Al-Shabaab: A Jihadist Threat to America

September 13, 2011

http://www.investigativeproject.org/3170/al-shabaab-a-jihadist-threat-to-america

The Somali jihadist organization al-Shabaab did not exist a decade ago. Today, its success in recruiting and radicalizing Muslims inside the United States has made al-Shabaab “a direct threat to the U.S. homeland,” according to an investigative report by the House Homeland Security Committee.
Al-Shabaab, which is affiliated with al-Qaida, is fighting to oust the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), an “interim” regime that has served as the nominal government of Somalia since 2004. The TFG is supported by the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) military force, comprised of approximately 8,000 troops from Uganda and Burundi.
Until recently, the Somali government controlled little more than a few parts of Mogadishu, the capital, while al-Shabaab exercised control over much of southern and eastern Somalia and part of Mogadishu. But al-Shabaab has been plagued by defeats and desertions, and last month the terror group withdrew from territory it occupied in Mogadishu.

Al-Shabaab evolved out of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an Islamist group that went to war against the Somali government five years ago. The ICU captured Mogadishu in June 2006. By late October, the ICU had effectively encircled the TFG in Baidoa, located in south-central Somalia. The only thing preventing the city’s destruction were Ethiopian soldiers defending the city.
Shortly after the ICU emerged, “hundreds of terrorists from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula arrived to train in or staff these camps,” wrote Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for the Defense or Democracies. A United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia warned that the ICU “is fully capable” of turning the country into “an Iraq type scenario, replete with roadside and suicide bombers, assassinations and other forms of terrorist and insurgent-type activities.”
That warning would soon appear prophetic.