For more than a year, al-Shabaab has been fine-tuning its military strategy. The consensus among its leaders was to morph into a guerrilla movement and abandon traditional warfare by withdrawing into ‘Somalia’s Tora Bora’ – the mountainous region in Sanaag in the northeast, and into Ras Kamboni – a vast area of inaccessible jungles in Lower Jubba, near the border with Kenya. Both locations have been extremist hideouts for two decades.
Yet it’s al-Shabaab’s political strategy that’s likely to be more effective than its military one. The group now plans to rebrand itself as the alternative to the new Somalia government, should the latter becomes yet another playground for rapacious men.
Notwithstanding their brutal justice system, al-Shabaab has a track record of delivering three fundamental things that successive Somali governments have utterly failed to achieve: basic security, stemming corruption and a non-sectarian governing structure.
Unlike the new Somali government, which has a four-year term to achieve something, al-Shabaab is neither bound by term limits nor by a legal framework. Its faceless leaders are prepared to stay in the periphery until the new government commits suicide.
Out of the shadows
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