Loading ammunition into the magazine of his AK-47 assault rifle, the young suicide bomber looked straight into the camera. “Jihad is real,” he said. “There’s no way you can understand the sweetness of jihad until you come to jihad.”
His accomplice joined in, his face hidden by a scarf. “How dare you sit at home and look on the TV and see Muslims getting killed ... Those who are in Europe and America, get out of those countries,” he ordered.
Moments later a column of black smoke appeared as a battered Toyota truck exploded.
The slick video showing the last moments of a suicide bomber, entitled “Message to those who stay behind”, is part of the latest recruitment propaganda to emerge on English-language websites directed at young wannabe jihadis.
Its origins were not, however, in Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan, the usual bases of jihadi recruiters, but Somalia, the war-torn east African state.
The site has been traced to Al-Shabaab, a radicalised Islamist militia group led by Somalis trained in Afghanistan and aligned with Al-Qaeda. The group is fighting against Somalia’s fragile transitional government, which is backed by the West and the United Nations.
It is seeking to impose sharia (Islamic law) in Somalia with brutal tactics including public beheadings. Amnesty International has condemned it for cruel punishments including sentencing robbers, without trial, to have their right hand and left foot cut off.
What concerns western security officials is that the movement has built an international recruiting network in Somali expatriate communities in the West. It has arranged for impressionable young Somali men to go to a country they scarcely know, to fight for its cause.
Now there are signs that these fighters are returning to their home countries to spread terror there.
Last week, Australian security forces announced they had uncovered an alleged plot by immigrants, including three Somalis with Australian citizenship, to carry out a suicide attack with automatic weapons on a Sydney army base.
“The men’s intention was to actually go into the army barracks and kill as many soldiers as they could before they themselves were killed,” said Tony Negus, acting chief commissioner of Australia’s federal police force.
In America, a counterterrorism investigation is continuing after more than 20 young Americans of Somali origin left their homes in Minneapolis and went to fight with Al-Shabaab.
A first wave left in 2007 and a second in 2008 but their disappearance came to light only after news reached Minneapolis that one of them, Shirwa Ahmed, blew himself up in an attack in Somalia last October that killed as many as 30 people.
Others have been arrested and charged on their return to the United States.
Last month Lord Malloch-Brown, then the minister for Africa, said Somalia posed a greater threat than Afghanistan to Britain. Its ungoverned space is being compared to Afghanistan under the Taliban when Osama Bin Laden used the lawless areas on the Pakistan border to plan attacks on western targets.
Experts fear that as Al-Qaeda has come under more pressure in the border region from western forces it will turn increasingly to Somalia as an attractive haven where it can set up terrorist training camps for worldwide jihadists. Echoing this appeal, Bin Laden has urged Muslims to send money or go to fight in Somalia.
So is Somalia now rivalling Afghanistan as a crucible for terror?
FOR 18 years since the fall of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, Somalia has been a country without an effective central government. Today it is the world’s pre-eminent failed state in a perpetual fog of civil war. A tenth of its population has been killed. A million have fled abroad.
The Al-Shabaab movement — meaning “the youth” in Arabic — was formed as the youth and military wing of a group of sharia courts that controlled much of southern and central Somalia in 2006. >>>
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