Al-Shabaab gunmen killed and injured more than 39 in Nairobi

Two different analysis on the origins of Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab, a group of Al Qaeda affiliated masked gunmen killed and injured more than 39 people in terrorist attacks at Nairobi shopping center.

The Guardian

It is only seven years since Ethiopian forces swept into Somalia with the political and military backing of the US to topple the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamist movement that had taken control of much of south and central Somalia after years of disastrous feuding between warlords. Ethiopia’s vastly superior forces routed the youth militias loyal to the courts with hundreds killed or driven from the cities.

However, the Ethiopian intervention was the cue for the emergence of what had been the unheralded youth wing of the courts movement, “the shabaab” – meaning “youth” in Somali. These young fighters regrouped and took the war to the Ethiopians, who wearied of the guerrilla conflict and withdrew. Read more…

CNN

Decades of weak government amid grinding poverty have long made Somalia a target for radical Islamist groups.

Al-Shabaab’s predecessor was al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAI), which worked to create an Islamist emirate in Somalia. It was, in part, funded by former al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

AIAI, which the U.S. State Department designated as a terrorist organization, strengthened after the fall in 1991 of Siad Barre’s military regime and amid the years of lawlessness that ensued.

In 2003, a rift erupted between IAIA’s old guard — who were seeking to establish a new political front — and its younger members (Al-Shabaab, which means “the youth”), who were seeking to establish fundamental Islamic rule.

That led the latter to ally with a group of sharia courts — the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) — that was seeking to impose order over a landscape marked by feuding warlords in the capital city.

Working together, the ICU and Al-Shabaab succeeded in 2006 in gaining control of Mogadishu. That sparked fears in neighboring Ethiopia that violence would spill over there, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Those fears — combined with a request from Somalia’s transitional government — led Ethiopian forces to enter Somalia in December 2006 and to remove the ICU from power.

That move proved to be a turning point, one that radicalized Al-Shabaab, which attacked Ethiopian forces and gained control of parts of central and southern Somalia, according to a 2011 case study by Rob Wise, who was then with the Counterterrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Read more…