Worst suicide bombing
KAMPALA, Uganda: As the death toll rises above 300 – along with 500 casualties and counting – from one of the world’s bloodiest attacks in years, the al-Shabaab extremist group has sent a powerful signal that the international focus on extremism can’t afford to overlook the African continent, say analysts.
Saturday’s truck bombing of a crowded Mogadishu street showed that al-Shabaab, targeted for years by US air strikes and tens of thousands of AU forces, has again made a deadly comeback.
Pushed from Somalia’s capital in recent years, al-Shabaab has retreated mostly to rural areas of the country’s south, where the fragile central government can’t assert its authority and local fiefdoms are in charge.
From there, Africa’s deadliest Islamic extremist group has continued to plan guerrilla-style attacks like Saturday’s truck bombing in the capital, Mogadishu.
While demonstrating al-Shabaab’s resilience in the face of new military offensives by the US and Somalia in recent months, the attack also highlights the shortcomings of US drone strikes in a politically fraught country with a weak military and even weaker police, analysts said.
“Decapitation strikes certainly serve a purpose, but al-Shabaab will not be defeated this way. They replenish leadership very quickly,” said Matt Bryden, a security consultant on the Horn of Africa who once served as a UN expert.
Although al-Shabaab has not claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack, the Somali government says there can be no doubt. Bryden agreed, saying that “no other group in Somalia has the capacity to put together a bomb of this size… in this nature”.
A new statement by the SITE Intelligence Group said al-Shabaab as recently as yesterday was posting claims of responsibility for attacks on Somali and AU forces – but not for Saturday’s blast.
Mohamed Sheikh Abdi, a political analyst in Somalia, said he believed al-Shabaab is reluctant to take credit for the attack because the high civilian death toll would hand “an expensive propaganda prize for the government… as a rallying call and boost its public image”.
Al-Shabaab earlier this year vowed to step up attacks in response to new military efforts by both the Trump administration and Somalia’s recently elected Somali-American president. It is not yet clear how the US military will respond to Saturday’s bombing.
The extremist group knows how to make a comeback. It suffered perhaps its worst setback in 2014 after a US air strike killed its spiritual leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, who had helped forge the group’s alliance with al-Qaeda. Godane was quickly replaced by the more reclusive Ahmad Umar, who remains at large.
In the past year al-Shabaab attacks, including against the 22 000-strong multinational AU force in Somalia, have become more frequent. About half of the 1 228 civilian casualties recorded by the UN this year in Somalia have been caused by the extremist group.
Somalia saw a 38% rise in civilian deaths from improvised explosives in the first half of this year, the London-based Action on Armed Violence said.
“Time and again throughout its history… al-Shabaab has shown itself to be a remarkably resilient group,” said J Peter Pham, director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council.
“There is no reason to believe that it will not also survive in some fashion the recent setbacks it has suffered in terms of strikes and defections.”
Over the years al-Shabaab has grown from mounting low-level, symbolic assaults to staging complex attacks at home and abroad. The group is responsible for two major attacks that killed scores in neighbouring Kenya, at Garissa University in 2015 and Westgate Mall in 2013. Al-Shabaab called them retaliation for Kenya’s military involvement in Somalia.
The country is historically complicated terrain for the US, which pulled out of Somalia after the 1993 incident i n which two helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu and bodies of Americans were dragged through the streets.