With its horrific attack on Garissa University College in Kenya, killing at least 148 people, mostly students, the Somali violent Islamist group al-Shabaab has “crossed the Rubicon”, according to Foreign Policy magazine.
Al-Shabaab once aspired to govern Somalia, Bronwyn Bruton writes in the magazine. But it has now “given up all pretense of governing – and has joined the depths of global jihadi depravity”.
She warns that the Garissa attack bears many of the hallmarks of Boko Haram’s violence in Nigeria, which suggests that al-Shabaab, like Boko Haram, has switched allegiance from al-Qaeda to the even bloodier Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (IS).
“If so, al-Shabaab should be expected to use ever more flamboyantly violent tactics in the future, as it seeks to compete with other IS affiliates for notoriety and for relevance in the global jihad.”
Meanwhile, JM Berger has written an equally sobering article for the Brookings Institution, similarly seeing the Garissa attack as an indication that, having suffered military defeat at home, al-Shabaab is “metastasising” from an insurgency into a global terrorist group.
“Purely terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda before 9/11, are typically small,” Berger writes. “Insurgencies generally require much more manpower. Taking and holding a given town or a province takes hundreds or thousands of fighters.
“When a terrorist group adopts an insurgent approach with any degree of success, its ranks typically swell. If the insurgency fails, but is not definitively crushed, it can free up potentially thousands of experienced fighters for terrorist activities.”
And as the Garissa attack, which was carried out by just four people, shows, killing civilians requires far fewer fighters than taking and governing territory.
“It only takes a handful of fighters to create a tragedy of massive proportions. Even a small insurgency, transformed, makes for a huge terrorist capability.”
If we read Bruton and Berger together, we are facing the truly alarming prospect that the more al-Shabaab is defeated on its home soil – by the Somali government, strongly supported by the AU’s peace force Amisom – the more its killers will be freed up to rampage across the region, as terrorists, armed with a new determination to outdo Boko Haram in savagery.
If that is so, one almost wishes that the Union of Islamic Courts, which took control of Mogadishu in 2006 – and which spawned al-Shabaab – had been left in charge of Somalia. But that’s history. The genie is now truly out of the bottle.
What can Africa do about this? It’s really very hard to say.
But it would certainly seem that the AU needs a more comprehensive strategy for Somalia than just supporting Amisom. On a purely military level, this is a mission which seems to cry out for intervention by the AU’s African Standby Force, which has remained on the drawing board for more than a decade.
If that force, which would theoretically comprise soldiers from every member state of the AU, took over the responsibility of Amisom, it would at least spread the responsibility so wide that it would be harder for al-Shabaab to retaliate against just the few states participating in Amisom, like Kenya and Uganda.
But does not the proliferation of al-Shabaab terrorism also suggest the AU needs to return to a political strategy?
The AU supported the creation of the present Somali administration under President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud as the nearest thing to legitimate government which could be created in the difficult circumstances. And then turned to military means to prop it up.
But in the meanwhile, Mohamud’s government has become largely self-serving and dysfunctional as far as ordinary Somalis are concerned.
Kenya’s invasion of Somalia in October 2011 was justified by al-Shabaab’s terrorist attacks on tourist resorts, which threatened a vital part of the economy.
But since then Kenya seems to have been pursuing its own interests in Somalia rather than those of Somalia. There have also been credible reports of brutality by Kenyan troops against Somalis.
All of this plays into al-Shabaab’s hands. Maybe, as Berger and Bruton suggest, it’s already too late to return to politics because the horse has bolted. But it’s worth a try.
There seem to be few other options.