Alshabab leader justifies attack on Kenya

[GAROODI]

These guys are seriously sick, they give Muslims a bad name. Even in Islam you have rules of engagement of which include your not allowed to attack women and children, poison wells or food, etc.

 

 

What's worse is he speaks with a British accent. Kenya has no right to be in Somalia I agree. But never attack civilians.

[GAROODI]

Deutsche Welle (German paper)

 

 

Attacks on the up-scale Nairobi shopping mall has left at least 69 people dead and over 200 wounded. The Somali-based Islamist group al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for the killings. Analysts said the latest attacks in Kenya could further lead to the whole destabilization of the entire region. On Monday, the interior ministry said the fire in the mall had been contained, although plumes of smoke continued to dominate Nairobi's skyline as night fell.

 

Deutsche Welle: al-Shabab has said it is behind the attacks on Nairobi's Westgate shopping centre in Kenya, what do you think was the motive of this attack?

 

Guido Steinberg: Up to now we are not exactly sure who is behind these attacks. The perpetrators seem to be Kenyan based activists linked to the Somali al-Shabab. One can therefore conclude that the attack is supposed to put pressure on the Kenyan government to pull its troops out of Somalia. Since 2006 Kenya has stepped-up its crack-down on Islamist militants. In October 2011, Kenyan troops marched into Somalia and joined African Union troops, who had been in the country, to fight the al-Shabab. Since then, al-Shabab has experienced defeats.

Was the choice of the place, aimed at attracting as much attention as possible?

 

Yes it probably did. If they had chosen a shopping centre where mainly Kenyans shop, the attention given to the event would have also been great. But when you kill western citizens and there is a connection to Israel, you attract even more attention. That is the nature of Islamist terrorism. The anti-western orientation of al-Shabab probably also played a major role in choosing a location for the attack. We have to wait for more information as to whether al-Shabab had other partners in this, who are perhaps linked even closer to al-Qaeda?

 

The attack is not the first in Kenya, but since 1998, it is the worst. What does that mean for the security situation in East Africa. Should we expect more of the Somali conflict to be exported across borders?

 

Yes the attack is a clear indication that the Somalia conflict is expanding to its neighbouring countries. We had the first major indication with the 11th July 2010 attack during the football world cup finals at a rugby club and an Ethiopian restaurant in the Ugandan capital Kampala. The motives of al-Shabab, who staged that attack, were similar. The aim was to put pressure on Ugandan troops, who were already part of the African Union's peace-keeping troops in Somalia. Now we have a similar situation in Kenya and the escalation of terrorist violence in the country was to be expected.

 

Why?

 

For one, Somalia's conflict is anyway spilling over its borders into Kenya. There are a great number of Somali refugees in Kenya. We are seeing growing radicalization and the government is reacting with a heavy hand against Somalis living in Kenya. Secondly, there is the military intervention in Somalia. Such actions often lead to counter-actions and this case from the militant group. We have seen these methods by other groups in different conflict areas.

 

Who supports the Islamists in Kenyan and the region?

 

al-Shabab has managed to garner much sympathy in Kenya. There is a strong Islamist underground, which lives off the circumstance that, part of the Muslim population especially at the coast feel closer to the Arab world than to Africa. Moreover, the government only responds to Islamist radicalization with repressive measures.

 

Is there no end in sight for Somalia's conflict, despite the advancement of the Somali government and the AU troops?

Many observers believed that the calming down of the military situation in Somalia, the stabilization of the government and the weakening of al-Shabab, would result in a quieting of the situation. But this should generally not be expected in a situation where religious, social, cultural and political conflicts in the neighbouring countries remain unsolved. Such activities generally lead to groups like al-Shabab to look for alternative ways of continuing the battle. In Somalia, their chances are currently minimal. They are on defensive and have lost control of major towns in the south-east of the country. This is why they are now trying to fight their opponents with all possible means. This will probably lead to a further destabilization of the entire region.

 

Dr. Guido Steinberg is a senior associate researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.

[GAROODI]

Washington post:

 

U.S. officials said the assault showed levels of determination and sophistication that are likely to prompt American intelligence and military officials to reexamine the threat posed by al-Shabab, a militant group that aligned itself with al-Qaeda last year. Even so, U.S. officials said the attack reveals more about al-Shabab’s shifting survival strategies than any success it has had recapturing its former strength.

 

“They’re in much worse shape than they were a couple years ago,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “This may very well be an effort to send a message to the rest of the world that they’re still around, still violent. I think it also is an indication they fear for their survival if the [African Union] continues to press its campaign against them in Somalia.”

 

Kenya is among the A.U. nations that have contributed forces to a U.S.-backed campaign that since 2011 has forced al-Shabab to retreat from the Somali capital, Mogadishu, as well as other strongholds, including Kismaayo, a port city that had been a source of millions of dollars in annual tax revenue.

 

The losses have crippled al-

Shabab as an insurgency. But analysts at the CIA and other agencies say the group’s retreat from its effort to impose Islamist rule may have prompted its leaders to divert remaining resources to plotting attacks against countries that sent troops to Somalia.

 

“Al-Shabab’s operational arm may be benefiting from additional resources now that the group is less preoccupied with governance,” said an American official with access to classified U.S. intelligence on the Westgate attack. “It’s really too early to say if al-Shabab’s latest attack is the beginning of a broader campaign in Kenya or a desperate attempt to compel Nairobi to withdraw its troops from Somalia.”

 

U.S. officials and counterterrorism experts noted that the mall assault was preceded by dozens of smaller-scale strikes in Kenya over the past two years, including attacks with grenades and small arms that targeted churches, nightclubs and bus stations. Many were focused in towns along the Kenya-Somalia border, but the campaign has included strikes in Mombasa and Nairobi.

 

Al-Shabab has also attracted a small number of Kenyan fighters who support the group’s hard-line Islamist agenda. Among them was Ahmed Iman Ali, a former preacher who became a senior commander of al-Shabab in charge of the group’s non-Somali faction, according to an article published last year by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

 

Before the Nairobi assault, the most recent large-scale attack by al-Shabab was in 2010, when more than 70 people were killed in the bombings of crowds watching a televised soccer match in Uganda, which has backed the multinational campaign against al-Shabab.

 

The United States also has been deeply involved in that effort, providing military training to regional allies as well as intelligence gathered by the CIA and the National Security Agency. The U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command has carried out intermittent drone strikes and helicopter assaults against the group.

 

U.S. concern about al-Shabab intensified as the group became aligned with al-Qaeda, whose most potent affiliate is based in Yemen, across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia. U.S. officials suspect that several dozen Somali Americans left the United States to join al-Shabab in the past five years, raising fears that some might seek to return to carry out attacks.

 

Still, U.S. officials have recently characterized al-Shabab as primarily a regional menace.

 

In congressional testimony this year, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said al-Shabab would probably “remain focused on local and regional challenges” and “continue to plot attacks designed to weaken regional adversaries, including targeting U.S. and Western interests in East Africa.”

 

Experts said that the Nairobi attack could help al-Shabab attract attention and financial support from sympathizers in Africa and the Middle East but that overall the group has been substantially degraded.

 

The attack may help “bring in donations from radicals elsewhere and draw some recruits,” said Daniel Benjamin, a professor at Dartmouth University who previously served as the top counterterrorism official at the State Department. But, he said, “the fact is al-Shabab, at least compared with its own aspirations, is a shadow of its former self.”

 

 

Julie Tate contributed to this report.

[GAROODI]

Japan times

 

NAIROBI/JOHANNESBURG – The attack that killed 69 people in a Kenyan shopping mall over the weekend was the first regional operation undertaken by the new leadership of Somalia’s al-Shabab militants following a bloody power struggle.

 

After months of pressure from African troops against the al-Qaida-linked group inside Somalia, Ahmed Godane, also known as Ahmed Abdi Aw-Mohamed, 34, seized control of the militants in a June fight that led to the death of several leaders. He’s pushed the movement to be more flexible, according to analysts such as Cedric Barnes, the regional director at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. The U.S. in June offered a $7 million reward for information on his whereabouts.

 

Al-Shabab is “different now,” Barnes said in an interview Monday from Nairobi. “It can move fast, it can change direction at will, it can especially do that now under the centralized and firm leadership of Godane.”

 

In recent weeks, al-Shabab fighters have carried out several attacks, including a bombing at the Turkish Embassy in the capital, Mogadishu, the United Nations compound and Somalia’s airports.

 

As many as 15 gunmen stormed the Westgate Mall in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, on Saturday, after al-Shabab had vowed to strike East Africa’s biggest economy over the government’s decision to join the fight against its forces in neighboring Somalia in October 2011.

 

Throwing hand grenades and spraying gunfire, the militants launched the deadliest attack in Kenya since the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy. Kenyan security forces Monday said they gained control of the four-story mall, freeing hostages and killing three of the assailants. At least 63 people are missing, the Kenya Red Cross said Monday.

 

Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahedeen, which translates as the Movement of Jihadi Youth, sprung out of Somali’s Islamic Courts Union following its defeat in 2006 by troops from neighboring Ethiopia. With Somalia not having a functioning government since the ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, al-Shabab promised stability and gained control of most of Somalia’s south including parts of Mogadishu.

 

Over the past two years, its fortunes have waned as the African Union’s 17,000-member force and a separate U.S.-backed Ethiopian expedition drove it out of major towns, including Mogadishu and the southern port town of Kismayo, where it earned revenue from taxation of trade.

 

Among the Somali public, support for the group has also faded. About 160 of Somalia’s “most distinguished” religious scholars this month denounced al-Shabab, declaring it was “a religious duty” to turn them in to the authorities, according to Prime Minister Abdi Farah Shirdon Saaid.

 

“This is unprecedented in Somalia’s history that a group of well-respected and internationally based and local scholars came together and declared a fatwa and denounced the organization, and said they were not speaking in the name of Islam,” Yusuf Hassan Abdi, a member of Kenya’s parliament with President Uhuru Kenyatta’s National Alliance party, said by phone from Nairobi.

 

They lost support “because of their brutality, their excessive use of force, the execution of innocent people,” said Abdi, who uses a wheelchair after being injured in a December explosion outside a Nairobi mosque.

 

Since his takeover, Godane has adopted a more radical agenda — vowing to enforce Shariah law across the world — and turned al-Shabab into a more hierarchical organization. The group has also abandoned what Matt Bryden, the director of Nairobi-based Sahan Research institute, called “the cult of the suicide bomber” and began staging operations requiring less sophisticated technology such as guns and grenades as were used at the Westgate Mall.

 

“Within al-Shabaab, Godane is known to be a proponent of the transnationalist faction,” Austin, Texas-based Strategic Forecasting Inc. said in an emailed note Monday. “The weekend attack in Nairobi could bolster Godane’s leadership of the transnationalist faction within al-Shabaab, while at the same time demonstrating that the group has not been defeated and remains a potent guerrilla threat, despite losing significant territory.”

 

The attack may also have been designed to provoke a violent response by Kenyans toward the roughly 1 million Somalis in the country, according to Kenneth Menkhaus, a political science professor at Davidson College in North Carolina.

 

“If they succeed in provoking a backlash in Kenya — either heavy-handed policies by the government or uncontrolled vigilante justice of Kenyans against Somalia — they will be able to reframe the crisis in the region as Somalis against the foreigners,” Menkhaus, who has published more than 50 articles and book chapters on Somalia, said Monday.

[uchi]

Disgusting.

[Wadani]

Abu Omar kulahaa...ma tuutada dhaxanta laga gashadaa?

[GAROODI]

Wadani;979354 wrote:

Abu Omar kulahaa...ma tuututada dhaxanta laga gashadaa?

Walahi I don't know what to make of this it's confusing. How could someone come on international tv and justify killing people unarmed civilians and hope to benefit somehow...??? Alqeada I thought it didn't exist. Are these people muslims... ??? Like seriously can you be a Muslim and do this. It gets tiring turning on the news and seeing one lunatic after another talking about how it's Islamic to kill someone even though the night before they were in a night club or something. Study the religion properly this is xaaaaaaraaaaaaan

[Hobbesian_Brute]

GAROODI;979355 wrote:

Walahi I don't know what to make of this it's confusing. How could someone come on international tv and justify killing people unarmed civilians and hope to benefit somehow...??? Alqeada I thought it didn't exist. Are these people muslims... ??? Like seriously can you be a Muslim and do this. It gets tiring turning on the news and seeing one lunatic after another talking about how it's Islamic to kill someone even though the night before they were in a night club or something. Study the religion properly this is xaaaaaaraaaaaaan

:cool: I feel your pain not, maybe they are following the correct version and not the wishy washy version you want to show off to the world.

[Hobbesian_Brute]

Wadani;979354 wrote:

Abu Omar kulahaa...ma tuututada dhaxanta laga gashadaa?

[Wadani]

Hobbesian_Brute;979356 wrote:

:cool: I feel your pain not, maybe they are following the correct version and not the wishy washy version you want to show off to the world.

Gaaroodi's version is the correct one, because Islam law is unequivocal about the prohibition of harming civilians. Unless, that is, you have textual proof from the sources of Islamic law stating otherwise that we are not privy to.

[Wadani]

I see Xaaji Xunjuf is browing this topic. Adeer, you've been missed on the forum. Halkeed ka dhacday these days?

[Mad_Mullah]

Somalis could always travel from place to place because they knew that even Shabab wouldn't attack other countries. Story has changed now and we'll be treated like the Pakistanis and Yemenis/Saudis.

[GAROODI]

Hobbesian_Brute;979357 wrote:

Hobbs you wasted my time last time don't do it again saxib. Like I said you are dead and Barried read a few books come with some factual evidence then we can have a chat but now you have nothing to offer to this discussion

[GAROODI]

I once met an athiest and I asked him: why don't you believe in God. He told me all my life I have seen nothing but pain, my parents are dead, my wife left me etc. He said to me if there is a God how can he do this to a good person. So you see most of the hate from atheists is from mans desire to reason like children. But this form of reason is wrong because God knows best. How can you reason with the master of reason who not only created You but everything for you. He created your parent and thus you and maybe it was better that your wife left you but you will only realise later in life. Like children....this concept of why leads them astray. Everything happens for a reason. Atheists hide behind science but their problems are really personal. They believe the existence of God limits them.

 

People like Alshabab only harm the perception of Muslims and play into the atheists hand. Their arguments however are none sense. Islam was the very foundation of the science they hide behind.

[Hobbesian_Brute]

GAROODI;979378 wrote:

Hobbs you wasted my time last time don't do it again saxib. Like I said you are dead and Barried read a few books come with some factual evidence then we can have a chat but now you have nothing to offer to this discussion

horta the correct spelling is buried and not barried. tan kale your intellectual capacity is limited and i don't think any debate i have with you will be fruitful.

 

do you even read my responses, then you would know i am not an atheist.