, and the Pentagon significantly escalated American combat activity. But shortly before leaving office, Mr. Trump ordered most American troops to pull out of Somalia — except for a small force that has guarded American diplomats at a bunker by the airport in Mogadishu.

On its first day in office, the Biden administration suspended a permissive set of targeting rules put in place by the Trump administration, instead requiring requests for strikes — except in self-defense — to be routed through the White House. (Africa Command also invoked that exception for strikes undertaken in the “collective” self-defense of Somali partner forces.)

That pause was supposed to take only a few months while the Biden administration reviewed how targeting rules had worked under both the Trump and Obama administrations and devised its own. But even though it has largely completed a proposed replacement described as a hybrid between the two preceding versions, final approval of that has stalled amid competing national security policy matters.

The military, for its part, has tried to continue training, advising and assisting Somali and African Union forces without a persistent presence on the ground, but gradually increased the length of shorter stays. During a visit to Somalia in February, General Townsend warned of the threat Al Shabab posed to the region.

“Al Shabab remains Al Qaeda’s largest, wealthiest and most deadly affiliate, responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents, including Americans,” he said. “Disrupting Al Shabab’s malign intent requires leadership from Somalis and continued support from Djibouti, Kenya, the U.S. and other members of the international community.”

At least 10 people have been killed in a second day of air raids on Mekelle, the capital of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, a hospital official said, in attacks that came after authorities there expressed readiness for a ceasefire.

Twin drone attacks hit a residential neighbourhood, killing 10 people and injuring others, said Kibrom Gebreselassie, the CEO of Ayder Referral Hospital, on Wednesday.

Five of the victims died en route to the hospital, Kibrom said, citing the city’s emergency coordinator, while the others died at the scene of the drone attack in the Midre Genet neighbourhood.

Fasika Amdeslasie, a surgeon at the same hospital, said the first bombing injured two women, followed by a second “drone strike on the people gathered to help and see the victims”.

“Among the victims, a father was dead and his son is taken to surgery”, he said on Twitter.

On Tuesday, Kibrom had told Reuters news agency that a witness arrived at the facility with a wounded man after an air raid.

There was no immediate comment on this week’s bombings by Ethiopia’s federal government, which has been fighting Tigray’s regional government since November 2020.

Kibrom said the hospital was struggling to save the wounded because of supply shortages caused by nearly two years of war.

“There is no oxygen for the operation. I don’t know what to do. Am I to lose every salvageable victim because there is no oxygen or medicine?” he said.

Al Jazeera has not been able to immediately verify the claims, as access to northern Ethiopia is severely restricted and Tigray has been under a communications blackout for more than a year.

Renewed violence

The reported attack followed a drone attack on Tuesday on Mekelle University, which the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which governs Tigray, said caused injuries and property damage

On Tuesday, Getachew Reda, spokesman for the TPLF, said on Twitter the business campus had been hit by drones. He accused the Ethiopian government of being behind the air raid.

Dimtsi Weyane, a TPLF-affiliated TV network broadcasting in Tigray, said its station was also hit on Tuesday, forcing it off air and “causing heavy human and material damage”.

Tigray has been hit by several air raids since fighting resumed in late August between government forces and their allies and TPLF rebels in northern Ethiopia.

The return to combat shattered a March truce and dashed hopes of peacefully resolving the war. Since November 2020 when Abiy sent troops to Tigray, the conflict has killed thousands of civilians, uprooted tens of thousands, and triggered a humanitarian crisis in northern Ethiopia.

Both sides have accused the other of firing first. Fighting has spread from around southern Tigray to other fronts farther north and west, while also drawing in Eritrean troops who backed Ethiopian forces during the early phase of the war.

TPLF military boss Tadesse Worede on Tuesday said “Eritrean forces are in Sheraro”, a town in northwestern Tigray, where the rebels said they were resisting a major offensive that Ethiopia and Eritrean troops launched earlier this month.

The developments come days after the TPLF said it was ready to take part in peace talks led by the African Union (AU), removing an obstacle to potential negotiations with the federal government.

There was no immediate comment about the announcement from the Ethiopian government, which has long insisted that any peace process must be brokered by the Addis Ababa-based AU.

Until recently, the TPLF had vehemently opposed the role of the AU’s Horn of Africa envoy Olusegun Obasanjo, protesting against his “proximity” to Abiy.

The announcement was made amid a flurry of international diplomacy after fighting flared in August for the first time in months in northern Ethiopia, torpedoing a humanitarian truce.

The international community has urged the warring sides to seize the opportunity for peace, with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, AU Commission chief Moussa Faki Mahamat, and the East African bloc, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), welcoming the offer by “the regional government of Tigray” to hold talks.

DOLLOW, Somalia (AP) — A man in a donkey cart comes wheeling through the dust, carrying two small, silent boys. The sky is overcast. It could rain. It won’t. It hasn’t for a very long time.

Mohamed Ahmed Diriye is 60 years old, and he’s completing the grimmest journey of his life. He set off from a seaside city on the northern edge of Somalia two weeks ago. People were dying. Livestock were dying. He decided to abandon work as a day laborer and flee to the other end of the country, crossing a landscape of carcasses and Islamic extremist-held territory along the way.

Seven hundred miles later, he is exhausted. The food has run out. He clutches a battered stick in one hand, the nearly empty cart in the other. His boys are just 4 and 5.

They had tried to escape, Diriye says. “But we came across the same drought here.”

More than 1 million Somalis have fled and discovered that, too.

In Somalia, a nation of poets, droughts are named for the kind of pain they bring. There was Prolonged in the 1970s, Cattle Killer in the 1980s, Equal five years ago for its reach across the country. A decade ago, there was Famine, which killed a quarter-million people.

Somalis say the current drought is worse than any they can remember. It doesn’t yet have a name. Diriye, who believes no one can survive in some of the places he traveled, suggests one without hesitation: White Bone.

This drought has astonished resilient herders and farmers by lasting four failed rainy seasons, starting two years ago. The fifth season is underway and likely will fail too, along with the sixth early next year.

A rare famine declaration could be made as soon as this month, the first significant one anywhere in the world since Somalia’s famine a decade ago. Thousands of people have died, including nearly 900 children under 5 being treated for malnutrition, according to United Nations data. The U.N. says half a million such children are at risk of death, “a number, a pending nightmare, we have not seen this century.”

As the world is gripped by food insecurity, Somalia, a country of 15 million people shaking off its past as a failed state, can be considered the end of the line. The nation of proud pastoralists that has survived generations of drought now stumbles amid several global crises descending at once.

They include climate change, with some of the harshest effects of warming felt in Africa. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which stalled ships carrying enough grain to feed hundreds of millions of people. A drop in humanitarian donations, as the world shifted focus to the war in Ukraine. One of the world’s deadliest Islamic extremist groups, which limits the delivery of aid.

The Associated Press spoke with a dozen people in rapidly growing displacement camps during a visit to southern Somalia in late September. All say they’ve received little aid, or none. A day’s meal might be plain rice or just black tea. Many camp residents, overwhelmingly women and children, beg from neighbors, or go to sleep hungry.

Mothers walk for days or weeks through bare landscapes in search of help, at times finding that the withered, feverish child strapped to them has died along the way.

“We’d grieve, stop for a while, pray,” Adego Abdinur says. “We’d bury them beside the road.”

She holds her naked 1-year-old in front of her new home, a fragile hut of plastic sacks and fabric lashed together with cord and stripped branches. It’s one of hundreds scattered over the dry land. Behind a thorn barrier marking her hut from another, giggling children pour cherished water from a plastic jug into their hands, sipping and spitting in delight.

The home the 28-year-old Abdinur left was far superior — a farm of maize and dozens of livestock in the community where she was born and raised. The family was self-sufficient. Then the water dried up, and their four-legged wealth began to die.

“When we lost the last goat, we realized there was no way to survive,” Abdinur says. She and her six children walked 300 kilometers (186 miles) here, following rumors of assistance along with thousands of other people on the move.

“We have seen so many children dying because of hunger,” she says.

At the heart of this crisis, in areas where famine likely will be declared, is an Islamic extremist group linked to al-Qaida. An estimated 740,000 of the drought’s most desperate people live in areas under the control of the al-Shabab extremists. To survive, they must escape.

Al-Shabab’s grip on large parts of southern and central Somalia was a major contributor to deaths in the 2011 famine. Much aid wasn’t let into its areas, and many starving people weren’t let out. Somalia’s president, who has survived three al-Shabab attempts on his life, has described the group as “mafia shrouded with Islam.” But his government has urged it to have mercy now.

In a surprise comment on the drought in late September, al-Shabab called it a test from Allah, “a result of our sins and wrongdoings.” Spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage claimed that the extremists had offered food, water and free medical treatment to more than 47,000 drought-affected people since last year.

But in rare accounts of life inside al-Shabab-held areas, several people who fled told the AP they had seen no such aid. Instead, they said, the extremists continue their harsh taxation of families’ crops and livestock even as they withered and died. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

One woman says al-Shabab taxed up to 50% of her family’s meager harvest: “They don’t care whether people are left with anything.”

Some flee their communities at night to escape the fighters’ attention, with men and even young boys often being forbidden to leave. One woman says no one from her community was allowed to leave, and people who received assistance from the outside would be attacked. Weeks ago, she says, al-Shabab killed a relative who had managed to take a sick parent to a government-held city and then returned.

Those who escaped al-Shabab now cling to a bare existence. As what should be the rainy season arrives, they wake in camps under a purple sky, or a gray one offering the tiniest specks of moisture.

Children send up kites, adults their prayers. Black smoke rises in the distance as some farmers clear land just in case.

In the only treatment center for the most severely malnourished in the immediate region, 1-year-old Hamdi Yusuf is another sign of hope.

She was little more than bones and skin when her mother found her unconscious, two months after arriving in the camps and living on scraps of food offered by neighbors. “The child was not even alive,” recalls Abdikadir Ali Abdi, acting nutrition officer with the aid group Trocaire, which runs the center of 16 beds and has more patients than they can hold.

Now the girl is revived, slumped over her mother’s arm but blinking. Her tiny toes twitch. A wrist is bandaged to stop her from pulling out the port for a feeding tube.

The ready-to-use therapeutic food so crucial to the recovery of children like her could run out in the coming weeks, Abdi says. Humanitarian workers describe having to take limited resources from the hungry in Somalia to treat the starving, complicating efforts to get ahead of the drought.

The girl’s mother, 18-year-old Muslima Ibrahim, anxiously rubs her daughter’s tiny fingers. She has saved her only child, but survival will require the kind of support she still hasn’t seen.

“We received a food distribution yesterday,” Ibrahim says. “It was the first since we arrived.”

Food is hard to come by everywhere. At midday, dozens of hungry children from the camps try to slip into a local primary school where the World Food Program offers a rare lunch program for students. They are almost always turned away by school workers.

Mothers recall having to eat their stockpiles of grain and selling their few remaining goats to afford the journey from the homes and lives they loved. Many had never left until now.

“I miss fresh camel milk. We love it,” says 29-year-old Nimco Abdi Adan, smiling at the memory. She hasn’t tasted it for two years.

Residents outside the camps feel the growing desperation. Shopkeeper Khadija Abdi Ibrahim, 60, now keeps her goats, sheep and cattle alive by buying precious grain, grinding it and using it as fodder. She says the price of cooking oil and other items has doubled since last year, making it more difficult for displaced people to obtain food with vouchers handed out by WFP.

Hundreds of families continue to emerge from the empty horizon across Somalia, bringing little but grief. The true toll of dead is unknown, but people at two of the country’s many displacement camps in the hardest hit city, Baidoa, say over 300 children have died in the last three months in rural areas, according to aid organization Islamic Relief.

One day in mid-September, 29-year-old Fartum Issack and her husband carried a small body along a dusty track to a graveyard. Their 1-year-old daughter had arrived at camp sick and hungry. She was rushed for treatment, but it was too late.

The graveyard opened in April especially for the newly displaced people. It already had 13 graves, seven of them for children. There’s easily room for hundreds more.

Issack and her husband chose to bury their daughter in the middle of the empty ground.

“We wanted to easily recognize her,” Issack says.

At the camp, eight other hungry daughters are waiting.

NAIROBI, Kenya — Dozens of women and girls have been raped and hundreds of civilians killed during fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, according to an official document seen by The Associated Press.

Roughly 40 girls and women between the ages of 13 and 80 were raped in the town of Sheraro in northwestern Tigray, according to the document prepared by Tigray’s regional Emergency Coordination Centre. The center includes regional government bureaus, U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations.

The document reports eight more rapes, “including gang rape,” in the district of Tselemti, also in northwestern Tigray.

Issued Oct. 14, the document did not state who was responsible for the sexual violence. Nor did it state the time frame in which it occurred.

According to diplomatic sources, Eritrean and Ethiopian forces took control of Sheraro last month. Eritrean troops have fought alongside Ethiopia’s federal military since hostilities resumed in Tigray on Aug. 24 after a lull in fighting.

Diplomats have expressed alarm over reports of civilian casualties in the region as Ethiopia’s federal military this week took control of the major town of Shire and the federal government expressed its aim to capture Tigray’s airports and federal institutions.

A humanitarian worker based in Shire told the AP the town’s airport is now manned by Eritrean forces. Ethiopian and Eritrean forces have captured warehouses belonging to NGOs there, and Eritrean forces are specifically looting vehicles, according to the aid worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of safety fears.

U.S. officials have called on Eritrean forces to withdraw from Tigray and urged the parties to agree to an immediate cease-fire. The administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, has described the human cost of the conflict as “staggering.”

The U.N. Security Council discussed the conflict in Ethiopia at a closed meeting Friday but didn’t issue a statement because of divisions among its 15 members.

Diplomats said Norway and the council’s three African members — Kenya, Gabon and Ghana — proposed a statement that would have expressed “grave concern” at reports of increased fighting in Tigray, called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, and urged the parties to recommit to dialogue. But Russia and China blocked its approval, the diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity because discussions were private.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield in a statement called the lack of a statement “disappointing,” citing the words of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres when he said this week that the situation in Ethiopia “is spiraling out of control.”

“In the past week alone, we’ve seen a serious uptick in fighting and violence,” her statement said. “The scale of the fighting and deaths rival what we’re seeing in Ukraine, and innocent civilians are being caught in the crossfire.”

The internal document seen by the AP said 159 individuals have been shot dead in the Tahtay Adiyabo, Dedebit and Tselemti areas of northwestern Tigray, adding that others were maimed by gunshots and shelling.

A further 157 people were “taken by Eritrean forces” in Tselemti, Dedebit and Sheraro, according to the document, which said there is “no information (on their) whereabouts.”

The latest fighting has halted aid deliveries to Tigray, where around 5 million people need humanitarian help. A lack of fuel and a communications blackout are hindering the distribution of aid supplies that were already in the region.

Ethiopia’s federal government said Thursday it would participate in African Union-led peace talks expected to begin in South Africa next week.

The U.S. is “fully and actively engaged in diplomatic efforts at the highest levels of our government to support the African Union,” Thomas-Greenfield said in her statement.

Speaking in the federal capital, Addis Ababa, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said Thursday that the war will “conclude” and “we will not be continuing with the fighting forever,” adding that he hopes for the day when Ethiopians work together for the prosperity of people in Tigray.

Tigray’s fugitive authorities are yet to confirm their attendance but have previously committed to participating in talks mediated by the African Union. The Tigray-based Tigrai TV aired footage Friday that appeared to show the release of thousands of prisoners of war by Tigray authorities ahead of the expected start of peace talks next week.

A World Food Program spokesperson told the AP that “an armed group” entered its warehouse in Shire on Oct. 18, a day after Ethiopia’s federal government announced the town’s capture.

“WFP is actively working to confirm if the armed individuals remain and if any humanitarian stocks or assets have been taken or damaged,” the spokesperson said.

All sides have been accused of atrocities since the conflict in northern Ethiopia began almost two years ago.

Last week a report by the Amhara Association of America advocacy group said the Tigray forces had killed at least 193 civilians and raped 143 women and girls since August in the Raya Kobo area of the Amhara region, which borders Tigray.

The conflict, which began nearly two years ago, has spread from Tigray into the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara as Tigray’s leaders try to break the blockade of their region.

At least 100 people have been killed and 300 injured in two car bombs that exploded outside the education ministry in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, the country's president has said in a statement.

"Our people who were massacred … included mothers with their children in their arms, fathers who had medical conditions, students who were sent to study, businessmen who were struggling with the lives of their families," President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said after visiting the site of blast.

"We ask our international partners and Muslims around the world to send their medical doctors here since we can't send all the victims outside the country for treatment," he said.

The al-Qaida-linked Al-Shabab extremist group, which often targets the capital and controls large parts of the country, claimed responsibility, saying it targeted the education ministry.

It claimed the ministry was an "enemy base" that receives support from non-Muslim countries and "is committed to removing Somali children from the Islamic faith".

The first of the explosions hit the education ministry near a busy junction in Mogadishu.

The second occurred as ambulances arrived and people gathered to help the victims.

The blast wave smashed windows in the vicinity. Blood covered the tarmac just outside the building.

The attack took place at the same place as Somalia's largest bombing, which killed more than 500, in the same month in 2017.

In that blast, a truck bomb exploded outside a busy hotel at the K5 intersection, which is lined with government offices, restaurants and kiosks.

Mr Mohamud said the number of victims could rise.

He had instructed the government to provide immediate medical assistance to the injured, some of whom were in serious condition.

The attack in Mogadishu occurred on a day when the president, prime minister and other senior officials were meeting to discuss expanded efforts to combat violent extremism and especially Al-Shabab.

The extremists, who seek an Islamic state, have responded to the offensive by killing prominent clan leaders in an apparent effort to dissuade grassroots support.

The group said it is committed to fighting until the country is ruled by Islamic law, and it asked civilians to stay away from government areas.

The United States has described Al-Shabab as one of al-Qaida’s deadliest organisations and targeted it with scores of air strikes in recent years.

Rwandan dissidents have claimed that President Paul Kagame has used dirty tactics to go after his critics abroad. Now, a classified FBI report obtained by OCCRP confirms that Rwanda has been conducting “poison pen” operations on American soil for years.

Key Findings

• Rwandan intelligence fed false information to U.S. agencies about Rwandan-born U.S. residents who were considered enemies of the country’s President Paul Kagame, with the aim of having them deported.

• The FBI investigated Rwandan claims that people affiliated with the U.S. chapter of the opposition Rwanda National Congress had supported anti-Rwanda militants in Central Africa, but found the allegations to be baseless.

• An internal Interpol document shows that the international police body revoked an arrest warrant for Eugene Gasana, a former Kagame loyalist now critical of the Rwandan regime, after it found Rwanda’s claims against him to be politically motivated.

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When Paul Rusesabagina left his Texas home in August 2020, he believed he was traveling to the East African nation of Burundi for a speaking tour. But on a layover in Dubai, the famed human rights activist was diverted onto a private plane, flown to his native Rwanda, and detained on dubious terrorism charges.

In an interview with the Guardian, Rwandan President Paul Kagame described the operation that lured his 68-year-old critic out of the U.S. as “flawless.”

The elaborate kidnapping plot that entrapped Rusesabagina sparked international outrage; the world knew him as the subject of the Hollywood film “Hotel Rwanda,” which feted him for saving the lives of more than 1,000 people who sought refuge in the hotel he managed during the country’s 1994 genocide. But it was only the latest in a decades-long crusade of harassment, threats, assassination attempts, and smear campaigns orchestrated by the Rwandan regime, according to a lawsuit filed by the Rusesabagina family in a Washington, D.C., court.

For years, Rwandan dissidents have claimed that Kagame has used unscrupulous tactics to go after his foreign-based critics — including filing false charges and abusing the Interpol red notice arrest warrant system, a policy that Freedom House calls “transnational repression.” Prominent dissidents have even been assassinated in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, and Mozambique.

Now, a classified FBI report obtained by OCCRP confirms that U.S. law enforcement has long known of Rwandan intelligence operations against civilians on its soil, including the targeting of Rusesabagina, a U.S. permanent resident, as early as 2011. The report also reveals the U.S. government knew as early as 2015 that agents of the Rwandan government had repeatedly attempted to mislead and co-opt U.S. law enforcement to target Kagame’s critics.

Despite this, the U.S. government is Rwanda’s largest bilateral donor, with $147 million handed over to Kigali in fiscal year 2021.

“Poison Pen Information”

Written in the build-up to Kagame’s re-election to a third seven-year term, the 2015 FBI report warned top American diplomats that Rwanda was using its intelligence services to spread disinformation in the U.S. about Rwandan asylum seekers and opposition members. Its tactics included “providing poison pen [intentionally false or misleading] information to U.S. law enforcement agencies concerning alleged criminal violations through the use of double agents, as well as attempting to manipulate U.S. government immigration law and the Interpol Red Notice System,” the FBI concluded.

One recipient of the FBI’s report was Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who was an assistant secretary at the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs at the time. Her office did not respond to questions sent by email.

“Virtually any country that has an oppressive enough government to create dissidents who would flee to the West are going to engage in operations against those dissidents,” retired FBI agent and counterintelligence expert Todd K. Hulsey told OCCRP, citing Russia, China, and Cuba as examples.

But “it is not normal for a partner nation, and certainly not an ally, to run a poison pen operation on American soil,” he said.

The FBI report said that a number of dissidents were targeted, including Rusesabagina.

In 2011, nine years before he was kidnapped, the Rwandan government made a formal request to U.S. authorities to investigate Rusesabagina for his alleged support of militants in Central Africa.

This was a common allegation against the regime’s detractors. Between 2012 and 2014 the FBI investigated people affiliated with the U.S.-based Rwanda National Congress (RNC), an anti-Kagame opposition group, after the Rwandan government alleged that it was supporting Central African terrorists but found no evidence of criminal activity.

However, the FBI report said its investigations were “consistently hindered” by Rwandan intelligence services “operating double-agents in the United States who were providing mis-information to investigating agents.”

Rwandan intelligence services sought to use an intermediary to plant “derogatory information” that would discredit RNC members, with the goal of getting them deported, the FBI report said. The intermediary confessed to working on some 40 individual cases. The person also provided false information alleging that RNC officials were plotting to kill Kagame in 2011 while he was on a visit to the U.S..

The FBI and U.S. State Department declined to comment. A Rwandan government spokesperson did not respond to questions.

“Open to Abuse”

The Rwandan government also manipulated Interpol — an international policing body based in France — and its red notice system to get foreign law enforcement agencies to go after its targets.

Léopold Munyakazi, a former trade union official in Rwanda, moved to the U.S. in 2004 and later taught French at a private liberal arts college in Maryland while waiting for political asylum.

The Rwandan government asked Interpol to issue red notices for him in 2006 and 2008 after he criticized the government, and U.S.-based Rwandan diplomats and intelligence officials monitored Munyakazi’s activities between 2011 and 2013, according to the FBI report. But Rwanda’s allegations against Munyakazi were inconsistent, first claiming that the dissident was a member of the RNC, then saying he was wanted on charges related to the genocide.

U.S. immigration authorities investigated Munyakazi and deported him in 2016 for suspected human rights violations, despite the fact that the 2015 FBI report said the investigation was “almost certainly” compromised by a Rwandan intelligence agent, and cast doubt on the allegations. In Rwanda, he faced trial on genocide charges and was sentenced to life in prison — only to be cleared of atrocities a year later and re-sentenced to nine years for “downplaying the genocide,” according to multiple media reports.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions.

Even senior officials can be targeted: Eugène Richard Gasana was Rwanda’s permanent representative to the United Nations until he disagreed with changes Kagame made to Rwanda’s constitution in 2015 that cleared his way for a third term in power. Gasana knew he couldn’t return to his homeland and settled in New York, his lawyer told OCCRP.

Soon he was being accused of supporting rebel groups. His lawyer told a New York court that the U.S. investigated these allegations and did not find them credible, while an internal Interpol document about Gasana’s case indicated the policing body found the charges to be politically motivated.

Then, he was accused of rape by a Rwandan woman who had interned in his office at the U.N. several years earlier. New York law enforcement investigated the criminal complaint but did not find a basis on which to bring criminal charges, according to a subsequent Interpol investigation. The accuser is now suing Gasana in New York over the same allegations.

In 2020, Interpol issued a red notice when the Rwandan government recycled the same charges. Gasana challenged the notice, arguing that the charges were political. The internal Interpol review obtained by OCCRP also concluded that there was “a predominant political dimension” to Rwanda’s case against Gasana, and that Interpol “may be perceived as facilitating politically motivated activities.”

“They manipulated Interpol. They snuck the arrest warrant into the system but we were able to get it deleted,” Gasana’s lawyer, Charles Kambanda, told OCCRP. He’s now representing Gasana in the civil litigation in New York, and speculates that after the Rwandan government failed in its efforts to go after Gasana through law enforcement, its intention now “is probably to bankrupt him.”

“Litigation in New York is damn expensive. We’ve been on the civil case for three years now. They always find some reason to delay the case since they know they don’t have a substantive case against him, so they use procedural tricks to keep the case going,” said Kambanda. “They’ve hired a lot of lawyers — I’m fighting five law firms I think. One of them, a lawyer, is representing Kagame in the case against Rusesabagina’s family.”

Will Hayes, a lawyer at U.K. law firm Kingsley Napley who represents clients fighting extradition requests and challenging Interpol red notices, told OCCRP the current system is “open to abuse.”

“The effects of red notices are so onerous and significant compared to the ease with which they can be issued,” said Hayes. “This highlights the disparity between the power of the authorities that request them and the subject who then has to deal with the consequences.”

The minimum requirements for issuing a red notice are very low, according to Hayes. Although in theory the requesting country should be able to provide information demonstrating the accused’s participation in an offense, in reality, “as long as there is a valid arrest warrant and the person is sufficiently identified, it’ll go through,” he said.

Often people learn there is a red notice against them only when they attempt to travel, or when extradition proceedings against them begin, Hayes said. To challenge it, they must petition an Interpol commission, which meets four times a year and can take nine months to issue decisions.

In 2016, Enoch Ruhigira, a Rwandan living in New Zealand who was traveling to the U.K., was detained in Germany on the basis of a red notice, even though it had already been deleted at the time. Ruhigira, the head of presidential staff under the previous Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, had been accused by Kagame of genocide in 2004, but presented convincing evidence to the contrary and got the red notice against him rescinded in 2015. Still, he spent eight months in custody while the confusion was sorted out.

Interpol declined to comment.

“You Can Run But You Cannot Hide”

Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front took power in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, which saw nearly 1 million members of the Tutsi ethnic group and their sympathizers murdered. Lauded for bringing peace and fast economic growth, his government has been embraced by Western allies for nearly three decades. But at the same time, it has targeted, criminalized and crushed his detractors at home and abroad. Human rights organizations have documented numerous killings, disappearances, threats, attacks and forced returns under Kagame’s rule.

The RNC, an opposition group established in the U.S. in 2010 by exiled former senior government officials, has drawn particular ire. RNC co-founder Patrick Karegeya, a former head of Rwandan intelligence, was murdered in a hotel room in South Africa in 2014. Co-founder Faustine Kayumba Nyamwasa, an ex-Rwandan army chief, has survived three assassination attempts.

“I am a high-profile target, but I’m safer than someone in Kigali [Rwanda’s capital] with similar thinking like me, Nyamwasa told OCCRP. “They are more exposed to a lot of danger.”

“We have our own way of getting to know what is intended,” Nyamwasa said, explaining how he has managed to stay alive. “But you cannot control everything. The situation is threatening but you get used to it. You learn to live with it.”

The Rwandan regime gets away with abductions, disappearances, and assassinations at home and in other African countries, where perpetrators can avoid justice by paying bribes, Nyamwasa explained. In Europe and in the U.S., where there are stronger institutions and rule of law, Rwanda uses disinformation instead.

The disinformation and intelligence operations are run out of Rwanda’s embassies all over the world, according to former high-ranking security officials now living in exile.

Robert Higiro, a former major in the Rwandan army, says sometimes the operations are carried out by people posing as refugees who are actually working for the government. They “push aggressively” by telling the U.S. State Department, FBI, CIA or the U.K.’s Foreign Office that certain targets are criminals and shouldn’t get asylum, according to Higiro.

Several exiles told OCCRP about warnings and briefings they had received by police in the U.S., U.K., Belgium, and the Netherlands, suggesting that despite warm diplomatic relations, these governments are aware of Kigali’s tactics.

British journalist Michela Wrong, author of “Do Not Disturb,” a book about the Kagame regime and the killing of Karegeya, told OCCRP that Rwanda’s extradition efforts are designed to dissuade any political challengers to Kagame. Foreign law enforcement agencies don’t always realize what they’re dealing with, she said.

“The message is, ‘You can run, but you cannot hide. I will get you in the end.’ That’s what all these operations boil down to,” Wrong said. “This is a personalized message directed at Kagame’s own entourage, which he believes would be the source of any serious challenge to his regime.”

Reconsidering U.S. Support?

Despite Rwanda’s poor track record on human rights, Western allies have maintained their support for decades.

In addition to training the Rwandan military, the U.S. proposed to spend $145 million in assistance to Kigali in 2023. The U.K. signed a bilateral agreement to send asylum seekers from the U.K. to Rwanda, despite being warned that Rwanda tortures and kills political opponents.

One U.S. lawmaker is pressuring the Biden administration to finally reconsider supporting Kigali, especially after Rusesabagina’s kidnapping in 2020.

“Not only would Rwanda be flouting U.S. laws by targeting dissidents inside the United States, Rwanda appears to be the only foreign government in the world that is both wrongfully detaining an American resident and seen by the United States as a partner and ally,” wrote Senator Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, to Secretary of State Antony Blinken in July.

The lawmaker said there was a “need for a more effective U.S. policy” and that he would place a hold on all security assistance to Rwanda until the State Department undertakes a comprehensive review.