... 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...
More at The Times.
Comments
Somalia is certainly very vulnerable (Brief primer on Somalia here: http://globalcrim.blogspot.com/2009/06/friday-feature-somalia.html). It once gain ranks at the top of the Failed States list, and has gotten worse, not better, since last year (also in the top 16, are surrounding Sudan, Chad, DRC, Guinea, Kenya, and Ethiopia). Last year marked that country's 18th consecutive year of civil war. An offshoot of continued lawlessness, the lack of a central government and economic devastation, piracy has grabbed international headlines with a surge of attacks on ships in the critical Gulf of Aden. The outlook for peace and effective government looks bleak.
And Shabaab is a legitimate source of concern. They have mounted a steady stream of attacks on Ethiopian and African Union-backed provisional governmentbut it's not clear they have the capacity to create a "new Afghanistan" - if that term refers to the kind of haven and infrastructure base that AQ had there in 1990s. .