Wednes­day, Jan­u­ary 04, 2017
By Joshua Meser­vey

Why Its Campaign of Terror Will Likely Accelerate

Somali soldiers inspect the scene of a suicide car bomb attack by al Shabab in Mogadishu, September 2016. FEISAL OMAR / REUTERS
 

Al Shabab,the al Qaeda af­fil­i­ate that has be­dev­iled the East African coun­try of So­ma­lia for a decade, is cur­rently en­joy­ing its most suc­cess­ful run of at­tacks in years against the So­mali gov­ern­ment. Since mid-Au­gust alone, the group has killed a num­ber of high-rank­ing of­fi­cials, in­clud­ing a se­nior in­tel­li­gence of­fi­cer, a dis­trict com­mis­sioner, and a gen­eral in the na­tional army. Its in­ten­si­fied as­sault on the gov­ern­ment comes in the mid­dle of an elec­toral process that in­au­gu­rated a new par­lia­ment in De­cem­ber and is sched­uled to bring a new pres­i­dent this month.

Dis­rupt­ing the elec­toral process is con­sis­tent with an old al Shabab strat­egy of dis­cred­it­ing any com­pet­ing sources of au­thor­ity and le­git­i­macy. How­ever, some­thing new is afoot as well: al Shabab has es­ca­lated its at­tacks in the north of So­ma­lia this year, out­side its pre­ferred south­ern area of op­er­a­tions. The group’s his­tory and ide­ol­ogy sug­gest the cam­paign is likely to ac­cel­er­ate once the elec­toral process fin­ishes. There are a num­ber of wor­ri­some con­se­quences of a north­ward lunge by al Shabab, the worst of which would be a re­newal of ties with the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Ara­bian Penin­sula (AQAP), his­tor­i­cally the al Qaeda af­fil­i­ate most fo­cused on at­tack­ing the United States.

The change in al Shabab’s pre­vi­ously desul­tory ap­proach to the north be­came clear in March 2016, when it landed as many as 600 fight­ers on the shores of the semi­au­tonomous north­ern re­gion of Punt­land. The ul­ti­mately ill-fated cam­paign was an un­prece­dented in­vest­ment of man­power out­side al Shabab’s south­ern strong­hold, where it once had do­min­ion over nearly a third of the coun­try. Its pres­ence in the north had pre­vi­ously been mostly con­fined to a small mili­tia based in the Gal­gala Moun­tains re­gion.

The Punt­land at­tack was just the start. In March and April, Punt­land se­cu­rity ser­vices broke up an al Shabab cell in Garowe, and al Shabab at­tacked the towns of Beled­weyne, Bosaso, Galkayo, and Garad—even briefly cap­tur­ing the lat­ter—all of which are out­side the area in which the group usu­ally op­er­ates. In late No­vem­ber, the group killed four pro-gov­ern­ment sol­diers with a road­side bomb near Bosaso, and in Au­gust it launched the dead­liest ter­ror at­tack ever in Punt­land, when two sui­cide car bombs ripped into lo­cal gov­ern­ment build­ings in Galkayo, killing nearly 30 and wound­ing al­most 90 peo­ple.

Al Shabab’s north­ward play makes sense for sev­eral rea­sons. It is be­ing squeezed in the south by the var­i­ous forces ar­rayed against it, and could be look­ing for an es­cape valve. Al Shabab is in no dan­ger of be­ing mil­i­tar­ily de­feated in the south any­time soon, but it is nat­ural for such a canny group to hedge its bets.

There is also the mat­ter of Ab­diqadir Mu­min, the se­nior al Shabab re­li­gious leader based in Punt­land, who de­clared al­le­giance to the Is­lamic State (ISIS) along with a small num­ber of fight­ers in Oc­to­ber 2015. De­spite re­peated over­tures from ISIS, the rest of al Shabab has re­mained fiercely loyal to al Qaeda, hunt­ing down any­one within its ranks sus­pected of ISIS sym­pa­thies. Mu­min’s band emerged from hid­ing in Oc­to­ber to seize Qan­dala, a port town in Punt­land, for over a month. Al Shabab wants him dead, a task that will re­quire a stronger pres­ence in the area.

Wreckage at the scene of an attack by Al Shabab in Mogadishu, Somalia, October 2016. Feisal Omar/ Reuters

STAVE OFF A RE­UNION

The most con­cern­ing con­se­quence of al Shabab mov­ing north, how­ever, would be any re­newal of its friend­ship with AQAP. Al­though the de­tails are un­clear, Al Shabab’s links with its as­so­ci­ates across the Gulf of Aden ex­tend back to at least 2010. In 2011, the United States cap­tured a high-rank­ing al Shabab op­er­a­tive named Ahmed Warsame as he was leav­ing Yemen in a skiff. Warsame had close links with An­war al-Awlaki, an Amer­i­can ter­ror­ist who was AQAP’s most se­nior and ef­fec­tive pro­pa­gan­dist. In 2012, al Shabab re­port­edly sent 300 fight­ers to re­ceive train­ing and to fight with AQAP in its war against the Yemeni gov­ern­ment. The in­creas­ing so­phis­ti­ca­tion over the years of al Shabab’s ex­plo­sives may be the fruit of that col­lab­o­ra­tion.

The re­la­tion­ship be­tween al Shabab and AQAP ap­pears to have weak­ened af­ter both groups suf­fered sig­nif­i­cant mil­i­tary set­backs in their re­spec­tive coun­tries. How­ever, the civil war be­tween Iran­ian-backed Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led mil­i­tary coali­tion that has gripped Yemen since 2015 has been a boon for AQAP. It took ad­van­tage of the chaos to rapidly ex­pand, at one point con­trol­ling nearly 400 miles of Yemeni coast­line and the coun­try’s third-largest port, Makalla, from which it de­rived as much as $2 mil­lion per day in taxes. At that time, it also freed more than 100 of its jailed mem­bers—in­clud­ing se­nior leader Khaled Batarfi—and seized huge amounts of weaponry from a gov­ern­ment de­pot.

The Saudi-led coali­tion even­tu­ally drove AQAP from Makalla, and it has lost ground in other parts of the coun­try as well. Yet it still con­trols sig­nif­i­cant chunks of Yemen, and the group’s long-term prospects are good as the stale­mated civil war en­sures the sort of vi­o­lent in­sta­bil­ity off of which AQAP feeds. The Yemeni group is likely to re­main an at­trac­tive part­ner for al Shabab for the fore­see­able fu­ture.

A re­newed re­la­tion­ship be­tween al Shabab and AQAP would make it eas­ier to move ma­teriel and men back and forth and for each group to share its ex­per­tise with the other. This is the sort of co­op­er­a­tion that has strength­ened ter­ror or­ga­ni­za­tions through­out the world. Boko Haram in West Africa (now an ISIS af­fil­i­ate), for ex­am­ple, be­gan as an un­re­mark­able mili­tia. Yet the train­ing that some of its fight­ers re­ceived from al Qaeda in the Is­lamic Maghreb (AQIM) and al Shabab helped it trans­form into one of the world’s dead­liest ter­ror­ist or­ga­ni­za­tions that rou­tinely hu­mil­i­ated the Niger­ian army and con­quered chunks of North­east Nige­ria.

A longer-term pos­si­bil­ity is that a stronger friend­ship be­tween AQAP and al Shabab could in­flu­ence the lat­ter to in­vest some of its en­er­gies into global ji­had. Al Shabab has his­tor­i­cally shown lit­tle in­ter­est in at­tack­ing what al Qaeda dubbed the Far En­emy, apart from oc­ca­sion­ally and un­suc­cess­fully call­ing for lone-wolf at­tacks in the United States. It is for now pre­oc­cu­pied with fight­ing a re­gional war, and there is no in­di­ca­tion it is re­think­ing its strat­egy.

Yet el­e­ments of al Shabab’s lead­er­ship have al­ways been sym­pa­thetic to in­ter­na­tion­al­ist ter­ror­ist goals, and many of its founders fought in the anti-So­viet ji­had in Afghanistan. Al Shabab’s stead­fast loy­alty to al Qaeda sig­nals at least tacit ac­cep­tance of the lat­ter’s in­ter­na­tion­ally fo­cused brand of ter­ror­ism. At­tack­ing West­ern tar­gets, specif­i­cally the United States, has been a pil­lar of al Qaeda’s strat­egy since the early 1990s.

Al Qaeda gen­er­ally strug­gles to get its af­fil­i­ates to look be­yond their lo­cal wars, yet AQAP has adopted al Qaeda’s in­ter­na­tion­al­ism with gusto. In 2009, the group just missed killing the deputy in­te­rior min­is­ter of Saudi Ara­bia in Jed­dah us­ing a man with ex­plo­sives hid­den in his body. AQAP was be­hind failed at­tacks on air­lines bound for the United States in 2009 and 2010, as well as the Jan­u­ary 2015 at­tack on the of­fices of Char­lie Hebdo mag­a­zine in Paris.

It is likely no co­in­ci­dence that in 2011 when al Shabab was closer to AQAP than it is now, at least sev­eral al Shabab lead­ers were plot­ting at­tacks against Eu­rope. The group has ex­ten­sive net­works through­out East Africa, and there are many invit­ing West­ern tar­gets there should al Shabab de­cide to pri­or­i­tize a broader ji­had. Al Shabab also once at­tracted the sup­port of scores of Eu­ro­peans and Amer­i­cans. The longer the feck­less So­mali gov­ern­ment dis­ap­points its cit­i­zens and the longer for­eign troops fight­ing al Shabab re­main in So­ma­lia, the more the level of ap­peal al Shabab holds for for­eign fight­ers is likely to re­bound. That would open up op­por­tu­ni­ties for al Shabab to di­rectly strike West­ern coun­tries, some­thing be­yond its cur­rent ca­pac­ity.

AQAP and al Shabab do not ap­pear to have yet re­built ties, and al Shabab is pre­oc­cu­pied with dis­rupt­ing So­ma­li­a’s elec­toral process. Ex­pect al Shabab’s north­ern ac­tiv­i­ties to con­tinue, how­ever, once the dis­trac­tion of the elec­toral process has faded, and par­tic­u­larly if AQAP con­tin­ues to re­vive. Now is the best time to nip a re­union in the bud, which will re­quire vig­i­lance and de­ter­mi­na­tion in both So­ma­lia and Yemen.