The bombings orchestrated by Somalia’s al-Shabab militia that killed at least 74 people watching the World Cup finals on television Sunday night are the latest sign of the growing ambitions of al-Qaeda’s regional affiliates outside the traditional theaters of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
The attacks, intended to inflict maximum damage on civilian targets, mark the first major international assault by Somali militants in a region where the United States and its allies are attempting to stem the rise of Islamist militancy. At least one American was killed and several were wounded in Sunday’s strikes.
The United States has provided millions of dollars in military and economic aid, training, equipment, logistical support and intelligence to regional counterterrorism allies such as Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya. Uganda is a training ground for soldiers for Somalia’s transitional government, which al-Shabab is seeking to overthrow, in a program backed by the United States and European nations. Troops from Uganda and Burundi make up a U.S.- and Western-backed African Union peacekeeping force in the Somali capital of Mogadishu that protects the fragile government.
A top spokesman for al-Shabab, speaking from Mogadishu, said the militia carried out the bombings, and he alluded to the group’s aspiration to use Somalia as a launching pad for international attacks. Ali Mohamud Raghe, the spokesman, threatened further attacks if Uganda and Burundi continue to supply troops to the African Union force.
However unfortunate these bombings might be, we should appreciate the larger picture, which is that AQ are becoming what amounts to a franchise operation. There have be relatively few successful attacks outside the muslim world — and this [i]is[/i] a muslim civil war — and most of them have been both at relatively modest scale and directed at rather soft targets.
This operational tempo and inability to strike at their opponents’ centres of gravity reflects significant degradation of AQ’s officer corps, and non-trivial loss of what would be their experienced NCOs were they a more standard military organisation.
This is not a strong organisation in its ascendancy. Both timing and targets are indicative of a badly degraded outfit, with what amount to non-standard militias using the name.