al-Shabaab

al-Shabaab, Somali-based Islamist militant group with links to al-Qaeda. Beginning in 2006, the group waged an insurgency against Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

Al-Shabaab originated as a militia affiliated with the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a federation of local and clan-based Islamic courts that had been founded in southern Somalia in 2004 to combat the lawlessness and banditry afflicting the area since the collapse of the government of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. From about 2004 this militia acted as an armed wing of the ICU, incorporating fighters from the disbanded Somali militant Islamist group al-Itihaad al-Islamiyyah as well as a number of fighters who had fought for the al-Qaeda network or received training from it. The group came to be known as al-Shabaab, meaning “the Youth,” and it was led by Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, a Somali operative reportedly trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Ideologically, al-Shabaab took a more extreme stance than the ICU as a whole, espousing a puritanical version of Islam at odds with the Sufi-influenced form practiced by many Somalis.

In early 2006 al-Shabaab fighters played a prominent role supporting the ICU in combat against a coalition of Mogadishu warlords that the United States covertly supported in an attempt to prevent the spread of militant Islamism. The ICU defeated the warlords and took control of Mogadishu in June 2006. That month the ICU also changed its name to Somali Supreme Islamic Courts Council (SSICC). The victory strengthened al-Shabaab, allowing fighters to take possession of arsenals belonging to the warlords. The SSICC’s takeover in Mogadishu was a threatening development for the TFG, then operating from Kenya and the Somali city of Baydhabo, and for the TFG’s international supporters, especially the United States, which feared that the SSICC would provide a haven for al-Qaeda.

International intervention came at the end of 2006, when a U.S.-backed Ethiopian force joined with TFG troops to fight the SSICC, which was quickly defeated and dissolved. Al-Shabaab, however, remained intact and began to mount a campaign of bombings and attacks against the TFG and Ethiopian forces in Somalia. Civilians, journalists, and international aid workers also became targets for attacks, as did the African Union peacekeeping force (AMISOM) authorized by the UN Security Council in February 2007. The death of Ayro in a U.S. air strike in 2008 did little to slow al-Shabaab’s insurgency. In October 2008 the TFG signed a power-sharing agreement with members of the former SSICC, providing for the incorporation of moderate Islamists into the government. Al-Shabaab, still fiercely opposed to any compromise with the TFG, denounced the agreement even though it set a timetable for the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia.

Al-Shabaab continued to extend the area under its control in 2009, banning behaviours that it deemed un-Islamic and implementing punishments including beheading, stoning, and amputation for offenders. In July 2010 al-Shabaab suicide bombers staged the group’s first major attack outside Somalia, killing about 75 people gathered in Kampala, Uganda, to watch a screening of a World Cup football (soccer) game. Al-Shabaab claimed the attack as retaliation for Ugandan troops’ participation in AMISOM. Al-Shabaab drew further international condemnation for first banning and then restricting assistance from international aid groups in southern Somalia during a deadly drought and famine in 2011.

By mid-2011 al-Shabaab appeared to be on the defensive. Worn down by repeated clashes with AMISOM forces, the group retreated from Mogadishu in August 2011. In October 2011 the group was forced to fight on a second front when several thousand Kenyan soldiers entered southern Somalia in response to a series of alleged al-Shabaab attacks and kidnappings in Kenya. The Kenyan force in Somalia officially merged with AMISOM in June 2012, and an AMISOM offensive in October of that year succeeded in driving al-Shabaab out of Kismaayo, the port city that had been the group’s last urban stronghold.

In February 2012 a video released jointly by al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda announced that al-Shabaab had formally pledged allegiance to the al-Qaeda network.

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Al-Shabaab launched its deadliest attack outside of Somalia in several years on September 21, 2013, when militants stormed a shopping mall in Nairobi, killing at least 65 people. Kenyan police cornered the gunmen in the shopping mall, resulting in a siege that lasted several days.

On April 2, 2015, al-Shabaab struck again in Kenya, killing more than 140 people and injuring dozens more in a raid on a university in Garissa.