Abdisalan Hussein Ali, a slight, talkative American born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, had fairly good prospects in life.
Ali, 22, majored in chemistry at university and had been admitted to medical school.
Last week, the New York Times reported that his life came to a bloody end in Mogadishu.
Ali was one of two bombers who blew themselves up in a suicide attack that killed several African Union peacekeepers in Mogadishu last week. Before he died, Ali left a suicide note urging more Americans to join what he called the jihad in Somalia.
Ali was one of a large group of foreigners who have swelled the ranks of Al-Shabaab since the group gained prominence in 2006.
That contingent of foreign fighters – numbering in the hundreds according to experts – has changed the make-up of what was originally a nationalist movement aiming to impose an Islamic state in Somalia and turned the Shabaab into an extension of the global movement of extremists that has loyalties to Al-Qaeda.
Somalia analysts say it is this influential foreign contingent that has radicalised the Somali youth in Al-Shabaab and driven the evolution of the movement from a domestic insurgency into a militant group with ambitions to strike far outside Somalia.
The foreign influence on Al-Shabaab goes back to the early 1990s.
Osama bin Laden was expelled from Saudi Arabia after a crown prince got fed up with his vocal opposition to the presence of American troops in the Arabian Peninsula, and especially his opposition to the first Gulf war.
Bin Laden found a home in Afghanistan and later travelled to Sudan where he refined his plans for a global war against the United States.
According to a new research paper by David Shinn, a professor at George Washington University who served the State Department in the Horn of Africa for many years, bin Laden primarily relied on Abu Hafs al Masri, an Al-Qaeda operative from Egypt described as one of the terrorist’s most talented and trusted lieutenants.
“Based on declassified Al-Qaeda documents, it is clear that Abu Hafs, an Egyptian by birth, made multiple trips to Somalia beginning 1992,” Prof Shinn writes in the Foreign Policy Research Institute paper, Al-Shabaab’s Foreign Threat in Somalia.
“Al-Qaeda believed that Somalia offered a safe haven for its operations in the region and encouraged it to target the United States in Somalia and the Arabian Peninsula. The first Al-Qaeda operatives left Peshawar, Pakistan, transited in Kenya, and arrived in Somalia in February 1993. The group worked closely with Al-Ittihad Al-Islamiyya and established three training camps in Somalia.
“Abu Hafs expected Somalia would become a low-cost recruiting ground where disaffected Somalis in a failed state would readily accept Al-Qaeda and enthusiastically join the fight to expel the international peacekeeping force, briefly led by the United States, which began arriving in Mogadishu in 1992. Somalia appeared to be, in the eyes of Al-Qaeda, another Afghanistan.”
In fact, Prof Shinn says, Somalia proved to be a difficult territory to operate due to labyrinthine clan loyalties in the country and the cost of corruption in places such as Kenya, through which the foreign fighters needed to transit.
In his history of Al-Qaeda’s rise from a small organisation in the deserts of Afghanistan to one of the most successful fundamentalist groups in the world, journalist Lawrence Wright records that bin Laden briefly considered living in Somalia but decided against it after concluding he could not hide in a country where “it is considered good manners to gossip”.
Al-Qaeda surmised that Somalia was not Afghanistan, and the organisation was unable to gain the type of foothold they had established in the Middle East.
“Al-Qaeda underestimated the cost of operating in Somalia. Getting in and out of the country was costly while expenses resulting from corruption in neighbouring states were high. Al-Qaeda experienced regular extortion from Somali clans and unanticipated losses when bandits attacked their convoys. It overestimated the degree to which Somalis would become jihadists, especially if there was no financial incentive, and failed to understand the importance of traditional Sufi Islam.
“Unlike the tribal areas of Pakistan, it found a lawless land of shifting alliances that lacked Sunni unity. The primacy of clan ultimately frustrated Al-Qaeda’s efforts to recruit and develop a strong, unified coalition. The jihadi foreigners from Al-Qaeda concluded during this early initiative in Somalia that the costs outweighed the benefits.”
Al-Qaeda’s foray into Somalia was not entirely fruitless. They landed the first blow when their affiliates killed 18 US servicemen who had gone to Mogadishu as peacekeepers; Somalia was later used as a base from which to launch the attacks in Kenya in August 1998 and November 2002.
But foreign involvement in the conflict in Somalia remained low-key until two separate factors triggered a flood of fighters from the huge Somali diaspora in Europe and the Americas.
The first was Ethiopia’s invasion of the country in 2006 which was used as a rallying point for Al-Shabaab recruitment, especially by its sophisticated propaganda wing which has a significant Internet presence.
The second was the stepping up of drone attacks by the Americans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which led to the deaths of numerous senior and mid-level Qaeda leaders.
As a result, many of them fled to Somalia and Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the next major attack on America will emanate from either of these two countries.
The immediate victims of the flood of militants to the region, however, are Kenyans, Ugandans and Somalis. The attacks on military trucks in Kenya have been triggered by improvised explosive devices, an instrument widely used by Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The foreigners in Al-Shabaab have also introduced tactics considered taboo and were unheard of previously in Somalia, such as suicide bombings.
The first was carried out in 2006; later in August 2010 they bombed football fans watching the World Cup final in Uganda. A lot of this, Prof Shinn writes, is the work of the foreign core of the Shabaab.
This large foreign influence in the Shabaab illustrates the scale of the challenge regional governments and their Western partners face in tackling the militant group.
As a Somalia government spokesman put it, the members of the Somali diaspora must be counselled to come back to build their fragile state and not to bomb it.
“(Abdisalan’s death) is tragic because we were hoping for this young man to come back and take part in the rebuilding of the country,” said Suldan A. Farahsed. “We needed young people like that.”
Source: www.nation.co.ke
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