The US deployment of about 450 Special Operations troops back to Somalia will help Washington’s local counterterrorism partners pressure the increasingly dangerous al-Shabaab terrorist group—which most Americans do not realize has become al-Qaeda’s largest, wealthiest, and deadliest franchise. Apart from the decision to send US forces to shore up NATO’s defenses against Russian aggression in Europe, the Somalia deployment may represent the largest new commitment of US forces overseas by President Joe Biden.

As counterterrorism professionals with more than fifty-five years of national-security experience between us—in the White House and three cabinet departments, and under four presidents from both parties—we are increasingly concerned about the popular perception that terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) have been defeated. As far back as 2018, the National Strategy for Counterterrorism foresaw that groups such as ISIS and al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s branch in Somalia, would continue to threaten US interests, and that terrorists would seek to gain control of safe havens in countries whose governments are too weak or distracted to contain them without outside help. Premature declarations of victory are dangerous. 

This is why Somalia is an important story. The recent election of president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud represents progress, but al-Shabaab—whose leaders frequently call for attacks on Americans—is gaining power in southern and central Somalia and is close to being able to mount external operations targeting the United States. One such plot was already disrupted: In December 2020, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment for a plot by al-Shabaab’s leaders to carry out a 9/11-style aircraft hijacking in the United States. The Philippines extradited an alleged al-Shabaab operative to the United States to stand trial for the scheme.

Al-Shabaab also has a history of luring young Somali-Americans to Somalia to fight foreign invaders, then using them for terrorist attacks against civilians. Such attacks have reached beyond Somalia, killing sixty-seven at a shopping mall in 2013 and 147 at a university in 2015, both in Kenya. A plot to bring down a passenger plane in February 2016 failed only by good luck and a skillful aircrew. And in 2020, Al-Shabaab killed three Americans who were training Kenyan counterterrorism forces.

For all these reasons, Biden’s order to resend US service members—which reversed a December 2020 decision by the Trump administration to withdraw the then-remaining 750 US military personnel in Somalia—was the right move. Conditions on the ground in 2020 did not justify confidence that Somali forces were ready to take on al-Shabaab without help. Early that year, US Africa Command said publicly (and repeated it just before then President Donald Trump’s decision) that al-Shabaab “remains adaptive, resilient, and capable of attacking US partner interests in Somalia and East Africa.” 

Since the US withdrawal, al-Shabaab has grown in power and wealth. Open sources estimate that the group has grown to seven thousand fighters and receives annual revenues of $130 million from criminal activities, which have included forcing Somalis to give their charitable contributions to al-Shabaab instead of actual charities. For comparison, the Somali government’s total revenue in 2019 was $342 million. Given the number of people living in al-Shabaab-controlled areas, that makes the terrorist organization more than twice as rich per capita as the Somali government.

In February, when the United States carried out a drone strike in defense of Somali military forces being attacked by al-Shabaab, US forces advised and assisted Somali partners from outside the country. But this is hardly the best approach to working effectively with partner counterterrorism forces. 

The Biden administration’s decision will allow US troops to once again train and work alongside the Danab, Somalia’s most effective counterterrorism unit. This will result in better battlefield intelligence collection, especially the kind of gritty tactical intelligence from local human sources needed to successfully counter al-Shabaab. A persistent presence also enhances security for US diplomats and civilian specialists to carry out their vital work. 

A small footprint, especially of US Special Operations Forces, will strengthen and rebuild Somali counterterrorism capabilities in ways that an “over-the-horizon” presence never could. This will keep the pressure on al-Shabaab, limiting the group’s ability to plan and mount external operations that threaten Americans in the US homeland and overseas.

Experience has shown that we ignore growing terrorism threats in contested spaces at our peril. Biden’s decision to send a small number of US troops into Somalia with a limited mission needs to be given the credit and support it deserves. American lives may well depend on it.

Thomas S. Warrick is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, director of the Future of DHS Project, and co-director of the Future of Counterterrorism Project. He is a former senior official at the US Department of State and deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy at the US Department of Homeland Security.

Christopher P. Costa is the executive director of the International Spy Museum and a former career US Army intelligence officer. He served as special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018. 

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Africa Center Distinguished Fellow Ambassador J. Peter Pham, former US Special Envoy for the Sahel Region as well as former US Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa, moderated the conversation, opening with a discussion on the evolution of Prof. Autesserre’s distinguished career from identifying flaws in international peacebuilding norms and practices to offering an alternative localized solution, noting that her often provocative work has influenced policy discussions at some of the highest levels in international organizations and governments.  

In Prof. Autesserre’s remarks, she highlighted the need to move peacebuilding away from the traditional practices of premature elections and a focus on elite-bargaining, towards a process that is locally led and prioritizes local definitions of peace, democracy, and justice. She also spoke of the growing support for localized peace processes but noted that international organizations often merely “talk the talk” when it comes to supporting genuinely locally driven peace processes.

Prof. Autesserre also engaged on the role of locally led peace processes in Idjwi (DRC), Somaliland, and lessons that can be brought from these contexts to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (​MINUSMA), whose annual mandate renews on June 30 and which Amb. Pham noted, has “found progress difficult to come by” despite the “billions of dollars spent since 2013 and the hundreds of lives lost, making MINUSMA the deadliest ‘peacekeeping’ mission in the world today.”

Further reading

Event Recap May 25, 2021

Mali coup: White House official calls for ‘unconditional and immediate’ release of president and prime minister

By Africa Center

Speaking at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Day celebration, White House official Dana Banks responded to topical issues in African affairs, including the coup in Mali, calling for “the unconditional and immediate release of the president and the prime minister.”

Africa Democratic Transitions

Event Recap Apr 13, 2021

Reflecting on the Bring Back Our Girls movement

By Africa Center

On Tuesday, April 13, the Africa Center convened a private event with Wall Street Journal reporters Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw for a discussion of their recently published investigative book Bring Back Our Girls, chronicling the infamous abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 and the resultant social media-driven advocacy campaign and international response.

Africa Extremism

New Atlanticist May 25, 2021

Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Africa’s most overlooked crises and opportunities

By Katherine Walla

Thomas-Greenfield spoke about US President Joe Biden’s outlook on Africa with Ambassador Rama Yade, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, at an event celebrating Africa Day and introducing the Africa Center’s new team and mission.

Africa Crisis Management

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In his remarks, Mr. Abdirizak addressed issues of security, governance, elections, and regional relationships from Somalia’s perspective, emphasizing that Somalia itself must be the key actor in building a better future for the country. Regional ambassadors in attendance were offered the opportunity to respond to the Minister’s remarks, providing reflections of their own on regional relations and the role of regional institutions such as the Intergovernmental Authority on Development. Dignitaries in attendance included H.E. Ali Sharif Ahmed, ambassador of Somalia; H.E. Lazarus Amayo, ambassador of Kenya; H.E. Nureldin Satti, ambassador of Sudan; and Berhane Solomon, chargé d’affaires of the Embassy of Eritrea to the United States.

Others in attendance included current State Department officials, former US ambassadors to African countries, African and European diplomats, and the senior leadership of relevant non-profit organizations, among others. Participants took advantage of the forum to ask the Minister questions on a wide variety of topics, including civil society, journalistic freedom, regional integration, relations with key partners, and efforts to combat Al-Shabaab. Mr. Negatu closed the conversation by emphasizing his hope for stronger regional relationships through dialogue and collaboration on important challenges, as well as by pledging to continue further discussions on Somalia and the Horn of Africa throughout 2021 under the auspices of the Atlantic Council.

Event Recap May 25, 2021

Mali coup: White House official calls for ‘unconditional and immediate’ release of president and prime minister

By Africa Center

Speaking at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Day celebration, White House official Dana Banks responded to topical issues in African affairs, including the coup in Mali, calling for “the unconditional and immediate release of the president and the prime minister.”

Africa Democratic Transitions

Event Recap Apr 13, 2021

Reflecting on the Bring Back Our Girls movement

By Africa Center

On Tuesday, April 13, the Africa Center convened a private event with Wall Street Journal reporters Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw for a discussion of their recently published investigative book Bring Back Our Girls, chronicling the infamous abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 and the resultant social media-driven advocacy campaign and international response.

Africa Extremism

New Atlanticist May 25, 2021

Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Africa’s most overlooked crises and opportunities

By Katherine Walla

Thomas-Greenfield spoke about US President Joe Biden’s outlook on Africa with Ambassador Rama Yade, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, at an event celebrating Africa Day and introducing the Africa Center’s new team and mission.

Africa Crisis Management

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On November 18, Forward Defense and Middle East Center non-resident senior fellow Thomas Warrick wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle titled “Trump gambles with national security by removing troops.” In this piece, Warrick argues that President Trump is taking significant risks by withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, which will most likely not pay off.

Fellow

Thomas S. Warrick

Nonresident Senior Fellow, Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative

Forward Defense Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East programs

National Security Terrorism

Forward Defense, housed within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, generates ideas and connects stakeholders in the defense ecosystem to promote an enduring military advantage for the United States, its allies, and partners. Our work identifies the defense strategies, capabilities, and resources the United States needs to deter and, if necessary, prevail in future conflict.

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Ms. Bronwyn Bruton, Africa Center director of programs and studies and deputy director, moderated the ensuing discussion in which participants engaged Faratoon on the Puntland–Somaliland dispute, oil and gas exploration, and the effects of Chinese, Russian, and Gulf State interests in Somaliland and the wider region.

Among those in attendance and participating in the discussion were Ambassador Lange Schermerhorn, former US ambassador to the Republic of Djibouti, Ambassador Stephen Schwartz, former US ambassador to the Federal Republic of Somalia, and Ambassador David Shinn, former US ambassador to Burkina Faso and the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, as well as representatives from US government agencies and nongovernmental organizations.

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Another somber anniversary will be marked in the first week of October. In 1993, in a battle fought over two days—October 3 and 4—Somali gunmen loyal to the warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed killed eighteen US soldiers, wounded seventy-three others, and shot down two US Army Black Hawk helicopters. The battle prompted the United States to abandon a mission originally intended to support United Nations humanitarian operations in Mogadishu.

Fast-forward to 2018. US forces—working with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and Somali security forces—have steadily ratcheted up counterterrorism operations in Somalia.

Noting the precision of these operations, J. Peter Pham, vice president for research and regional initiatives and director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, said: “Long gone are the days when US forces narrowly, but all too regularly, missed a guy here or there.”

“There are instances where US missiles have struck large groups of Shabaab gathered in one place as well as successfully hitting high-value terrorist targets,” Pham said.

Bronwyn Bruton, director of programs and studies and deputy director of the Africa Center, said the impact of US operations—and of the African Union (AU) peacekeeping mission—has been mixed in Somalia. “Al-Shabaab has been forced to surrender its hold on most of the territory of southern Somalia. But Shabaab forces still move throughout the country with ease and impunity, and are still highly capable of spoiling Western efforts to expand the government’s control of territory,” Bruton said.

“Beyond the short-term goal of reducing Shabaab’s hold on territory, however, US and AU efforts have been a profound failure,” she said. “The desire to resist US and AU efforts to impose a government on Somalia has been the unifying force behind a very disparate group of Islamist, clan, criminal and anti-government actors, and perceptions of a foreign ‘invasion’ of Somalia have certainly fueled al-Shabaab’s recruitment efforts, both locally and internationally. When AU forces eventually withdraw—as they must, sooner or later—it’s likely that al-Shabaab will quickly retake every inch of ground that it has lost.”

While contending that the US operation has succeeded in decimating al Shabaab’s senior leadership, Pham said, the Somali government still needs to be empowered to fill the vacuum on the ground. “US operations can clear the ground, but someone local has to fill that space,” he said, adding, “that’s incumbent on the Somali government.”

Pham said while the current Somali president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, has done better than his predecessors “that is a pretty low bar.”

“By any objective standard,” said Bruton, “the Somali government remains the most corrupt and incompetent government in the world.”

The al-Shabaab threat

The State Department, in its Country Report on Terrorism 2017 released this week, said al-Shabaab remains a threat to regional security in East Africa. “It retained safe haven, access to recruits and resources, and de facto control over large parts of Somalia through which it moves freely,” the report says. “Al-Shabaab maintained its allegiance to al-Qaeda, remaining intent on limiting the influence and reach of the northern Somalia-based group of ISIS-linked fighters responsible for local suicide bombings and other attacks against Somali security forces.”

Al-Shabaab is an organization that “has historically had links to global terrorism and networks like al Qaeda,” said Pham.

According to the State Department report, despite facing “significant military pressure during 2017” al-Shabaab “still maintained control over large portions” of Somalia. The group, for example, was believed responsible for an October 2017 bombing in Mogadishu that killed more than 500 people and wounded several hundred.

Al-Shabaab primarily operates inside Somalia with sporadic attacks across the border in Kenya. Some of these attacks—Westgate and a subsequent attack on Garissa University College in 2015—have been spectacular. In April 2015, al-Shabaab militants attacked Garissa University College in northeastern Kenya. At least 147 people, mostly children, were killed.

The State Department report said Kenya witnessed a “significant increase” in al-Shabaab terrorist attacks in the region bordering Somalia in 2017. It goes on to describe Kenya as “a strong US partner in counterterrorism investigation, prosecution, and incident response, and continued to play an important role in regional counterterrorism cooperation.”

“What we don’t pay attention to is how much Kenya has borne the cost of this war,” said Pham. “Kenya, for a number of years, suffered weekly, if not daily, incursions from Shabaab.”

The Kenyan government has “fought the hard fight,” Pham added.

Calibrating the US response

On the military level, the United States needs to encourage the Somali government to take the lead on counterterrorism operations, said Pham, suggesting that Washington dial back its operations in Somalia.

“The recalibration of US operations in Africa as a whole, which is taking place on the orders of [US] Secretary [of Defense James] Mattis, is necessary because we have eliminated high-value targets and it is neither the job of the US military nor is it sustainable over the long term that the US chase after every single terrorist,” said Pham. That is the job of the Somali armed forces, he contended.

“The ubiquitous nature of the US involvement can often be a crutch that prevents the Somali armed forces” from stepping up to the plate, he added.

On the political level, Pham suggested that the United States encourage the Somali government to build a sustainable political framework. After all, he said, “the only way you defeat an insurgency of any kind is through a political solution.”

“The Somali government needs to be encouraged to share power and resources with regional and local authorities who are closest to the Somali people,” said Pham, noting the prevailing crisis between the regional states and the federal government. “That very political stalemate creates the space for groups like ISIS, which has more recently established a presence in Somalia, and Shabaab.”

According to Bruton, the current Somali government “is still not regarded as a credible institution by the majority of Somalis, and it will not survive the withdrawal of African Union peacekeeping troops from Somalia.”

“US support for the Somali government—from the Bush administration onwards—has always been tepid and inadequate,” she said. “However, it is not clear that it would be desirable from a policy perspective for the Trump administration to do more to support an institution that is unlikely to become viable.”

Ashish Kumar Sen is deputy director of communications, editorial, at the Atlantic Council. Follow him on Twitter @AshishSen.

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While it is imperative to keep up military pressure on the militants, ultimately insurgencies like Somalia’s can only be defeated by political legitimacy—and, as I pointed out late last year, this is one test that, more than a quarter of century after the collapse of the last central government to really exercise sovereinty over the country, the authorities in Mogadishu still struggle to achieve a passing grade on: recall that the FGS’s own auditor estimates that $20 million changed hands in the process that led to the establishment of the current administration in February 2017, a fact that does not exactly stir patriotic adherence to or otherwise bolster the regime’s credibility with ordinary Somalis.

Protected in the seaside capital by the 22,000-strong military force of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)—made up of troops from Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda whose salaries are paid by the European Union and whose operations are supported by a United Nations logistical package and various bilateral donors led by the United States—Somalia’s political elites wile away their time in internecine power struggles. Earlier this month, the speaker of the country’s parliament, Mohamed Osman Jawari, was forced to resign ahead of a no-confidence vote, after losing out in a fight with President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, a.k.a. “Farmajo” (from the Italian formaggio, or cheese) a dual US-Somali national who worked as a Buffalo-based diversity contracting officer for the New York State Department of Transportation in between stints in politics. At least this standoff was resolved without recourse to physical violence: just a week before, parliamentary police loyal to the speaker squared off against state security forces aligned with the president in the legislative chamber itself, necessitating an intervention by Ugandan Brigadier Paul Lokech and AMISOM troops under his command to separate the combatants.

Amid this political infighting, extremist Islamist elements—including veterans of some of al-Shabaab’s predecessor groups or fellow travelers such as al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI), the Islamic Courts Union, and al-Islah—have begun to coalesce around a new banner, “al-Citisam” (“those who seek protection” [from God]), with support from certain segments of the FGS. During a trip to the region last month, a well-placed senior African interlocutor with years of diplomatic and intelligence experience in Somalia shared with me a dossier that suggests that al-Citisam’s reach may go as far as President Farmajo’s chief of staff, Fahad Yasin. From what I learned, Yasin—who, prior to his entry into politics as the manager of Farmajo’s successful bid for the presidency last year, worked for Doha, Qatar-based Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language channel as a correspondent—has links to several prominent figures in AIAI, which has been designated a terrorist group by the US State Department under the USA PATRIOT Act. 

A respected Horn of Africa researcher summarized al-Citisam in this way: “It is garnering broader alliances of businessmen and clerics, and this had produced telling jokes in Mogadishu: ‘al-Shabaab with money is in the making and delivered al-Citisam,’ and the group is stealthily trying to capture the state… The importance of al-Citisam lies in the fact that it has the capacity to become a force to be reckoned with quickly, progressively assuming the upper hand among the rank and file of the [Somali Federal Government], although the group’s target is the 2020 elections in Somalia… The whole plan is designed in such a way as to constitute the core of the [Somali National Army, SNA]… When the full training and organization of these [first] 1,000 soldiers is completed, they will take over the running of the security of Villa Somalia… Following the adjustment of Villa Somalia’s security arrangements, the next batch of 1,000 soldiers consisting of [former] al-Shabaab operatives will deal with the security of the city.” According to this analyst, recruitment for this plan is being overseen by a committee headed by Sheikh Abdullahi Ahmed Omer, formerly of Jabhatul Islamiya (a.k.a, the Somali Islamic Front, JABISO), a group that merged into the Hizbul Islam insurgency during the Ethiopian intervention in Somalia in 2006.

All this is taking place under the very nose of President Farmajo—perhaps even with his tacit approval. It is worth recalling that Farmajo’s 2009 master’s thesis at the State University of New York at Buffalo not only claimed that the genocidal Siad Barre regime had “won the hearts and minds of the people by promoting a new self-reliance and self-supporting mentality” and lamented the dictatorship’s ignominious collapse as “another unfortunate page in an unfortunate epoch,” but described US policy in the region as “failed” while slavishly praising then-Somali President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, an Islamist, as “the very best person for today’s Somalia.”

This is the context which perhaps sheds some light on an otherwise obscure set of recent developments. On April 8, Somali officials stopped an airplane at Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport carrying forty-seven military personnel from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to a statement from the UAE’s Foreign Ministry, the Emirati personnel were held at gunpoint and assaulted, while a large amount of cash meant “to support the Somali army and trainees and pay their salaries” was seized (the Associated Press reported that the funds totaled $9.6 million). A week later, on April 14, in the northern port city of Bosaso, another Emirati plane, this one carrying trainers for the maritime police force in the semi-autonomous Puntland region, was detained before it was eventually allowed to depart.

Since 2014, the UAE has provided military and police counterterrorism trainers for Somalia and pays the salaries of some 2,407 Somali soldiers (roughly 10 percent of the SNA’s official payroll, although a significantly higher proportion of its deployable effectives). In addition, the Emirati government and charities underwrite various aid projects, including the Sheikh Zayed Hospital in Mogadishu (named for the UAE’s founding president, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan), which opened in 2015 and has since provided free treatment to hundreds of patients daily. The UAE is also, after Saudi Arabia and Oman, the largest market for Somalia’s primarily agricultural exports, especially livestock and hides. Dubai-based DP World is also committed to investing $442 million in a joint venture with the government in the Somaliland region to manage and develop a multi-use port in Berbera, on the Gulf of Aden, one of the largest natural deep harbors on the African continent’s eastern littoral. (The government of Ethiopia acquired a 19 percent stake in the project in March 2018, planning to make Berbera the gateway for an inland infrastructure corridor.)

In response, the UAE announced on April 15 that was ending its military-training mission, which up to now has trained thousands of Somali soldiers and police at three training centers that it also constructed. According to the Foreign Ministry in Abu Dhabi: “The decision comes in response to Somali security forces’ seizure of a UAE-registered civil aircraft at Mogadishu Airport and confiscation of money destined to pay the soldiers… The UAE has expressed its denunciation of the seizure incident which flies in the face of diplomatic traditions and ties between world countries and contravenes the agreements signed by both countries.”

On April 21, Somali officials formally took over what had until just days before been the UAE-run training center in Mogadishu (SNA chief Abdullahi Ali Anod claimed that the government will turn the facility into a military academy, although he did not explain how it was going to pay for the transformation). As if on cue, al-Shabaab militants launched a heavy assault in the early hours of April 22 against the army barracks in the capital’s Warta Nabada (formerly Wardhigley) district, home of the Villa Somalia presidential compound and the parliament building. While the attack was repulsed with some casualties, that it could take place in the heart of Mogadishu, a city from which the insurgents were driven more than six years ago by AMISOM, only underscores how badly the FGS forces need the training and support that they won’t be getting any more from the Emirati mission—for whose absence the thirty buses donated by the government of Qatar after Mogadishu’s rupture with the UAE won’t quite make up.

What has transpired is that the diplomatic conflict between Qatar and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council—especially Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain—has spilled over into a proxy conflict in the Horn of Africa. That much could have been anticipated, but what is both surprising and, from the point of view of the United States and other allies, more worrisome, is that the FGS has apparently taken sides. Moreover, Mogadishu’s choice appears to be driven, in some measure, by a cabal within the already-fragile regime with a clear Islamist agenda—as if the very real threat of terrorism in and from Somalia were not more than enough to be concerned about.

J. Peter Pham is vice president of the Atlantic Council and director of its Africa Center.

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The strikes also underscore the shift in ISIS’ center of gravity following the group’s losses not only in Iraq and Syria this year, but also the routing of its affiliate in Libya last December. These developments have sent surviving fighters and arms flowing into more remote areas, including the Sahel, where the killing of four US Special Forces troops in an ambush in Niger in October focused attention on the new front lines of the fight. While most of the counterterrorism focus is on North and West Africa, where many ISIS recruits originally came from, the eastern side of the continent presents its own vulnerabilities.

The militants who were the target of the operations on November 3 are based in the northeastern part of Somalia, in the Galgala district of the semi-autonomous Puntland region. Here, in late 2015, a number of al-Shabaab militants led by Abdulqadir Mumin pledged allegiance to ISIS’ self-proclaimed caliph, Abubakar al-Baghdadi. Mumin, a Somali-born radical preacher, lived for years in Sweden and the United Kingdom before fleeing back to Somalia after coming under the scrutiny of MI5, the United Kingdom’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency. His remote mountainous camp enabled Mumin and his small band of followers to survive al-Shabaab’s ruthless campaign against ISIS encroachments in Somalia, but also enabled him to gather additional recruits to his Abnaa ul-Calipha group (or “Islamic State in Somalia” as it has been dubbed) from sub-clans marginalized by the Puntland regional authorities. When al-Shabaab sent a force to rein in the turncoat, local clan forces ambushed them, allowing Mumin to get away.

While al-Baghdadi has to date not accepted Mumin’s bay’a (pledge of allegiance)—ISIS has often waited until new groups proved themselves before granting formal recognition—Somali security officials have reported that the ISIS affiliate in Yemen has provided training, weapons, and other materiel. In August 2016, citing his expansion of “his cell of ISIL supporters by kidnapping young boys aged 10 to 15, indoctrinating them, and forcing them to take up militant activity,” the US State Department declared Mumin a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” (SDGT).

Late last year, Mumin and his followers managed to seize and briefly hold Qandala, a port town on the southern shore of the Gulf of Aden with a population of nearly 20,000 in the Bari district of Puntland. Thus, albeit for only a few months before Puntland forces pushed them out, the black flag of ISIS flew over a not-insignificant territory in Somalia.

In March 2017, US President Donald J. Trump signed a Presidential Policy Guidance giving AFRICOM commanders enhanced authorities to carry out anti-terrorism operations in Somalia. To date, AFRICOM commander Gen. Thomas Waldhauser and his team have used the expanded targeting authorization judiciously to take out terrorists, including on November 3. Undoubtedly, they will be called upon to do so again, both against Mumin’s ISIS-branded group and against the larger al-Shabaab militants. (In a separate—but certainly not unrelated—development over the weekend, the US diplomatic mission, located inside the heavily-fortified international airport at Mogadishu, ordered non-essential personnel to leave the Somali capital because of a “specific threat.”)

While it is imperative to keep up the tempo of counterterrorism operations in order to eliminate threats and degrade the capabilities of militants, ultimately insurgencies like Somalia’s can only be defeated by political legitimacy—a test with which the internationally-recognized and rather generously-supported Somali government struggles. It’s hardly promising when a regime’s own auditor estimates that $20 million changed hands in the process that culminated in the selection of the current president, a fact that can hardly be expected to stir patriotism or otherwise inspire heroic efforts. Credible benchmarks and the political will to enforce them are desperately needed if the international community is to have a reliable partner to work with in Somalia, rather than just an additional liability.

J. Peter Pham is Atlantic Council Vice President for Research and Regional Initiatives and Director of the Council’s Africa Center.

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“The weekend’s attacks highlight the limits of the military assistance [that the Somali government] has received,” said J. Peter Pham, vice president and director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. “As the enemy has shifted, so too must the emphasis now move to building up police and intelligence capacities.”

However, this is not a call for an increased US role in Somali state-building. “We need to recognize that what we can realistically do is minimize the threat that al-Shabaab and other militants can pose to regional security,” said Pham, adding: “What we cannot do is make Somalia ‘work’—only Somalis can do that.”

On October 14, two truck bombings in the Somali capital of Mogadishu killed over 300 people and wounded hundreds of others in the deadliest single attack in the fragile nation’s history. As rescue workers clear the scene, the death toll continues to rise.

The Somali government has attributed the attack to al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-linked militant group which has carried out a number of similar bombings in Somalia, killing 723 in 2016 alone, since it infiltrated the country in 2007. While the group has not yet claimed responsibility for the October 14 attack, large truck bombs have been its method of choice in the past.  

US President Donald J. Trump has increased commitment of US forces and airstrikes to aid the Somali government’s counterterrorism efforts. US Special Operations forces have launched fifteen airstrikes against al-Shabaab since the outset of 2017.

“The horrific twin attacks by al-Shabaab underscore a key truth about the terrorists,” said Pham: “Time and again throughout its history, the al-Qaeda-linked militant group has shown itself to be remarkably resilient, adapting to the shifting strategic and political landscape of Somalia and its neighborhood.”

Issuing a statement condemning “in the strongest terms,” the attacks on October 14, the US Mission to Somalia claimed that “such cowardly attacks reinvigorate the commitment of the United States to assist our Somali and African Union partners to combat the scourge of terrorism to promote stability and prosperity for the Somali people and their regional neighbors.”

However, according to Pham, increased airstrikes may prove insufficient. “Despite the recent setbacks [al-Shabaab] has suffered in terms of airstrikes by the United States and defections from its ranks—both of which indeed have measurably weakened it, but not entirely wiped it out—it has shifted once again, moving from a posture of insurgency to increasingly more lethal terrorist operations,” he said.

The group has steadily lost territory since 2011, but has revamped its terror attacks on the crowded Somali capital. According to Pham, the attacks over the weekend are the thirty-fourth time a car bomb has been detonated in the Somali capital this year.

These violent operations are “aimed at undermining the modicum of security that has slowly returned to Somalia for the first time in years,” said Pham.

Somalia has struggled to re-establish a secure state and governance structure since the collapse of its central government twenty-five years ago. Improvements have been made under the new government of Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed such that “the current regime probably enjoys the best prospects of any Somali entity in a long time,” said Pham. However, the persistence of al-Shabaab and the scale of the recent attacks demonstrate the level of work left to do in order to make Somalia more secure.

While improved governance in Somalia could advance counterterror efforts, Pham insisted that “the role of the United States and its allies is not to nation-build in Somalia. That is the responsibility of the Somalis themselves.”

“However,” he added, “it is… in the interest of the United States and other international partners to support—to the extent that they demonstrate an effective capacity—those national or regional entities in Somalia which stand opposed to our common enemies and can thus contribute to local and regional security.”

While responsibility for stabilizing Somalia should not fall with the United States, Somalia cannot do it alone. “The current Somali government is not without its defects,” said Pham, “and the international community needs to be very clear-eyed about that reality and factor in the limitations of what the government can realistically be expected to accomplish.” According to Pham, increased and revised strategic counterterror efforts from both Washington and Mogadishu are necessary in order to effectively counter the increasingly violent insurgency of al-Shabaab.

Rachel Ansley is an editorial assistant at the Atlantic Council.

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Al Shabaab was once a radical youth militia on the fringes of Somali politics, but it was transformed into a national resistance movement when policymakers in Washington decided to bankroll and provide political cover for Ethiopia’s brutal invasion and occupation of Somalia. Ethiopia’s occupation enraged the Somali people, who turned to the only armed group that was capable of resisting the Ethiopian army and the unpopular, foreign-created government that it was attempted to install in Mogadishu.

Since 2007, al Shabaab and the Somali government have been locked in a symbiotic relationship. Washington’s fear of al Shabaab ensures that the Somali government will continue to receive financial and political support, as well as tens of thousands of African peacekeepers. These peacekeepers fight al Shabaab—but they also protect the government, which does not have the capacity to protect itself.

Al Shabaab also depends on the government: the Somali people’s perception that the government has been captured by one clan at the expense of all the others, ensures that al Shabaab retains a base of support among disenfranchised clans. Thus, al Shabaab fighters continue to weave effortlessly in and out of Mogadishu, planting bombs, undermining Somalis’ sense of security, and making a mockery of the government’s claims that it is in control of the country. One decade, more than a billion dollars, and tens of thousands of peacekeepers later, the Somali government is clearly not in control—not of its capital city, not of the top two-thirds of the country, not of most of the rural areas, and not of the areas that have effectively been annexed by the Kenyan military. Somalia is a mess.

The tragedy is that the Somali people are helpless, bloodied pawns in an artificial stalemate. Al Shabaab would have little reason to launch attacks in Mogadishu were it not for the presence of the Somali government. American and European policymakers vaunt the progress that the Somali government has made over the past 10 years, but the reality is that almost nothing has changed. When the African Union peacekeepers leave—as sooner or later they must—this “internationally recognized” government will utterly and immediately collapse, and there will be nothing to show for the decade of effort that the troop-contributing countries have poured into Somalia. The only legacy of the peacekeeping mission will be the weapons, intelligence, and training that Washington has lavished on the authoritarian leaders of Burundi, Uganda, and Ethiopia to pursue this fight.

Policymakers in Washington need a new set of priorities. They should stop promoting the Somali government at all costs, and focus instead on ending this bloodshed (which has already spread to Kenya and is poised to seep across the rest of the region). Al Shabaab cannot be defeated militarily: the problem requires a political solution. And a political solution requires Washington to deal directly with al Shabaab, and with the many clan factions that feel threatened by the current government. It cannot continue hiding behind the fiction that the government is in control, or will be anytime soon.

Washington’s proposed solution to this crisis—to create an army for the Somali government that can defeat al Shabaab without foreign assistance—is laughably unrealistic. Stepped-up efforts to create an army for the Somali government have led to a dramatic escalation in violence in Mogadishu over the past few months, as the government has attempted to disarm and decommission many soldiers, particularly from the Darod clan. The weekend’s truck bombing is part and parcel of this escalation, and there is no end in sight.

Soldiers defect from the Somali army faster than they can be trained. [More than 60,000 have defected so far—only about 5,000 remain loosely under arms. Most of those remain loyal to militia commanders and may or may not choose to fight al Shabaab when called. Indeed, Somali soldiers have deserted their positions when alerted to a pending attack.] Even if Washington and its allies were able to stop the flood of desertions and build something approximating a functioning army, it is unclear to whom any real Somali army would report. Rival administrations have sprung up all over Somalia, and they may well resort to another round of civil war rather than hand real military power to the regime in Mogadishu.

If civil war is not what Washington wants to see in Somalia, it needs to change course now.

Bronwyn Bruton is deputy director and director of programs and studies in the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. Follow her on Twitter @BronwynBruton.

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In his remarks, Shire emphasized Somaliland’s continued status as an island of peace and stability in the troubled Horn of Africa region, its consolidation of security and governance gains, and its relative success in spurring economic development, despite the world’s longstanding refusal to grant Somaliland recognition as an independent nation. (Somaliland declared independence from Somalia two and half decades ago, in 1991). A severe drought has inflicted terrible damage on Somaliland’s economy, killing a majority of the country’s livestock and aggravating youth unemployment. Shire affirmed the government of Somaliland’s commitment to holding elections in November 2017, after a three-year delay. Shire voiced concern at Somaliland’s inclusion in the Trump administration’s proposed travel ban, but expressed his hope that Somaliland could continue to work toward both independence and regional stability.

Africa Center Director of Programs and Studies and Deputy Director Bronwyn Bruton introduced Shire and moderated the ensuing discussion, which included attendees from the US government, non-profit sector, and academia. 

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Somalia recently concluded its presidential selection process, and now faces the challenge of completing a constitutional review and finalizing details for the country’s re-constituted security forces. All this takes place amid renewed international conversations about the status of the African Union-led peacekeeping mission (AMISOM), a key player in the fight against al-Shabaab.

In his remarks, Keating detailed the UN’s role in supporting Somali and AU security forces, and in providing humanitarian assistance to the millions of Somalis in need of emergency food aid. He also commended the recent agreement between the Somali federal government and  the country’s federal member states to form a National Security Council and undertake a series of security-related reforms.

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Anzalone’s overview was followed by a response from Stig Jarle Hansen, author of Al-Shabaab in Somalia. He detailed al-Shabaab’s ability to put its own “twist” on real-world events, often capitalizing on regional governments’ sometimes-brutal counterterrorism campaigns, to successfully attract new followers.

Bruton moderated the ensuing question and answer session, which focused on the influence of the Islamic State in Somalia, al-Shabaab’s increasingly sophisticated use of social media and its attempt to export its ideology to Somalia’s neighbors. 

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This is not the first time that the Kenyans have made overtures to close Dadaab, though the call usually comes in the wake of a devastating terror attack, as was the case after both al Shabaab’s April 2015 assault on Garissa University College and its September 2013 attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi. Previous calls for Dadaab’s closure were largely dismissed as attempts to score cheap political points with a portion of Kenyan population that harbors an unfavorable opinion of Somali refugees, or to compel international donors to increase funding. This month’s announcement may be another such ploy.

There are, however, troubling signs that the Kenyan government may be more serious this time. Hosting more than half a million refugees is no small feat, and Kenya is rightly frustrated by the economic, security, and environmental costs of hosting a massive refugee population, particularly amid an increasingly limited global appetite to fund such humanitarian initiatives in Africa. Unlike in previous cases, Kenya recently disbanded its Department of Refugee Affairs and set aside $10 million for closing Dadaab, announcing that the first waves of resettlement will happen in November, with all repatriation finalized by May 2017.

Kenya points to the growing threat posed by Somali terror group al-Shabaab, including claims that the group operates, recruits, and smuggles contraband through Dadaab, to justify the complex’s closure. To some extent, this has been true in the past—in 2011 and 2012, humanitarian aid workers withdrew from Dadaab following a series of kidnappings, attacks, and roadside bombs orchestrated by al Shabaab operatives. But the security situation in the camps has improved since then, and the government has never provided any proof linking Dadaab to the Garissa or Westgate attacks.

More importantly, closing the Dadaab camps is not a silver bullet for Kenya’s security woes. Al Shabaab has proven its ability to operate in northeastern Kenya time and again, as well as its appeal to youth—both Kenyan and Somali. Without also significantly improving the political and security atmosphere inside Somalia, there is little to suggest that closing Dadaab would make Kenya safer. If anything, a hasty dismantling of Dadaab, which could forcibly relocate some 350,000 refugees—some of whom have spent their entire lives in Dadaab and never set foot in Somalia—might increase insecurity in Kenya. Nearly 60 percent of Dadaab’s refugees are under the age of seventeen, and nearly half of the youth are boys, traditionally the most vulnerable population to extremist recruitment. The difficulty of securing Kenya’s porous 425-mile border with Somalia remains a serious challenge for both countries. Notwithstanding a Kenyan proposal to build a physical wall between the two countries, there are few plans to sustainably control migration following a large-scale return of refugees to Somalia.

Already, Al Shabaab employs allegations of discrimination and harassment against ethnically Somali Kenyans and Somali refugees in its recruitment efforts. Closing Dadaab would further exacerbate the existing grievances of Somali communities living elsewhere in Kenya, thereby strengthening al Shabaab’s hand.

To justify their decision legally, the Kenyan government cited a Tripartite Agreement between Somalia, Kenya, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. While this agreement does, as Kenya claims, provide a framework for repatriation of refugees, the agreement stresses the voluntary nature of any refugee returns to Somalia. As forced repatriation violates the non-refoulement principle of the Geneva Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, it is unclear how the Kenyan government would deal with those refugees who do not wish to return (to date, only 5,000 refugees have taken advantage of the agreement to voluntarily return to Somalia), and how it would keep repatriated refugees from re-entering Kenya. Of note is Interior Principal Secretary Karanja Kibicho’s defiant statement, “Our national interest is superior to our international obligations.”

There are also logistical complexities to closing Dadaab. Families with several generations who have been born, grown up, and acquired property live in the camp, which has its own governance structures and service providers. Moving a city roughly the size of Minneapolis, Minnesota, will be enormously complicated—all the more so if most of the residents do not want to leave. The question of what happens to the camp’s basic infrastructure—thousands of buildings, tents, and water, sanitation, and waste disposal  infrastructure—is an important one, and how the transition will affect Kenyans living in nearby Dadaab town merits serious consideration.

Closing Dadaab could also prove costly, as many Kenyan businesses supply the international aid organizations working there, thereby contributing to a beneficial ripple effect throughout the Kenyan economy. Estimates suggest that closing the camp could cost the country 10,000 jobs and some $99 million annually in foreign currency flows. From the sale of livestock alone, Kenyan host communities earn around $1.8 million annually from camp consumers. Dadaab itself does some $25 million in internal business every year.

The international community is not blameless in this scenario. Annual financial appeals for humanitarian efforts in Kenya have been consistently underfunded (only 38.9 percent in 2015) and there is no doubt that supporting Dadaab saddles Kenya with a heavy burden. Kenya is clearly taking cues from the West’s contentious debate on refugees, noting specifically Europe’s “unprecedented efforts to limit refugee flows” from Syria in wake of security concerns and suggesting that Kenya must take the same drastic measures.

Furthermore, while the internal security situation in Somalia remains volatile, in 2013 the United States recognized the country’s government for the first time since 1991 and quietly lifted the two-decade suspension on deporting Somalis back to the country. The United Kingdom and France have also recognized the government, and both countries now have Ambassadors to Somalia. This surge in diplomatic relations—at least rhetorically—now presents the international community with a conundrum: Kenya is calling the West’s bluff, suggesting that Somalia is safe enough for refugees to return.

Is Kenya serious about dismantling Dadaab this time? The country appears more determined than ever before to move forward with its plan. But it faces an uphill battle not only amid resistance from the international community and Somali refugees, but also from the acute and complex challenges posed by the world’s largest refugee camp. More important still, it’s unlikely that breaking down the camps will achieve the objective of “securing Kenya.” Instead, it will garner substantial international condemnation, especially from Europeans who will be worried that uprooted refugees forced back to Somalia will continue toward Europe, and distract from the broader challenges which terrorism and extremism pose to Kenya.

Kelsey Lilley is Associate Director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and Julian Wyss is a Program Assistant with the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.

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After drawing attention to the drafting of Somalia’s first new foreign policy strategy since independence in 1960, Omer focused on the evolving security situation within the country, including providing an updated on the fight against Al-Shabaab, the status of border security efforts, and the efforts to enhance maritime policing. In particular, Omer underscored the importance of harnessing Somalia’s natural resources—including the longest coastline in Africa, 8.9 million hectares of arable land, and a young and increasing education workforce—to protect livelihoods and foster economic growth, a process which is essential for the long-term security and stability of the country. Finally, Omer highlighted the increased burden that the influx of refugees from Yemen has placed on the country in recent months.  

A full transcript of Omer’s remarks can be found below.

Other participants in the event included H.E. Ahmed Isse Awad, Ambassador to the United States of the Federal Republic of Somalia; the Honorable David Shinn, US Ambassador to the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (1996-1999); LTG William E. Ward, Commander of US Africa Command (2007-2011); current and former senior US and foreign officials; and representatives of think tanks and non-governmental organizations.

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US strike on terrorist group exposes ‘serious strategic challenge,’ says Atlantic Council’s J. Peter Pham

A US airstrike that killed more than 150 al Shabaab fighters at a training camp in Somalia over the weekend emphasizes the extent of the terrorist threat in a country that US President Barack Obama once cited as a counterterrorism success story, said the Atlantic Council’s J. Peter Pham.

“The airstrike was a tactical and operational success, but it also underscores that there is a very serious strategic challenge,” said Pham, who is Director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.

The airstrike hit a training camp about 120 miles north of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said a “large-scale” attack was being planned. “We know they were going to be departing the camp and they posed an imminent threat to US and [African Union] forces,” he said according to reports.

While al Shabaab has not managed to carry out attacks in the West, it has attacked Western targets in Somalia as well as, indirectly, in the region. In a video posted online in early 2015, it did, however, call for attacks on shopping malls in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The video listed the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, as a target. Minnesota is home to the United States’ largest Somali community.

Al Shabaab appeals to a “very small minority” of the Somali diaspora in the United States, said Pham. Nevertheless, it does have a network that has facilitated people traveling from the United States to Somalia to fight alongside the group.

“Unlike the isolated, so-called ‘self-radicalized’ ISIS sympathizer, this is a group that has a network that has successfully served as a pathway from the United States, and presumably, and this is a risk, a path back to the United States,” he said.

Shirwa Ahmed, the United States’ first suicide bomber in the modern era, came from the Somali-American community in Minnesota.

Al Shabaab’s leader Ahmed Abdi Godane pledged allegiance to al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in February of 2012. Godane was killed in a US airstrike in September of 2014. Al Shabaab also has ties to two al Qaeda affiliates—al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Al Shabaab has resisted overtures from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Instead, it has conducted a ruthless campaign to root out those calling for alignment with ISIS, said Pham.

J. Peter Pham spoke in an interview with the New Atlanticist’s Ashish Kumar Sen. Here are excerpts from our interview.

Q: What is the significance of the US airstrike on al Shabaab targets in Somalia?

Pham: The airstrike was a tactical and operational success, but it also underscores that there is a very serious strategic challenge. The airstrike, which is reported to have killed 150 al Shabaab militants, is quite significant for two reasons: some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that someone in the United States was keeping an eye on the ball. We had good enough intelligence that the group had assembled, and we were able to react quickly and eliminate the terrorists.

The bad news is that the group could assemble 150 people in one spot and was not afraid to do so. These are not signs of a group that is supposedly on the run or defeated.

Less than two years ago, President Obama cited the supposed success stories in Yemen and Somalia. Yemen today is definitely not a success story and Somalia’s success story has been overblown. But there have been some successes in Somalia. In the last five or six years, al Shabaab has been pushed out of Mogadishu as an occupying force, although it still carries out attacks there. It no longer controls two-thirds of south-central Somalia. But the group has proven to be remarkably resilient and now, freed of the burden of having to hold and govern territory, it carries out a wide range of attacks ranging from suicide bombings to conventional assaults. Less than two months ago, al Shabaab successfully overran the forward operating base in El Adde, Somalia, manned by Kenyan troops serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), killing scores of peacekeepers.

Another important news story out of Somalia today was the announcement from the Australian Navy that the HMAS Darwin stopped a fishing boat en route from Oman to Somalia with 100 RPGs on board worth roughly $2 million, 2,000 automatic rifles, and assorted other armaments. The sheer size of the arsenal is problematic as is the fact that the group has the resources to pay for it. A group that is “on the run” doesn’t need an arsenal that large—which begs the question of the judgment of those who advanced the supposed “success” of the “Somali model” for confronting Daesh in Iraq and Syria.

Q: Does the United States have a credible security partner in Somalia?

Pham: The United States and its European allies can take credit for training and equipping the AMISOM force that has helped push Shabaab out of territory in major urban centers like Mogadishu. Our efforts to train an effective Somali security force to assume responsibility have, however, been less successful. Part of the reason for this is you cannot build a sustainable security force without building a government that will be responsible for that security force.

The fact is that despite our good intentions, the Somali government is still wracked by corruption. Last year, Reporters Without Borders rated the internationally-backed Somali government as having one of the worst records on freedom of expression, ranking down at the very bottom of the World Press Freedom Index with the likes of Eritrea, North Korea, Turkmenistan, and Syria. US federal courts will routinely refuse to deport people back to Somalia because they find conditions so abysmal as to be a violation of our treaty obligations to compel people to go there. Until a government is built that is truly legitimate in the eyes of Somalis, it is a Sisyphean endeavor to try to build a security force.

Q: Despite overtures from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), al Shabaab has been reluctant to declare its allegiance to the group. Why is that?

Pham: In the last six months, Shabaab leaders have been internally repressing any dissident elements calling for a realignment with the so-called Islamic State. The group has unleashed its intelligence and security branch, the so-called Amniyat, on its own membership to root out, and in some cases kill, those who advocate ties with Daesh.

Shabaab has had longstanding relations with al Qaeda, which go back to the late leader of al Shabaab, Ahmed Abdi Godane. He trained in Afghanistan and fought with al Qaeda-linked forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and perhaps Kashmir, long before 9/11.

Q: What support does al Shabaab derive from the Somali American diaspora?

Pham: Al Shabaab’s appeal has been to a very small minority in the Somali American community. That being said, if one goes by the prosecutions and convictions that have been secured by the US government, it does have an infrastructure that has facilitated people going and joining the fight as well as people sending support to the group. In that sense, it is one of the few foreign terrorist organizations that has succeeded in building an infrastructure within the American homeland, however small. Thus al Shabaab does have that reach.

Unlike the isolate, so-called “self-radicalized” ISIS sympathizer, this is a group that has a network that has successfully served as a path from the United States to Somalia, and presumably, and this is a risk, a path back to the United States.

Q: Does al Shabaab have the capacity to carry out an attack in the West?

Pham: We tend to focus too much on outrageous comments like those calls [to attack the West] that are meant as much to get our attention and to bolster the group’s standing among extremists. While we shouldn’t ignore the possible threats, I don’t think it’s helpful to allow al Shabaab’s propaganda to determine our allocation of limited intelligence and other counterterrorism resources. Instead we should focus on the real threat of Shabaab that not only remains, but has changed and is growing in East Africa.

Ashish Kumar Sen is a staff writer at the Atlantic Council.

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The Pentagon continues to fly drones over Somalia from another regional base, in Djibouti, making the loss of the Ethio­pian base easier to take, said J. Peter Pham, an Africa analyst at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

“There’s less of a strategic reason to have a base there, so it makes sense to pack up and move to where there’s more of a need,” he said. “There’s been a great deal of progress [against al-Shabab], or at least as much progress as one can get from a drone program.”

Read the full article here.

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Sidikou, who participated in a transition seminar last September at the Atlantic Council before leaving for his current post, was optimistic in his assessment of Somalia’s progress on the consolidation of peace and state-building efforts. However, he noted two major challenges to the consolidation of peace and security: discord between the executive and legislative branches, evidenced most recently by a motion of impeachment against President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud by members of Parliament; and the integration of the Somali National Army and police.

The discussion, moderated by Pham, centered on the importance of intelligence in degrading al-Shabab’s capabilities, allegations of civilian casualties and sexual abuse against AMISOM troops, and Somalia’s upcoming presidential elections.

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Bronwyn Bruton, deputy director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington, D.C., said the support thrown behind Mohamud has much less to do with his abilities as a leader and a lot more to do with the international community’s unwillingness to deal with another political transition in a country that has lacked a federal government for more than two decades and has gone through more than 10 prime ministers in the past decade.

“By any objective standard, he should be impeached,” she told FP in a phone call. “He is very corrupt, and he is guilty of several major abuses of power. If this was a normal functioning government, there’s no way he should be allowed to stay in his office.”

[…]

Bruton, on the other hand, shied away from even labeling the 2016 process an election at all. Whatever happens in 2016, she told FP, will not be an election — but “an election-like event.”

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J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, said the opening of Somalia’s embassy here “represents yet another instance where form wins out over substance, wishful thinking trumps reality, and time and resources are squandered on frivolous displays of so-called progress while lives are lost and threats to security grow” because of the lack of a clear strategy and meaningful commitment.

One of the biggest problems, according to Pham, is that the Federal Republic of Somalia’s claim to territory is disputed both by al-Shabaab and by regional entities like the breakaway Republic of Somaliland, which have declared their independence and over which the Mogadishu government has no control.

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But experts caution that the gains made by African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), which accelerated after the United Nations (UN) Security Council topped up the peace enforcement mission with an additional 4,000 Ethiopian troops after the Westgate Mall attack in 2013, have not degraded the al-Shabab threat as thoroughly as some have claimed. “Al-Shabab is simply retreating, conceding ground,” said Bronwyn Bruton, Deputy Director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council. “They are not actually confronting AMISOM head-on anymore, which means that their forces and weapons are mostly intact. They have shifted from a conventional force to a pure terrorist one that is increasingly focusing its attention on attacks outside of Somalia, in Kenya, and elsewhere in the region.”

[…]

The conditions under which Bancroft and other private military contractors operate, however, offer little in the way of transparency or safeguards against abuse. Vast swaths of Somalia are effectively lawless, and communications links between rural communities are weak. Neither feature of the terrain augers well for accountability. “Even the glossiest [private security companies] — think Blackwater back in the day — are prone to excesses of force,” said the Atlantic Council’s Bruton. “In the Somali context, those excesses are likely to go unreported, which makes abuse all the more likely.”

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“It’s not going to solve the remittance problem. There’s more to it,” said Peter Pham, head of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. For instance, it wasn’t until last 2014 that the first automated teller machines were installed in the capital city of Mogadishu.

“To make it useful, you would have to have fairly significant infrastructure. Over time it’s possible, but certainly not in the short term,” Pham said. He added that, while it may be a very difficult transition period, the move could certainly lay the groundwork for future development, even if it takes a long time.

Read the full article here.

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J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, says the Ethiopians felt they couldn’t let the militants continue to gain influence in Somalia, but that it’s a common misconception to link the rise of al-Shabab – which has been linked to al-Qaida and is listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States – to the invasion.

“There’s no doubt that the Ethiopian intervention helped Shabab gain a nationalist narrative,” Pham says. “The fact is al-Shabab and its precursor groups have existed for quite some time, for more than a decade, before the Ethiopians invaded.”

Read the full article here.

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Since Kenya’s armed forces invaded Somalia in 2011 in pursuit of the terrorist organisation al-Shabaab, the country has endured more than one hundred terror attacks. Al-Shabaab’s latest major attack came on 2 April 2015 when four gunmen entered Garissa University in eastern Kenya and murdered nearly 150 students. It was the deadliest attack in Kenya since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in the capital Nairobi.

The attack increased pressure on the government to find a solution to the wave of violence. On 11 April 2015, Deputy President William Ruto demanded that the United Nations remove Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp from the country within three months, continuing a longstanding government practice of blaming domestic insecurity on the country’s refugees. Dadaab is a sprawling complex of five camps in Kenya’s northeast near the border with Somalia. Today it shelters more than 330,000 Somali refugees.

Read the full article here.

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The Garissa attack, says one expert, is proof that al-Shabaab is a far more organized terror effort than previously believed. J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center for the Atlantic Council, said in August that al-Shabaab appeared to be “morphing more and more into a transnational regional terrorist organization,” not a ragtag group of insurgents, and that “intelligence capabilities,” not just airstrikes in Somalia, would be necessary to stop their spread.

Read the full article here.

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J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington, said Kerry’s stop in Somalia “is a political necessity” during a visit to neighboring Kenya. Kerry and others in the Obama administration have referred to their multinational approach in Somalia as a successful model for U.S. intervention, but the results are still far from conclusive, Pham said.

While security has improved, Somalia is still unstable and legitimate local governance is spotty, he said. In fact, the State Department in November canceled participating in a donor conference for Somalia in Denmark, citing “political division” among Somali leaders.

Read the full article here.

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However, a military defeat of al-Shabab would not equate to a total defeat of the group, said Peter Pham, the Africa Center Director at the Atlantic Council.

“The movement has transformed itself from less a territorial entity seeking to control parts of Somalia into a transnational terrorist entity,” said Pham.

The group “has to be fought not just with purely military means but also police, intelligence and also social, economic and political development and inclusion,” he said.

Read the full article here.

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Some experts believe ISIS’s influence may also have played a part in al-Shabaab’s massacre of 147 people, mainly Christian students at a Kenyan university, on April 2. The Atlantic Council’s Bronwyn Bruton pointed out that al-Shabaab had previously moved away from attacks on students due to public backlash in Somalia, and the fact that it was re-embracing the tactic could be “a sign of a final evolution where it is no longer interested in maintaining political credibility or gaining the support of local communities.” The Somali group has reportedly been losing ground to the Islamic State in the competition for foreign recruits, so the attack may have been an effort to re-establish its credibility to an international audience. This could be part of an effort by the traditionally al-Qaida-linked group to either compete with ISIS or pivot to an alliance with it.   

Read the full article here.

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“In Somalia, al-Shabab is on the back foot. In Kenya, the group is gaining prominence,” Bronwyn Bruton, Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Centre, wrote.

Read the full article here.

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“They may say that their national security interests trump the need to abide by the international convention they signed,” said Joshua Meservey, assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. 

[…]

The desire to repatriate the Somali refugees was one of the reasons for the Kenyan invasion, said Meservey, but the move would exacerbate tensions between Kenya’s political elite and Muslim groups that support the refugees.

“The feeling is very much that these are overwhelmingly Muslim refugees, and the Christian government is trying to kick them out of the country,” he said. “They’re scapegoating them for the government’s own security failings.”

Read the full article here.

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“Al-Shabab has never been monolithic. It’s a rather confusing coalition of overlapping ideological groups and clan interests,” said Peter Pham, head of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. The group has its own internal factions. While some members are focused on gaining territory and power in Somalia, a growing faction is more interested in being part of a global jihad movement. The hard-line jihadists are taking over and pushing al-Shabab to increasingly desperate measures to prove themselves members of a more global movement — which may result in more large-scale attacks as it finds itself cornered.

“I would definitely expect that the attack in Garissa, dreadful and brutal as it was, is but the first of many,” Pham said.

Read the full article here.

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“Their objective right now is to get attention,” said Peter Pham, an Africa expert at the Atlantic Council, adding that the terror group is “changing its model” from a “major insurgent threat” to, increasingly, “a transnational terrorist group.” 

A presidential visit would, for a brief period, put the international spotlight on Kenya. Pham said al-Shabaab, while good at hitting “soft targets,” so far has avoided government buildings and other fortifications and would likely not attempt to “storm any majorly defended target” like the meetings Obama would be attending. 

However, that might not stop them from plotting an attack against Kenyans while the president is in the country, for the kind of attention they’re seeking. 

“It doesn’t necessarily need to be associated directly to the presidential visit, other than the timing,” Pham said. “Anything they do … will get them what they want, which is more media and exposure to the big leagues so to speak. The more reporters in the country heightens the risk.” 

Read the full article here.

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Sadly, the al Shabab attack on Kenya’s Garissa University College that killed at least 147 people was nothing new. Since October 2011, when Kenya invaded Somalia to fight the terrorist group in its home territory, the group has launched more than 100 attacks inside Kenya that have claimed hundreds of lives and sent the country’s tourism industry into a tailspin. Many of the attacks have been as ruthless as this latest outrage: the group killed at least 67 in an attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in September 2013, and in June 2014 took over a Kenyan town and systematically executed its non-Muslim residents.

Even so, al Shabab has been wounded by a sustained offensive from the multinational African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), and its deeds are increasingly eclipsed by the lurid exploits of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Boko Haram. As the group feels its stature weaken, it is more likely to lash out, carrying out high-profile and gratuitously brutal attacks like the one in Garissa. The United States and the rest of the international community must do all they can to support Kenya as it weathers al Shabab’s grisly turn.

Read the full article here.

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J Peter Pham, Director of the Africa Center for the Atlantic Council, said that Al-Shabaab is “morphing” “into a transnational regional terrorist organization” on Monday’s “CNN Newsroom.”

“In recent years, the United States, the European Union, the international community have assisted building up a military capacity to defeat Shabaab on the battlefield as an insurgent group. We haven’t paid as much attention to building up police capacity, intelligence capabilities to beat Shabaab as a terrorist organization. And this attack is a wake-up call. we may have won the battle the against insurgents, but the same group is morphing more and more into a transnational regional terrorist organization. And we need to up the game. it’s shifted tactics but it’s not completely done yet” he stated.

Read the full article here.

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Bronwyn Bruton, deputy director of the Africa Center of the Atlantic Council, a research institute in Washington, said she suspected the Shabab were “beginning to play with class distinctions.”

“Westgate and, to a lesser extent, Garissa University College are both enclaves of privilege in a country where youths, especially Muslim youths, are frustrated by the lack of economic opportunity,” she said. “Eventually, Shabab is going to have to find a way to connect with non-Somali Muslims.”

[…]

“Stopping the Shabab is going to be tough,” Ms. Bruton said, adding that the region’s security services desperately needed reform, and “that will take years.”

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The Obama administration’s strategy to combat al-Shabab resembles its approach in countries such as Yemen, where drone strikes have emerged as the face of American power. But the horrific attack last Thursday have raised questions whether this strategy will ultimately prove successful.

“Al-Shabab is not defeated,” J. Peter Pham, the director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, told the Washington Post. “It has just changed.

Read the full article here.

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Some critics said that the international community’s insufficient response had allowed al-Shabab to survive. “Al-Shabab is not defeated, it has just changed,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council. Instead of trying to hold territory, like an army or militia, it functions today almost entirely as a regional terrorist group.

“Arguably, their terror attacks have gone up as they lost territory,” Pham said.

Read the full article here.

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These recent military setbacks suffered by Al-Shabab help explain why the group is targeting vulnerable populations within in Kenya, said Joshua Meservey, assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. “They [Al-Shabab] can’t control as much territory as they once did,” Meservey said. “They can’t fight AMISOM in a conventional military battle, so really they’re left with terror attacks.”

Read the full article here.

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Early on the morning of April 2, gunmen from the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab attacked Garissa University College in northeastern Kenya. After launching several hand grenades, gunmen moved door to door inside the campus dorms, separating Christians and Muslims. Reportedly, Christians were shot on the spot, and some victims were beheaded. Hostages were taken, and Kenyan authorities report that at least 147 people, including four attackers, have been killed. Many others are injured or still missing.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta quickly condemned the attack, and the government put out a bounty of 20 million shillings ($215,000) for information on the incident’s alleged mastermind, Mohamed Mohamud (known as “Dulyadin”).

Read the full article here.

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Atlantic Council’s Bruton says Somali terror group embracing more deadly tactics

Al-Shabaab’s deadly April 2 assault against a Kenyan university—the country’s bloodiest attack in 17 years—is a sign that the Somali terrorist group is trying to pivot toward the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), said Atlantic Council analyst Bronywn Bruton.

“A schoolyard massacre like this really is the signature of Boko Haram,” Bruton, Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, told the New Atlanticist. “Al-Shabaab engaging in this is essentially al-Shabaab saying to IS, ‘Hey, don’t forget us.’”

Boko Haram, the terrorist group currently under attack from troops in northern Nigeria, has pledged allegiance to the leader of ISIS.

At least 147 people were killed in al-Shabaab’s attack in Garissa, a town in eastern Kenya.

Bruton spoke with the New Atlanticist’s Ashish Kumar Sen. Excerpts below:

Q: Al-Shabaab attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in 2013. Today it attacked a university in eastern Kenya. Why is the Somalia-based terrorist targeting Kenya?

Bruton: Ostensibly, al-Shabaab is attacking Kenya because Of Nairboi’s invasion of Somalia in late 2011. Kenya has also informally annexed a very strategic piece of Somali real estate—the port of Kismayo. Al-Shabaab says that its attacks on Kenya are a retaliation for this occupation and meddling in Somali affairs.

Though al-Shabaab started out in Somalia as a populist resistance movement, it now has an eye to becoming an international terrorist organization. Somalia was at best a steppingstone towards that goal, since, although it is strategically located on the Gulf of Aden, it is isolated and doesn’t have any Western targets to speak of. Kenya is a much richer target since it has Western tourist and business interests. It is the ability to strike Western targets that would make al-Shabaab a more valuable affiliate to al-Qaeda or ISIS than, say, Boko Haram, which is largely confined to northern Nigeria.

Q: Does the group target Westerners?

Bruton: Al-Shabaab has rarely attacked Western targets. Throughout its entire existence it has almost exclusively focused on African victims. The Westgate Mall attack is the closest that it has come, so far, to deliberately targeting Western victims.

Q: To what extent are al-Shabaab’s attacks a consequence of the growing influence of groups like ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula?

Bruton:I think it is. When al-Shabaab bombed a medical graduation ceremony in 2009 and killed the first class of graduating Somali doctors in two decades, it caused an enormous public backlash. After initially claiming responsibility for the attack, al-Shabaab disowned it. The fact that al-Shabaab is turning again to an attack on students is a sign of a final evolution where it is no longer interested in maintaining political credibility or gaining the support of local communities. If anything, this is an attack based on the Boko Haram model. Boko Haram is famous for going into schoolyards and massacring students and kidnapping children. In so deliberately evoking Boko Haram, a-Shabaab is probably signaling an intention to realign itself with Islamic State, whose tactics are very different from the tactics of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is not associated with murdering schoolchildren.

Q: What links does al-Shabaab have with other terrorist groups?

Bruton: Al-Shabaab is affiliated to al-Qaeda, but this attack today is probably a sign of a pivot to the Islamic State. I would think they are deliberately sending that message. Al-Qaeda does not prey on local communities. Al Qaeda wants Muslim communities to feel that it is a vehicle to express their grievances. Boko Haram and the Islamic State are famous for preying on local populations. This is a kind of movement that says ‘We are the enemy of the public, and we are engaging in tactics that are so brutal, we don’t want political credibility; we just want to inspire terror.’ That the Islamic State has taken Boko Haram as an affiliate, and understanding that a schoolyard massacre like this really is the signature tactic of Boko Haram, al-Shabaab engaging in this is essentially al-Shabaab saying to IS, ‘Hey, don’t forget us.’

Q: How big is al-Shabaab and what does it want?

Bruton: Al-Shabaab is a movement in flux. It has cells and fighters in Somalia and those fighters are engaged in a tactic of spoiling progress. They do things like roadside bombs, assassination, sort of mosquito-bite attacks that are intended to promote instability but are not signature strikes.

Most of al-Shabaab’s energy has shifted toward Kenya. More and more, al-Shabaab is trying to reimagine itself as not a distinctly Somali group but as an East African terror organization.

I think al-Shabaab has abandoned its territorial ambitions. Its defeat in Somalia, the loss of its territory, the fact that it no longer has to worry about governing has made it free to become just a pure terrorist group.

Q: What is the United States doing to counter al-Shabaab?

Bruton: The United States is working with Kenya and Somalia. In Somalia, al-Shabaab is on the back foot. In Kenya, the group is gaining prominence. It is becoming ever more virulent. It is being greatly assisted by the brutality of the Kenyan police and military. They have conducted dragnets in which hundreds of people have been swept up for no other reason than they look Somali. The Kenyan brutality is counterproductive not only in terms of limiting the amount of intelligence they can get hold of, but it also reaffirms al-Shabaab’s radicalization messages.

Q: Has that had an impact on US support for Kenya, as it did in Nigeria?

Bruton: The United States is certainly aware of the problem, but unlike in Nigeria where the Leahy Amendment prohibited support for some small period of time until the forces could be vetted, I don’t think we have done enough in the Kenyan context. The United States is trying hard to train Kenyan troops and make them more responsible, but the corruption and lack of professionalism is just so endemic, they are not able to make any progress.

Ashish Kumar Sen is a Staff Writer at the Atlantic Council.

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But al-Shabaab has suffered a steady decline over the last four years at the hands of a multinational force called the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) that has pushed the group from all its major strongholds, including the lucrative port cities of Mogadishu, Kismayo, Marka, and Brava.

Al-Shabaab once attracted scores of foreigner fighters to Somali—including at least several dozen Somali-Americans—and raked in donations from around the world. But its battlefield setbacks and brutality against fellow Somali Muslims has withered much of the support it once enjoyed, relegating it to second tier status among international terrorist organizations. The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Boko Haram in Nigeria has exacerbated the trend. Both dominate international headlines, and ISIS is attracting thousands of foreign fighters, including Somali-Americans who were previously al-Shabaab’s constituency alone.

Al-Shabaab almost certainly feels the need to compete with these upstarts, something counterterror theorists call “outbidding.” One might think it is a good thing when terrorist groups compete, but it is not. One of the ways terrorist groups bid for money and recruits is to garner publicity, and the best way to do that is to carry out more, high-profile, and/or especially brutal attacks. One of the reasons ISIS so fastidiously broadcasts its atrocities around the world is because they bring international attention, including that of potential recruits and funders.

Throughout its existence al-Shabaab would have gladly attacked a Western target if the opportunity presented itself, but doing so has never been a focus of its efforts. All three countries al-Shabaab has attacked outside of Somalia are important troop contributors to AMISOM. For years its propaganda called would-be jihadists to Somalia and did not bother to call for them to carry out terror attacks in the West.

The pressures converging on al-Shabaab may be motivating the group to concentrate more on high-profile attacks, however, and there is little more high-profile than striking a Western target, particularly an embassy.

Strikes on international targets are also in keeping with the leadership’s ideology. For years the group was split between those who wanted to keep their jihad focused on the Somali war and those who viewed their terror campaign as part of a larger civilizational clash between Muslims and infidels. That debate was ended definitively in June 2013 when the then-emir of al-Shabaab, Ahmed Abdi Godane—a committed international jihadist—purged the group of anyone who was a threat to his leadership. Godane was killed in a drone strike in September 2014, but his successor, Ahmad Umar, was part of his inner circle and almost certainly has the same international orientation.

There has not been an overwhelming shift in the targets al-Shabaab chooses since the purge, but there have been a few worrying developments. During the Westgate Mall attack in Kenya in September 2013, the gunmen were reportedly looking especially for Kenyans and Americans during their rampage. It has since 2013 also issued at least three calls to its supporters to stage attacks in the West, including two since the beginning of this year, which is a departure from business as usual for the group. The threats over the last several years that have caused embassy closures, drawdowns, and warnings to US citizens in East Africa might be part of an emerging trend.

Fortunately, al-Shabaab’s ability to carry out a complex international attack is much diminished from the days when it struck Kampala and the Westgate Mall. Many of its high-level leaders have been killed; since December last year, US drone strikes have killed two men responsible for the group’s external operations and one who planned the Westgate Mall attack, a significant loss of expertise. It also brings in less revenue than it once did, and its diminished standing makes its appeals to supporters to launch lone wolf terror attacks unlikely to gain much traction.

But while al-Shabaab is wounded, it remains dangerous. It still has a sophisticated skill set as evidenced by the complex and effective attacks it launches in Somalia and Kenya. It continues to raise money from charcoal smuggling and taxation, and has a regional network of affiliates in Tanzania and Kenya. The steps the United States has taken with its embassies are heartening signs it is taking the group seriously, as it must; al-Shabaab’s declining fortunes and its need to outbid ISIS and Boko Haram may be making it more intent on attacking US interests than ever before.

Joshua Meservey is Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. Follow him on Twitter at @jmeservey.

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Pentagon officials would not say if any other militants were targeted in the strike or if it had caused any civilian casualties. But J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, citing conversations he had had with Somali officials as early as last week, said two other militants had been killed in the drone attack. That couldn’t be immediately confirmed by U.S. officials.

Garar was not very well known but in fact was considered “a major Shabab player,” Pham said, and “one of their more skilled operatives.” He had participated in attacks outside Somalia, including in Uganda and Kenya, Pham said.

Read the full article here.

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“Adan Garaar was one of the key planners behind the assault on the Westgate mall, just as he has been behind a number of other high-profile attacks, both carried out and foiled, including the attempt major bombing in Kampala last year,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. “He may not be as well-known generally as other Shabaab leaders, but is certainly no stranger to those tracking the terrorist group’s activities elsewhere in East Africa outside Somalia.”

Read the full article here.

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On October 29, 2008, an American named Shirwa Ahmed drove a vehicle loaded with explosives into the northern Somali city of Bosaso. When he detonated the bomb, as part of one of five near-simultaneous attacks across northern Somalia, he became the second-known American suicide bomber.

Ahmed was one of dozens of Somali-Americans enticed to fight in Somalia by al-Shabaab, a Somali terrorist organization that controls swathes of the East African country. On February 21, the group called for attacks on several malls in the West, including the Mall of America in Minnesota. The group recruited as many as sixty Americans—nearly all of Somali descent—including one added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list in January. Al-Shabaab’s efforts constitute the most successful terrorist recruiting program in U.S.history, according to the House Homeland Security Committee.

Read the full article here.

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Some of the concern stems from the fact that al-Shabaab has successfully recruited at least forty Somali-Americans to fight in Somalia, as many as four of whom became suicide bombers. It is certainly not a coincidence that the video singled out the Mall of America located as it is in Minnesota, home to the largest Somali-American community in the country.

But the chance al-Shabaab operatives could conduct such an attack is virtually nil, and their chance of inspiring someone else to do it is low as well.

Al-Shabaab remains a dangerous force in the Horn of Africa region—in a February 20 attack in Mogadishu it killed twenty-five people, including two Members of Parliament—but is under heavy pressure from an international coalition that has driven it from its major urban strongholds and decimated its leadership. Executing an attack thousands of miles away in the face of alert law enforcement is beyond its capacity at the moment.

The video was instead designed to inspire a so-called lone wolf attack launched by someone motivated by al-Shabaab’s message but who does not have formal or operational links to the organization. The portion of the video calling for the mall attacks occurs at the end and the speaker specifically addresses Muslims in the West.

These types of attacks are concerning because they are difficult to preempt. A lone wolf normally does not engage in the activities domestic law enforcement would detect, such as communicating with a network of co-conspirators or gathering significant resources. If there is a silver lining, it is that lone wolves generally have little training and do not coordinate with other terrorists, making them less effective than they might otherwise be.

An al-Shabaab-inspired lone wolf attack is not impossible. The recent assault in Mogadishu was launched by two Dutch-Somali women, suggesting the group maintains appeal for some of the diaspora. The Somali community in the United States still struggles to protect its young people from radicalization as well: reports in the past six months have documented at least eleven Somali-Americans who have joined or attempted to join Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, including the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

But al-Shabaab squandered most of the support it once had from the Somali diaspora. Its appeal stemmed largely from the fact it was fighting Somalia’s hated neighbor, Ethiopia, which invaded Somalia in 2006 to attack the relatively popular Islamic Courts Union that had brought a measure of stability to parts of the country. But the group’s brutality against fellow Somalis, shoddy treatment of foreign fighters, and battlefield reversals caused diaspora supporters to sour on the group. There have been few reports of Somali-Americans joining al-Shabaab since 2009.

In addition, ever since al-Shabaab’s recruitment success, domestic law enforcement and concerned members of the Somali-American community have made it more difficult for al-Shabaab to entice followers. When Somali-Americans began traveling to Somalia to fight, the FBI responded with a massive counterterrorism investigation. More recently, the Department of Justice has chosen Minneapolis as the site of a federal anti-radicalization program, and some Somali-Americans are actively countering extremist appeals to the community.

Finally, al-Shabaab has called on its Western followers to attack the United States and Europe before but without success. The situation has changed little since then, suggesting their plea will be ignored again.

Years before ISIS declared a caliphate, al-Shabaab attracted foreign fighters from all over the world and enjoyed the prestige of governing more territory than any other Islamic terrorist group. But today it is increasingly overlooked as it suffers military setbacks and ISIS and the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram grab headlines and, in the case of ISIS, attract thousands of foreign fighters. Al-Shabaab’s mall threat is a gambit with little downside: inspiring a lone wolf attack in the West or, failing that, getting back into the headlines, are both ways to regain some relevance.

US officials are prudent to advise caution as a lone wolf attack requires only one determined individual, but, happily, a call from a diminished terrorist group seeking to restore its luster is unlikely to inspire such a person.

Joshua Meservey is Assistant Director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. Follow him on Twitter at @jmeservey.

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