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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 Shabab (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 Shabab. Although there have been some small-scale successes in targeting elements of al Shabab’s command and control structure, the link between the Somalian group and al Qaeda prime has been established, and al Shabab’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.
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