Blast sends warning signal from deadly extremist group
KAMPALA, Uganda—As the toll rises above 300 from one of the world’s deadliest attacks in years, the al-Shabab extremist group has sent a powerful signal that the international focus on extremism can’t afford to overlook the African continent.
Saturday’s truck bombing on a crowded Mogadishu street showed that al-Shabab, targeted for years by U.S. airstrikes and tens of thousands of African Union forces, has once again made a deadly comeback.
Pushed from Somalia’s capital in recent years, al-Shabab 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-Shabab’s resilience in the face of new military offensives by the U.S. and Somalia in recent months, the attack also highlights the shortcomings of U.S. drone strikes in a politically fraught country with a weak military and even weaker police, analysts told The Associated Press.
“Decapitation strikes certainly serve a purpose, but al-Shabab 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 United Nations expert.
Although al-Shabab 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-Shabab as recently as Monday was posting claims of responsibility for attacks on Somali and African Union forces—but not for Saturday’s blast.
Mohamed Sheikh Abdi, a political analyst in Somalia, said he believed al-Shabab 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-Shabab 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, who has vowed to wipe out the extremist group within two years.
It is not yet clear how the U.S. military will respond to Saturday’s bombing. A Pentagon spokesman, Col. Rob Manning, said the United States has about 400 troops in Somalia and “we’re not going to speculate” about sending more.
The extremist group knows how to make a comeback. It suffered perhaps its worst setback in 2014 after a U.S. airstrike killed its spiritual leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, who had helped forge the group’s alliance with al-Qaida. Godane was quickly replaced by the more reclusive Ahmad Umar, who remains at large.
In the past year al-Shabab attacks, including against the 22,000-strong multinational African Union force in Somalia, have become more frequent. About half of the 1,228 civilian casualties recorded by the U.N. this year in Somalia have been caused by the extremist group.
Somalia saw a 38 percent rise in civilian deaths from improvised explosives in the first half of this year, the London-based Action on Armed Violence said Monday.
“Time and again throughout its history … al-Shabab has shown itself to be a remarkably resilient group,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center 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.”