An
image grab taken from AFP TV shows a member of the Kenyan security
forces taking position inside a shopping mall following an attack by
masked gunmen in Nairobi on September 21, 2013. (AFP TV)
Monday, September 23, 2013
The massacre at a Kenyan shopping mall by Somalia's Shebab insurgents
has shown the still potent threat of the Al-Qaeda-linked group even as
fighters struggle at home, analysts say.The attack, which follows
bloody strikes by Shebab suicide commandos earlier this year, including
against an United Nations base in the Somali capital Mogadishu, comes
in spite of the group losing a string of key towns in Somalia to African
Union troops and bitter infighting.
Dramatic attacks such as
Saturday's brutal siege in Nairobi's Westgate shopping centre can be
seen as an attempt to bolster their struggling reputation and loss of
territory at home, experts say.
"Paradoxically, a weakened Shebab
is a greater threat outside Somalia than a stronger Shebab," wrote Ken
Menkhaus, professor at Davidson College in the US state of North
Carolina, in an article following the attack.
He noted that he had
previously argued that "were the group to weaken and fragment, it would
be more likely to consider high-risk terrorism abroad."
Shebab
chief Ahmed Godane, who the US have offered $7 million for, is seeking
to strengthen his authoritarian control following bloody purges of
former comrades after they complained to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman
al-Zawahiri about his command.
"The group has been going through
its own internal struggles over its leadership and direction," said J.
Peter Pham, who heads the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council in
Washington.
"The question now is whether, having marginalised
rivals and turned Shebab into more of a terrorist group and less of a
Somali insurgency, Godane will transform it into a more regional
threat."
Before Westgate, the group's last large scale attack
outside Somalia was its 2010 bombing of the Ugandan capital Kampala, in
which at least 76 died.
In recent years, the extremist group has
instead struggled inside Somalia, tied down battling regional armies
such as Ethiopia and Kenya, as well as the African Union force (AMISOM).
Shebab fighters fled fixed positions in the capital Mogadishu, and have since lost almost all its towns to AMISOM forces.
"The
Westgate attack is the latest sign of the group's weakness. It was a
desperate, high-risk gamble by Shebab to reverse its prospects,"
Menkhaus argued.
The major attack on Nairobi comes almost two
years after Kenya rolled troops and tanks across the border to fight the
Islamists on their home ground in southern Somalia, seizing the
Shebab's former bastion port of Kismayo.
Since then the Shebab
have multiplied their warnings of revenge attacks on Kenyan soil, but
until now were on a relatively small scale, at least in the capital.
"The
group is just now recovering its elan from the loss of territorial
dominance it formerly enjoyed before the AMISOM and Kenyan-led
offensives of 2011 and 2012," Pham added.
Still, Shebab fighters
control swathes of rural southern Somalia, while UN Monitoring Group
reports in July estimated the Shebab are still some 5,000 strong, and
remain the "principal threat to peace and security in Somalia".
Their threat, as the well-planned attack in Nairobi showed, should not be underestimated.
In
June, the Shebab showed their strength with a brazen daylight attack on
a fortified United Nations compound in Mogadishu, with a seven-man
suicide commando blasting into the complex and starting a gun battle to
the death.
The coordinated attack on the UN killed 11, tactics already tried in April when they attacked a Mogadishu court house.
Stig
Jarle Hansen, a Norwegian academic and author of Al-Shebab in Somalia,
warns that Saturday's attack -- as well as the UN and courthouse attacks
in Mogadishu -- bore similarities to the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
"By
making the attack so visible it will hit Kenya where it hurts the most
by hitting the tourism sector. I think it very likely that this was
calculated. Travel warnings might be issued by western countries as
well," said.
"Kenya managed to survive the financial crisis quite well but this will hit them."