Editor's Note: This is the first in a four-part series on the rebuilding of a key al Qaeda node in Somalia.
Early May 1, a U.S. AC-130 Spectre gunship destroyed a house in central Somalia where members of the Islamist militant group al Shabaab (Arabic for "the youth") were holding a meeting. Two men with close ties to al Qaeda prime were killed in the attack. With the U.S. government reporting recently that the al Qaeda node along the Afghan/Pakistani border is reorganizing, and with evidence surfacing recently that the al Qaeda node in Yemen is reorganizing as well, it seems that a select few al Qaeda groups have been undergoing a period of rebuilding. The same situation could be playing out in Somalia with al Shabaab. Although there have been some small-scale successes in targeting elements of al Shabaab's command and control structure, the link between the Somalian group and al Qaeda prime has been established, and al Shabaab's expansion in the near future is a very real threat.
Al Qaeda and Somalia
Al Qaeda has a long operational history in East Africa; Osama bin Laden himself spent time there, operating out of Sudan from 1992 (shortly after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia) to 1996 (when he left for Afghanistan). The group's involvement in Somalia was first evident to the Western world in 1993 — during Operation Gothic Serpent — when al Qaeda sent operatives to Somalia to train the militias of Mohamed Farah Aided, a powerful local warlord and the main target of U.S. operations. In 1998, al Qaeda made its presence felt in East Africa with the embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
More recently, al Qaeda has been implicated in the bombing of a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and an attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner, both in 2002. The group of al Qaeda operatives sent to aid the Somalian militias in 1993, which likely included Fazul Abdullah Mohamed is credited with instructing the Somalis on how to disable military helicopters by targeting them with rocket-propelled grenades as they flew low over the city. This tactic was what allowed the Somalis to disrupt U.S. operations and ultimately contributed to the U.S. pullout in late 1993. This serves as the first known example of al Qaeda providing direct material support to the Somalian cause. Al Qaeda's motivation for supporting the militias at this time came partly from Somalis within al Qaeda prime's ranks wanting to support their brethren in Somalia and partly from the group's desire to take advantage of an opportunity to strike at the United States at a point of vulnerability.
As a predominantly Sunni country, Somalia has been a source of al Qaeda fighters over the years, with a number of ethnic Somalis traveling to Afghanistan to train with al Qaeda prime and then returning to organize and command local al Qaeda nodes. Al Qaeda prime was known to have sent numerous operatives to East Africa in the early to mid-1990s to locate potential targets. In more recent years, there have been numerous reports of Somalis fighting alongside members of the local al Qaeda nodes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Development of Al Shabaab
After Ethiopian forces beat back the Supreme Islamic Courts Council (SICC) in 2007, the SICC's armed wings dissolved into the ungoverned savannah in the south, the Mogadishu underground and safe zones in central Somalia. They eventually re-formed under the leadership of Aden Farah Ayro (one of the men killed in the May 1 U.S. airstrike) and Sheikh Hassan Turki (who is suspected to be along the border between Somalia and Kenya), assumed the name al Shabaab and sought to continue the fight against the new Somalian government and its Ethiopian backers with an insurgency-style approach. Portions of al Shabaab have also been known to call themselves the Mujahideen Youth Movement (MYM); this is largely suspected to be a twist on the name of the main group and not an indication that the MYM is a separate entity.
The group's core leadership comprises senior militants, some of whom trained directly and fought with al Qaeda prime in Afghanistan, while its rank-and-file membership is largely untrained Somalian youths. Al Shabaab is estimated to have 6,000 to 7,000 members, with cells having several hundred members. As a result of Somalia's turbulent past, the group's members have had no shortage of practice in asymmetrical warfare and small unit tactics, as well as experience using a wide array of weaponry. From an operational standpoint, the group is fairly new. As the SICC's militant wing, it gained notoriety before the SICC took over Mogadishu in June 2006 for its desecration of Italian graves and the killing of a British journalist. The U.S. State Department formally labeled al Shabaab as a foreign terrorist organization in March — a mostly bureaucratic action, but nonetheless a demonstration of the extent to which the group had been able to develop and progress. The group actually publicly addressed its addition to the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations, saying it would only help support al Shabaab's cause, as its justification as an official terrorist group would bring it more attention and subsequently more material support.
Helping to speed al Shabaab's growth is the fact that when it was SICC's militant wing, it had an organized command and control structure and many rank-and-file members already in place. The group was able to transfer that structure, and many of its members, to its new incarnation as al Shabaab. This — coupled with the leadership's operational experience and links to al Qaeda prime — has helped create a capable and fairly strong group. From a tactical standpoint, al Shabaab does not yet exhibit any of the trademarks commonly associated with al Qaeda prime. The group employs a tactical doctrine that places a strong emphasis on small-unit, hit-and-run-style assaults, mainly targeting lightly guarded towns and villages and subsequently retreating to the countryside before reinforcements arrive. While they have begun to employ more traditional tactics such as improvised explosive devices in more urban environments, the militants have been operating more as a traditional insurgent force than as a traditional terrorist organization as commonly defined. Next: Al Shabaab's Leadership Links to Al Qaeda
