Terror Turns Outward

After Setbacks in Somalia, al-Shabaab Militants Stage High-Profile Attacks in Neighboring Countries

ADF STAFF

As al-Shabaab terrorists stalked through Nairobi’s Westgate Shopping Mall, Faith Wambua and her two children lay still. The mother was sprawled face down on a tiled floor next to her 9-year-old daughter, Sy, and 21-month-old son, Ty.

Wambua grabbed a shard of broken glass and held it out to her son, who is fascinated by — and a little scared of — insects, saying: “ ‘Look, dudu’ — dudu is a Swahili word for an insect. I said: ‘Ty, look. Dudu is coming to bite you.’ That would scare him a little, and so he would keep quiet. And we played that game for almost an hour. It was amazing he just kept still.”

Wambua and her children pretended to be dead for more than four hours in hopes of escaping the gunmen. At one point, al-Shabaab militants came so close to them that Wambua could smell gunpowder and hear the clink of spent shell casings as they hit the floor.

“That’s the point when I started singing a song about the resurrection because I thought we were all going to die,” Wambua told the BBC. Soon, a man called out “Mama” to her, and touched her daughter gently. He identified himself as a police officer, and he and his colleagues led the mother and children out of the mall to safety.

Many others were not so fortunate. After an 80-hour siege in September 2013, terrorists had killed nearly 70 men, women and children, and injured about 175 in the gun and grenade attack. The brutal extremist group, which for years has terrorized Somalia, had again struck outside its home base, attacking a civilian target in Kenya, which has participated in the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).

Opinions differ on the meaning of the attack. Some see it as a sign of a weakened terror group lashing out against a soft target. Others see the group as adapting, using new tactics, and believe it is a harbinger of more attacks to come. One thing is certain: The response by Kenya and other East African nations to the tactical shift by al-Shabaab will be critical to ensuring that the terror group is further isolated and weakened.

THE RISE OF AL-SHABAAB

Al-Shabaab grew out of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in 2006 after years of civil war and chaos under a series of warlords in the 1990s. The courts tried to bring order to Somalia, but they collapsed under pressure from the Transitional Federal Government and an invasion by Ethiopia. The Ethiopian invasion eliminated more moderate elements of the ICU, leaving behind strong, radical fighters bent on imposing an Islamic state in Somalia. Al-Shabaab, which means “the youth,” emerged. “Al-Shabaab was always a radical wing or radical element within ICU,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Al-Shabaab militants soon found that governing was more difficult than insurgency. Their brutality and practices are inconsistent with Somali culture, Felbab-Brown said. Also, according to a paper published by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, three factors came together in ensuing years and weakened al-Shabaab: the formation of AMISOM, mismanagement of the 2011 regional drought, and internal clan divisions.

THE TIDE TURNS IN SOMALIA

AMISOM, which the African Union set up in 2007, got off to a rocky start. Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006 was effective against the ICU militia but unpopular with the Somali people. AMISOM began with only Ugandan troops, but Burundi soon joined, and Djibouti, Sierra Leone and Kenya sent troops later. By 2011, the operation had gained traction, and AMISOM forces pushed al-Shabaab militants out of the capital, Mogadishu. About a year later, AMISOM retook the southern port city of Kismayo, the third-largest city in Somalia and an important financial hub for the terror group, which had been using the port to raise money through the export of charcoal. 

At one time, al-Shabaab was making about $500,000 per month by exporting charcoal to Gulf states, according to Lt. Col. Geoffrey Kambere of the Uganda People’s Defence Force. The militant group also raised significant money by taxing imports and exports at the port. According to a United Nations report, at its height, al-Shabaab was taking in $35 million to $50 million per year in custom tolls and business taxes in Kismayo and two other ports.

Internal leadership divisions led up to military setbacks. The group’s merger with al-Qaida is believed to have caused a rift between Mukhtar Abu al-Zubayr, also known as Godane, and Hassan Dahir Aweys, who was less devoted to global jihadist goals. Godane has been called “al-Shabaab’s Osama bin Laden.” Aweys was taken into custody in summer 2013, reportedly after defecting.

The East African drought of 2011 also took a heavy toll on al-Shabaab’s influence. “Although the drought affected the entire region, it was only in the southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle areas controlled by al-Shabab where it also led to a famine,” the CTC paper said. “According to the United Nations, around three million people in al-Shabab-controlled areas of Somalia were without enough food. This was in large part due to the militia’s refusal of foreign aid, which it saw as an attempt to undermine its authority and help spread Western influence.”

By this time, remaining popular support for al-Shabaab was beginning to decrease. As the militants lost ground to AMISOM, financial opportunities dwindled. The group resorted to tribal taxes, livestock theft, kidnapping for ransom and consorting with pirates. “This kind of behavior is damning evidence that the radicals’ practices are unrelated to Islam because Islam forbids stealing livestock from poor people and using the money to finance unjust wars against the people,” Somali lawmaker Mohamed Omar Gedi told Sabahi Online in July 2012.

AL-SHABAAB LASHES OUT

In the wake of these setbacks, al-Shabaab has stepped outside Somalia with high-profile attacks. The Westgate massacre came in September 2013, and a month later, two al-Shabaab militants died when the bomb they were working on accidentally detonated in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Officials arrested several others in what is believed to have been a plan to bomb Addis Ababa Stadium as fans watched a World Cup football qualifier between Ethiopia and Nigeria, the Sudan Tribune reported.

Despite the brutality of the Westgate attack, some consider it a validation of the AMISOM strategy in Somalia. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the top U.S. diplomat for Africa, told reporters in October 2013 that the attack showed that al-Shabaab is hitting “soft targets because other targets are being made harder for them to go after.”

“It highlighted to us we were pursuing the right strategy,” Thomas-Greenfield said, according to The Citizen of Tanzania. “We need to bolster that strategy.”

Kjetil Tronvoll, senior partner with the International Law and Policy Institute in Oslo, Norway, told ADF that military gains have no doubt redirected al-Shabaab’s focus in East Africa from a “Somali-based ideology to a more jihad-transnational-based ideology.” Because of that, more attacks are likely, he said.

Intelligence analysts say a retreat from imposing Islamist rule might have resulted in the group diverting resources toward attacking AMISOM troop-contributing countries. U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told the U.S. Congress in 2013 that he expects al-Shabaab to “remain focused on local and regional challenges” and “continue to plot attacks designed to weaken regional adversaries, including targeting U.S. and Western interests in East Africa.”

Kenya, like many other East African nations, has a sizable population of Somalis. Some estimates put the total at 1 million, and many live in the Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh, known as “Little Mogadishu.” Less than two months after the Westgate attack, Kenya, Somalia and the United Nations signed a repatriation agreement urging many Somali refugees to return to their home country, according to The Christian Science Monitor.

Anti-Somali sentiments were common in Kenya before and after the mall attack. Felbab-Brown said Kenyans have long been quick to cast a suspicious eye toward Somalis. That kind of scapegoating may be just what al-Shabaab is counting on.

FASHIONING A RESPONSE IN EAST AFRICA

Ken Menkhaus, professor of political science at Davidson College in the United States and an expert on Somalia, said the Westgate attack signals that al-Shabaab is hoping for a “violent backlash” against hundreds of thousands of ethnic Somalis living and working in Kenya.

“The Westgate attack is the latest sign of the group’s weakness,” Menkhaus wrote for the website ThinkProgress. “It was a desperate, high-risk gamble by Shabaab to reverse its prospects. If the deadly attack succeeds in prompting vigilante violence by Kenyan citizens or heavy-handed government reactions against Somali residents, Shabaab stands a chance of recasting itself as the vanguard militia protecting Somalis against external enemies. It desperately needs to reframe the conflict in Somalia as Somalis versus the foreigners, not as Somalis who seek peace and a return to normalcy versus a toxic jihadi movement.”

Tronvoll agrees. He said East African security forces must be careful not to “stigmatize all Somalis as potential threats and terrorists.”

“That can then propel a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing people or alienating people away from the state, so to say, and pushing them into other, more radicalized processes,” he said.

Lianne Kennedy-Boudali, a specialist in African counterterrorism with CyberPoint International, said adopting community policing and engagement practices would be one way to approach Somali communities in East Africa. Doing so would allow security forces to patrol safely while finding partners in the community who could provide information and counter violence. “From that, you get ideally the sorts of relationships where the security forces can get tips, can get information, can develop an information network, and can try to shift their actions more to prevention or patrolling … as opposed to just responding when something has already gone wrong,” she said.

“I think you have to start with a set of local security officers who understand the benefit of doing things differently.” If security forces can find people in these communities who share an interest in undermining al-Shabaab, “then you empower those people to take on a local security role.”

Authorities also must understand that as al-Shabaab undergoes an ideological shift, the group can use local grievances as a way of “getting a new foothold in neighboring countries,” Tronvoll said. For example, if Kenyan or Ethiopian authorities stigmatize Somali populations, that could lead to resentment that al-Shabaab could exploit for recruitment. Minimizing the threat will require East African security forces to work together. Intelligence sharing is crucial. That occurs to some extent now, but efforts will have to be enhanced, Tronvoll said.

“I think they need to define some new structures,” he said. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development and the East African Community already foster cooperation in the region, but “to lift it up a level, you need a new subregional structure, a mechanism to pool both intelligence sources’ information.” Joint task forces also could trace al-Shabaab’s recruiting network throughout East Africa. “You need a more fitted structure to address this subregional problem.”

Felbab-Brown agrees that regional cooperation is essential. “The one important thing is to move beyond the sort of parochial rivalries that characterize intelligence and security services in East Africa and get them to engage in better, more honest intelligence sharing, and focus on the counterterrorism threat.” Ultimately, internal intelligence sharing within national agencies will be as important as external intelligence sharing among East African nations, she said.