Issue No. 511

Al-Shabaab in Kenya, a persistent threat
 

The vigour and spirit that marked the onset of renewed offensives against Al-Shabaab (AS) in mid-2022 under the administration of Hassan Sheikh Mahmoud (HSM) seem to have subsided, two months after Major Abdillahi Ali Anod, spokesman for the Somali National Army (SNA), declared a second and final phase of war on the group. The militaristic verve displayed toward the beginning of 2023 appears to have been inflated. This may be due to a number of factors, central to which is the lack of a coherent strategic framework to ensure gains on the battlefield are sustained.
 
To escape the onslaught in key strongholds in Middle and Lower Shabelle, Al-Shabaab relocated families of its fighters to safe havens in northern Somalia, including parts of Puntland, where significant numbers of AS militants have been spotted multiple times since November 2022 by local residents. At the same time, threat levels seem to have increased in Somalia’s neighbouring countries. The thinking behind resolutions such as those arrived at during the recent Somalia Frontline States summit in Mogadishu, attended by Kenya’s President William Ruto, Djibouti’s President Omar Guelleh, and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, is that AS poses a growing regional security threat.
 
A week ago, a vehicle carrying four police officers from Kenya’s Border Patrol Unit was destroyed by a powerful explosion after it hit an improvised explosive device (IED) in Garissa County, which borders Lower and Middle Juba in Somalia. Al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility for similar attacks along Somalia’s border with Kenya, attacks that have intensified in recent months. In Lamu County, the area of operations of Jaysh Ayman, the contingent of AS fighters most responsible for the group’s Kenyan operations since 2015, attacks have spiked since late 2022. The county hosts the new Lamu Port, a key component of the multi-billion-dollar Lamu, South Sudan, and Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET). Since September 2022, the height of the crackdown against AS in Somalia, at least 30 LAPSSET workers have been killed in attacks suspected to have been conducted by AS. There have been 7 attacks in the vicinity of Lamu alone since December, leaving at least 14 people dead. 
 
The security threat posed by Al-Shabaab in Kenya is not new. In fact, the most recent AS attacks in Kenya have been commanded by one of Kenya’s veteran jihadists, who joined the group as early as 2013. Names such as Maalim Ayman and Ramadhan Kufungwa, the individuals who are now responsible for most AS operations in Kenya, have featured in investigative reporting for a considerable period of time. Kufungwa, in particular, became an important AS recruiter immediately following the deaths of Kenya’s most well-known AS supporters, Abubakar Sharif, known as Makaburi, and Aboud Rogo. The two were preachers from Mombasa on the Kenyan coast who had come to symbolise the face of Islamist terror in Kenya. The contingent of Kenyan fighters operating out of the Boni Forest straddling the northern Kenyan coast and southern Somalia, was named after Maalim Ayman.
 
The active presence of an individual such as Kufungwa in AS operations against Kenya is concerning. Hailing fom Kwale County on Kenya’s southern coast and border with Tanzania, Kufungwa has been part of a network of Kenyan militants with an intimate understanding of Kenya’s security vulnerabilities, some of whom hail from predominantly Christian communities, such as Luo, Kikuyu, and Kamba. As investigations following the January 2019 attack on the DusitD2 business complex in Nairobi revealed, individuals with such profiles can easily blend in with the Kenyan public, making it much more challenging for Kenyan security to identify them. Some of them also come from Kenya’s major urban centres of Nairobi, Mombasa, Isiolo, Nyeri and Eldoret.
 
Some of Al-Shabaab’s earliest Kenyan recruits, like Sylvester Opiyo and Kassim Omondi, who hailed from Nairobi’s Majengo slums, were funneled into AS by Ahmed Iman Ali, also from the Majengo slums, who relocated to AS controlled territory in Somalia in 2009. In Nairobi, most of these men were recruited through mosques, such as Masjid Kibera, Masjid Huruma, and Masjid Nuur, quickly converted to Islam then transported to Somalia to join AS.
 
Before Jaysh Ayman was established in 2013, most of these earlier Kenyan AS recruits were deployed in AS’s Majimmo sector in Southern Somalia – an area of operations assigned predominantly to East African militants, under the command of then 25-year-old Titus Nabiswa, a recent convert to Islam from Bungoma in Western Kenya. Nabiswa’s group included other militants from the Kenyan coast, largely radicalised by the sermons and mosque lectures (darsas) of the late Sheikh Aboud Rogo and Makaburi. Also in the group were Kenyan-Somalis (mostly from the Eastleigh and South C neighborhoods of Nairobi), including foreign militants such as Andreas Martin Mueller from Germany, as well as Jermaine Grant and Thomas Evans – both from the UK. Most of them have since been killed in battle or imprisoned. Some are still at large. In fact, after a heavy crackdown on this network, which ensued between 2011 and 2015, recruitment strategies also changed. Most of the existing members relocated to Somalia, where they joined the Jaysh Ayman wing of AS or Amniyaad terror cells. New recruits would increasingly be recruited through online platforms.    
 
Ramadhan Kufungwa comes from the older group, the pioneers of Jaysh Ayman; and as recent security alerts for Kenya regarding Al-Shabaab reveal, he is reportedly involved in planning new operations. Despite the recent offensives against Al-Shabaab in Somalia, Kenyan citizens and internationals in Kenya need to remain vigilant, while Kenyan and other regional security forces focus on these new and evolving threats. Somalia is not alone in facing the menace of Al-Shabaab.