Somali and African Union troops on Wednesday repelled an attack by al-Shabaab militants against the southern town of Wanla Weyn, police and residents said.

At least three police and two civilians were killed in the attack.

Al-Shabaab said it killed 10 soldiers and police. Officials denied that claim.

Wanla Weyn, which links several key towns in southern and central Somalia, was retaken from al-Shabaab by government and AU troops three years ago.

“[Al-Shabaab] entered the town from different directions, with a large number of fighters armed with guns, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, looting civilian shops and business premises,” police representative Abdiwali Farah said.

Al-Shabaab spokesperson Abdiaziz Abu Musca told pro-insurgent radio Andalus the attack had been “tactical”. He did not say whether the insurgents had tried to capture the town.

The fighting in Wanla Weyn comes after the capture of the transit hub Masjid Ali Gadud by Somali and AU troops on Tuesday.

Somalia has battled al-Shabaab for nearly a decade. The group has lost control of practically all major towns, and is increasingly resorting to urban warfare.

Eclipsed by newer, more bloodthirsty and media-savvy global jihadists, Somalia’s Shebab militants are struggling to stay relevant.

On Saturday the two most rapidly ascendant militant Islamist groups joined forces, in words at least, as Nigeria’s Boko Haram declared its allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria.

The rise of these two groups has left Al-Qaeda aligned Shebab in the dust, damaging its capacity to attract foreign recruits, said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert and professor at Davidson College, North Carolina.

“Shebab is really overshadowed by IS,” said Menkhaus.

Shebab aligned with al-Qaeda in 2012, but a turn to IS now seems possible. “Shebab has renewed its links with Al-Qaeda but hasn’t yet said anything negative about IS,” said Matt Bryden, director of Sahan Research in Nairobi. “There’s certainly interest in parts of Shebab to align with IS.”

Shebab websites and radio stations enthusiastically cover IS news and offer positive commentary, including of the weekend’s Boko Haram-IS union.

Shebab’s internal debate over whether to shift allegiance to the IS franchise intensified with the death of the group’s leader and Al-Qaeda stalwart, Ahmed Abdi Godane, in a US missile strike last year.

New emir Ahmed Umar is an al-Qaeda loyalist while other senior figures — among them Mahad Karate who runs the Amniyat, a special internal security wing that deals in intelligence and assassinations — advocate for a switch to the ascendant IS, experts say.

Shebab has fallen a long way from its height just a few years ago when it was the extremist group of choice for aspiring jihadists worldwide.

Mohammed Emwazi, recently revealed as IS executioner “Jihadi John”, is accused by British authorities of attempting to travel to Somalia via Tanzania in August 2009. Michael Adebolajo, the killer of an off-duty British soldier in London in May 2013, is similarly accused of attempting to join Shebab, via Kenya, in November 2010.

– Recruiting problem –

Scores of non-Somalis and diaspora Somalis once bolstered the ranks of Shebab, but now the group struggles to attract recruits from outside East Africa, even among its own nationals.

“Somalis in the diaspora are heading to Iraq and Syria, not Somalia,” said Bryden.

Last year it emerged that Sayid Hussein Feisal Ali, the Finland-born son of a presidential aspirant in Somaliland, had travelled to Syria to join IS.

The FBI believes there are many more.

Last month Hamza Naj Ahmed, from Minnesota, was charged with “conspiring to provide material support” to IS.

“Hamza Ahmed is at least the fourth person from the Twin Cities charged as a result of an ongoing investigation into individuals who have travelled or are attempting to travel to Syria in order to join a foreign terrorist organisation,” said US attorney Andrew Luger.

Local media in Minnesota reported that up to 15 young Somali-Americans had travelled to Syria by mid-last year, and that some had been killed fighting with IS.

Shebab’s allure for foreign jihadists had waned even before IS seized territory, and the world’s attention, last summer.

Its most notorious foreign recruit was Alabama-born US citizen Omar Hammami, known as Abu Al-Amriki, who appeared in recruitment videos praising the joys of jihad and rapping, badly.

But Hammami fell victim to an internal purge in 2013 that killed or alienated many of the group’s foreign fighters.

– Shebab ‘need a good editor’ –

In two recent propaganda videos Shebab has sought to regain some ground lost on the media battlefield, recounting attacks in Kenya that targeted Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall in 2013 and the coastal town of Mpeketoni in 2014.

But unlike the slick, punchy, international propaganda put out by IS in videoed executions or drone-shot warscapes, Shebab productions are flabby and parochial. The Westgate video ran to one hour and sixteen minutes and provided no new insight.

“I was unimpressed,” said Menkhaus. “They need a good jihadi editor.”

The film ended with a call for Muslims in the US, Britain and France to launch copy-cat attacks on shopping malls near them, which only underlined Shebab’s own inability to mount such assaults.

The Mpeketoni video revelled in slow-motion executions of civilians by masked gunmen. But by taking an attack on a small town in Kenya as its subject matter, the film only had appeal for a regional audience — reflecting Shebab’s current profile of mostly local recruits from Kenya and Somalia, the two countries where its energies are currently focused.

Shebab is “stronger regionally, but weaker globally,” said Menkhaus. However, he warned that while the militants are down, they are not yet out. “Shebab has had its day before and come back,” he said.    

The Somali government says it plans to use drones to fight the al-Qaida-linked group al-Shabab, targeting the militants’ bases and rural areas they still control.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Security, Mohamed Yusuf Osman, told VOA on Saturday that the Somali National Army plans to deploy the drones independently of the African Union Mission in Somalia, also known as AMISOM.

But he refused to say where Somalia obtained the drones, or how many there are.

U.S. Special Forces have been involved in drone attacks in Somalia in the past, successfully killing al-Shabab senior leaders and military commanders. Top leader Ahmed Abdi Godane was killed in a U.S. airstrike in September 2014.

Also Saturday, government authorities in Dhusamareb, central Somalia, said senior al-Shabab commander Abdullahi Ahmed Mohumed gave himself up to authorities after renouncing violence in Somalia. VOA sources said Mohumed helped al-Shabab make and plant explosive devices.

The Carabinieri officially launched the Somalia 3 Italian training mission (MIADIT) a couple of days ago in Djibouti. The Carabinieri will train 199 Somali police agents, including 13 women.

The capacity building project was promoted in a bilateral cooperation agreement between the governments of Italy and Somalia and will be implemented by the Carabinieri in the bordering Djibouti, a small but strategically located former French colony at the mouth of the Bab el Mandeb Strait between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, where Italy has a military base.

This year’s training mission is the third one, after the previous ones held in 2013 and 2014. Training will be provided over a 12-week intensive course comprising basic training modules for police officers on the control procedures for both people and vehicles, basic investigative techniques, crime scene on-site evidence searching and finding procedures, in addition to the basics in human rights and international law.

The Somali police agents were given uniforms and learning materials by Italy and were subdivided into classes, which were subsequently assigned to their respective trainers, who will monitor them throughout the training period.

At the end of the course, the roughly 200 trainees will add on to the 350 already trained in the two previous cycles and who now carry out high-profile tasks thanks to their high level of training.

This year, the team of top-ranking trainers will again be under the command of Colonel Paolo Pelosi and the course will include two new specialist training modules, both theoretical and practical, for 40 members of the Djibouti national police.

The trainers belong to the Carabinieri’s Special Intervention Group (GIS), the Tuscania 1st Regiment of Parachuters, the Scientific Investigative Group (RACIS) and the Special Operating Group (ROS).

The final aim of the course is to facilitate the stability and security of Somalia and of the whole Horn of Africa region, focusing on capacity building in the territorial control and security activities of national police forces.

A former Washington-area taxi driver who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list has been detained and is in the custody of the Somali government, a US government source confirmed.

The FBI said in January it added Somali-born US citizen Liban Haji Mohamed, 29, to its watchlist because he allegedly provided support to the Somalia-based Islamist militant group Al Shabaab.

It was offering a reward of up to $US50,000 for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

The US government source said Mohamed was arrested several days ago by Somali authorities and was now in Somali custody, but it was not clear if or when he would be sent back to the United States.

The Washington Post first reported on Monday that Mohamed had been detained in Somalia.

Mohamed lived in the northern Virginia suburbs near Washington and drove a taxi. He left the United States in 2012.

He was said at the time to be an associate of Zachary Chesser, an American who pleaded guilty in 2010 to threatening the writers of the television show South Park.

Kenya is going to build a wall. Not just any wall, but a “separation barrier”, to employ the euphemism coined by Israel to describe the towering, snaking structure that now separates it from Palestine’s West Bank.

Kenya’s version will be built along sections of its notoriously porous border with Somalia. A physical rendering in bricks, mortar and barbed wire of a line on the map.

“Construction works will begin soon. We expect to have finished the project before the end of the year,” said Lamu county governor Issa Timamy, as reported in the Daily Nation. Further details on the project are not yet forthcoming, and Lamu county have not responded to requests for comment.

All that is known is that the wall will be erected along the sections of border near the coast, and that its intent will be to keep out illegal immigrants from Somalia as well as dangerous al-Shabaab militants. A threat felt keenly after al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the Westgate mall attack in Nairobi in 2013.

“This is where immigrants have been arrested trying to cross into the country or having already entered through the border in Lamu. This is a good idea and we support it because we believe it will go a long way to secure this region and indeed, the country as a whole,” said Timamy.

Walls are a comforting proposition. There is something reassuring about shutting the everyone else out and pretending as you go to sleep at night that the world’s problems are not yours; that the bad guys can’t get you.

But how does this theory translate on to the international stage? Can countries really shut themselves off from their neighbours? Can cartographical borders become man-made barriers?

The most famous example, of many, is the Great Wall of China, an unparalleled feat of engineering designed to keep the Mongol hordes at bay. Then there was Hadrian’s Wall, a line of bricks across northern England meant to protect the Romans from the Scots. More recently, the Berlin wall divided a city, keeping West German capitalism from diluting East Germany’s communist revolution.

Today, there are still plenty of barriers dividing nations and societies. In Cyprus, one runs along the Green Line that divides the Turkish north from the Greek south. On Malaysia’s northern border with Thailand there’s one to keep out cheap but illegal Thai labour.

There’s one in Saudi Arabia, on its Yemeni border, to keep Yemen’s insecurity from spilling over. In the US too, several barriers have been erected to prevent illegal movement across the Mexican border.

Most famous, however, is Israel’s separation barrier – nearly 500 miles long, it alternates between rows of barbed wire and electrified fencing and eight-metre high concrete walls. Israel describes it as “the only thing that can minimise the infiltration of these male and female suicide bombers”; others call it the apartheid wall, an architectural expression of Israel’s subjugation of Palestine.

Either way, the real question that Kenyan officials will be asking is: has it worked? Experts are divided.
“Israelis would say that it’s been effective – noting that in the three years before it was built, suicide bombers killed 293 of their citizens; in the three years after it went up, that number dropped to 64. Since its construction, terrorist attacks have dwindled,” writes Rick Steves in the Huffington Post.

“Palestinians would counter by saying that this decline is not because of the wall, but because Palestine, its president, its security forces, and its people have all realised that violence is a losing strategy. Palestinians assure me that if anyone really wants to get through the wall (which is far from finished), it’s very easy to do,” he adds.

This, however, has come at a cost, and not just in financial terms (on that front: construction was an estimated $2m per kilometre, while maintenance is $260 million per year). By cutting off Israelis from Palestinians so completely, and vice versa, it has had a marked impact on how those societies interact, one which could have troubling long-term implications for peace and stability in the region.

Historically, walls are never a long term fix – and their effectiveness has always been dubious. The Great Wall of China, impressive as it was, became irrelevant when China’s ruling elite, confronted with a peasant rebellion, invited the Mongols in.

The Berlin Wall couldn’t isolate East Germans from the lure of a better life, and eventually in was torn down, brick by brick. The border fence separating Mexico and the US is so porous that one documentary-maker repeatedly crossed it illegally – once dressed as Osama bin Laden.

AMISOM – the African Union Mission in Somalia – is getting 20 MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected Vehicles) courtesy the US military’s CJTF-HOA (Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa) operation.

To be supplied over the coming two months, these very tough and versatile armoured vehicles will be used in support of counter-terrorism missions.

Previously deployed in Afghanistan, the MRAPs have been put through a refurbishment programme by ManTech officials and, according to Major General Wayne Grigsby, CJTF-HOA commander, they will “provide better security and movement to the troops’ contributing countries to complete their mission more effectively.”

The ManTech maintenance contract has a further year left to run and includes associated training services.

The AMISOM MRAPs will ultimately replace the South African-built Casspir infantry mobility vehicles in current service.

Introduced in the early 1980s, the pioneering Casspir inspired the MRAP concept which then took off in a large way. The MRAP programme has to date delivered some 12,000 vehicles into US military service.

Specifications vary but all MRAPs are designed with one key goal in mind: resistance to IED (improvised explosive device) blasts.

“This is huge for Uganda and Burundi to be receiving the MRAPs, as they were driving Casspirs”, commented CJTF-HOA Somalia planner, US Army Major Myesha DuBose. “The MRAPS will provide enhanced capabilities to our partnerships, with increased security.”

CJTF-HOA was formed post 9/11 as an AFRICOM (United States Africa Command) joint task force.

Comprised of approximately 2,000 service personnel, CJTF-HOA works to counter ‘violent extremist organizations in East Africa, helping to ensure the protection of the homeland, American citizens and American interests’, according to its official website.

AMISOM went into operation in February 2007. Run by the African Union, AMISOM is an ongoing peacekeeping mission focusing on central and southern Somalia. Commanded since December 2013 by Lieutenant General Silas Ntigurirwa, it presently has some 21,500 troops at its disposal.

A propaganda video released by Somali militant group al-Shabab, threatening attacks against shopping centres in the West, smacks of a bid to remain relevant as other extremist groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram grab the world’s attention.

The slickly produced 77-minute film, posted online this past weekend, calls for strikes on shopping streets and malls in London, the United States and Canada. “Westgate was just the beginning,” it proclaims, invoking what might cynically be described as al-Shabab’s greatest hit: the siege of the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in which 67 people were killed by four gunmen.

But that was September 2013 and a great deal has happened since. The Islamic State has overrun swaths of Iraq and Syria and produced macabre videos tailored to the modern media cycle. Boko Haram has rampaged through northern Nigeria and stolen headlines with the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls. Islamist gunmen stunned the world by attacking a Paris satirical magazine, killing 17 people over three days.

In the perverse battle for eyeballs and retweets, al-Shabab’s public relations department has been outwitted by its rivals and has lost territory after a hammering by US drones and African soldiers. Last September, its leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, was killed in a US air strike, but his successor, Ahmad Umar Abu Ubaidah, has so far failed to establish a similarly high profile.

There are two ways for al-Shabab, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, to put itself back on the global agenda. One was seen last Friday with the suicide bombing of a Mogadishu hotel, killing 25 people and injuring more than 40 and denting hopes that the capital has unstoppable momentum with new business, a construction boom and a returning diaspora.

Boko Haram used “copycat tactics” by declaring an Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria, but that option is not open to al-Shabab since its recent setbacks on the battlefield.

Anton du Plessis, managing director of the Institute for Security Studies, warns of the continuing potential for lone-wolf attacks. “Although they are on the back foot and have suffered losses, they are still a force to be reckoned with. Nobody knows the extent of their sympathisers in other countries.”

Though al-Shabab has carried out attacks in neighbouring Kenya, Uganda and Djibouti, which all contribute troops to the African Union force in Somalia, it has not operated outside East Africa and the Horn of Africa. Yet Minnesota, home to the biggest Somali population in the US, has been singled out by terrorist recruiters, according to Associated Press.

Since 2007, it said, more than 22 Somali men from Minnesota have travelled to Somalia to join al-Shabab, and a handful of Minnesota residents have gone to Syria to fight within the last year. At least one Minnesotan has died while fighting for the Islamic State.

Cedric Barnes, Horn of Africa project director at the International Crisis Group, says: “This video has a lot to do with recruitment. It is propaganda but it’s also a recruiting tool. There is now competition for radical young Muslims in the West: rather than al-Shabab, they might go for the immediacy of the Islamic State in Iraq or Syria. There are more rivals than there were.”

Stig Jarle Hansen, an academic on al-Shabab in Somalia, notes the group has “never staged an attack in a country that was not a part of the African Union forces fighting them. The most likely scenario is that this continues, but al-Shabab propaganda is professional; it might inspire sympathisers to act.”

Source:  mg.co.za

Insurgents in Somalia’s capital fired a barrage of mortar rounds on Thursday targeting the highly fortified presidential palace and main government compound, killing a guard, security officials said.

“At least four rounds of mortar shells struck the parking area and a guard was killed in the attack,” security official Abdirahman Mohamed said.

Witness Mohamud Hassan said several cars parked in the area were damaged.

“Shrapnel destroyed the windows of several cars in the parking area, and I saw one person who was lightly injured,” Hassan said.

Al-Shabab claimed the responsibility for the shelling, according the group’s radio station, Andulus.

There was no immediate word if Thursday’s attack caused any casualties or damage. The area was sealed off by security forces and journalists could not approach Captain Mohamed Hussein says that two more mortars struck a residential area near the state house which houses Somali president, prime minister and speaker of the parliament.

Al Qaeda-affiliated Shabaab rebels have staged a string of attacks in their fight to overthrow the country’s internationally-backed government.

However, other militia forces operate in Mogadishu, and the parliament is often riven by intense political power struggles.

Last week two Shabaab suicide bombers killed at least 25 people when they attacked major hotel close to the presidential palace and popular with top government officials.

The extremists say they are targeting the government and lawmakers as they allowed the deployment of foreign troops on Somali soil.

Source:  gulftoday.ae

Fifteen people were killed and several others injured in central Somalia’s Guricel town when government troops clashed with the Islamist group Ahlusunah Wal Jamaa, authorities said Wednesday, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

Abdulah Warsame, a local administrator told Xinhua that the fighting, which started on Tuesday, had escalated in the last 24 hours, causing residents to flee the area.

“Fifteen people were killed even during the time the peace committee established recently was meeting in the city to find ways to end the conflict,” said Warsame.

Ali Omar, director of Istarnil Hospital in the town confirmed that they had received more than 20 people who were injured in the fighting, expressing fears over the hospital’s capacity to handle more patients.

The clash came just one day after the international community hailed efforts by local elders and businessmen to mediate for a peaceful resolution in the region.

Guricel town has witnessed continuing fighting by two clans, which, analysts say, government forces and Ahlusunah Wal Jamaa supporting either side of the clans.