Somalia: not piracy catch all thread

[M-A Lagrange]

Target Of U.S. Raid In Somalia Called A Top Attack Planner

A Kenyan intelligence official of Somali origin says that the "high-value terrorist leader" whose residence was targeted in Saturday was the senior al-Shabab leader Abdikadir Mohamed Abdikadir, alias Ikrima.

Ikrima is a Kenyan of Somali descent who boasts connections to both al-Shabab in Somalia and to a Kenyan jihadist group called al-Hijra. Kenyan authorities announced on Friday that two of the four terrorists killed in the were al-Hijra militants.

[...]
A leaked Kenyan intelligence report confirms that Ikrima was plotting "multiple attacks" inside Kenya, "sanctioned by al-Qaida" in Pakistan, and "involving financial and logistical support from South African operatives." The report continues:

"By December 2011, the planners had acquired safe houses in Nairobi & Mombasa, trained the executors, received explosives from Somalia and commenced assembly of and concealment of explosives."

According to the report, Ikrima's small "terror cell" included two British nationals: an explosives expert named Jermaine John Grant and the infamous White Widow, Samantha Lewthwaite. (Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta had confirmed that a "British woman" may have been among the fighters in Westgate Mall.)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...aid-in-somalia

Main target seems accurate. For the rest, usual caution with intelligence leaks are to be observed.

[M-A Lagrange]

Two interesting articles on the Westgate and the SEAL raids.

First one is on the “white widow”. It is now almost certain she did not participate and the media frenzy around her involvement has been prompted by a lack of info and, as usual, the need for a scoop!

White Widow merely person of interest in Nairobi mall probe
AS FAR as the security officials in Kenya are concerned, Samantha Lewthwaite, the Northern Irish woman popularly tied to the Somali extremist group al-Shabaab, is merely a person of interest and not wanted for September’s mall siege in Nairobi that left dozens dead and many more injured. Having been first linked to the attacks by the British media, the link became so compelling that it was carried around the world as fact.
The Sunday Independent got the correct Lewthwaite angle: we should be worried about what the news of her fake South African passport will do to this country’s bid to reassure the world at large that its passport-issuing system is reliable.

Home Affairs Minister Naledi Pandor has assured the nation that the department had a handle on the situation as far back as 2011, when it cancelled the fraudulent passport.

"It was reported that Lewthwaite bought passports for her and her two children in Durban from convicted fraudster Ehmed Chisty for R60,000. The Sunday Independent was reliably informed that home affairs has been searching for three men who have been running ID schemes across the city similar to Chisty’s, raking in between R50,000 and R120,000 for each ID," the paper reported.

http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/colu...obi-mall-probe

And a very detailed inside of the SEAL raid:

Somalia SEAL Raid Ended by Children Used as Shields
In a corroborating report, NBC News described how SEALs were able to enter the al-Shabaab compound, take the positions required by their planning, and even watch one of the terrorists take a cigarette break. But that same al-Shabaab fighter may have spotted the SEALs, because he came back out with an AK-47 and fired on the SEALs. The mission quickly escalated into a firefight, with the SEALs encountering intense fire with both guns and grenades. An unidentified official told CNN that, “Once it became clear we were not going to able to take him, the Navy commander made the decision to withdraw.”

CNN and NBC had both received word from U.S. officials that the decision to end the Somalia raid was prompted by seeing children, used as human shields, being moved out of the fortified seaside stronghold the SEALs were attacking.

SEALs were actually able to see Ikrima through the compound’s windows, but when children came into their scopes, the threat of hurting them prompted the team’s withdrawal. The tactical situation for these members of SEAL Team Six, the same unit that killed Osama bin-Laden, was also disintegrating, and they evacuated via the beach.

http://guardianlv.com/2013/10/somali...ed-as-shields/

[Bill Moore]

After reading the Selected Wisdom post it seemed to be a lot of uninformed rambling about nothing. Al Shabaab has been a multinational terrorist network for years, and they also have been an insurgency force (even longer). Contrary to all the reports of Al-Shabaab being on their last leg, they remain one of the more dangerous Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist networks (even if their insurgency efforts were rolled back). We struggle too much to try to fit loose networked organizations into our desired view of organizations with a formal structure, and this results in a continued misdiagnosis or classification. We think we know how to defeat formal organizations, but loose networks are much harder to understand since they constantly adapt and are also very resilient. We seem to want to claim victory prematurely simply because African Union forces pushed Al-Shabaab out of the major urban areas in Somalia, yet they still exist and they still have the will and capability to fight, so making claims like they're on their last leg only sets us for disappointment when we find they're far from it. Instead of making such wishful comments, we should pursue the momentum the AU created and continue to aggressively target them until they're sufficiently suppressed. Furthermore, there is no reason to think they conducted this attack on the mall on their own, since the various terrorist networks around the globe mutually support each other to varying degrees, but on the other hand it may been conducted by homeboys from Kenya. It wouldn't surprise me if actors as far away as Pakistan and Yemen were involved (neither are that far away). Much too early to tell at this point, but whatever the truth is, it shouldn't be surprising, since all are credible probabilities.

http://www.nctc.gov/site/groups/al_shabaab.html

Al-Shabaab is not centralized or monolithic in its agenda or goals. Its rank-and-file members come from disparate clans, and the group is susceptible to clan politics, internal divisions, and shifting alliances. Most of its fighters are predominantly interested in the nationalistic battle against the TFG and not supportive of global jihad. Al-Shabaab’s senior leadership is affiliated with al-Qa‘ida and is believed to have trained and fought in Afghanistan. The merger of the two groups was publicly announced in February 2012 by the al-Shabaab amir and Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Qa‘ida.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/05/world/...rticle_sidebar

Washington (CNN) -- A pre-dawn raid by elite U.S. forces in southern Somalia, in the heart of territory controlled by the al Qaeda subsidiary Al-Shabaab, targeted an Al-Shabaab commander connected to one of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, a senior Obama administration official said Sunday.

The suspected foreign fighter commander is named Ikrima, a Kenyan of Somali origin about whom little is known. The official said Ikrima is associated with two now-deceased al Qaeda operatives who played roles in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and the 2002 attacks on a hotel and airline in Mombasa, also in Kenya.

Not only do they have American, British, and Kenya recruits:

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-s...,4926499.story

According to Norway's Channel 2, Ikrima had traveled to Norway in 2004 and sought political asylum while living in Oslo. He received travel documents but left in 2008 before authorities had ruled on his asylum request. Two Swedes whom he met in Norway later joined him at Shabab training camps in Somalia, the TV station said, adding that a Swedish member of the Shabab was killed in the SEAL raid Saturday.

Morten Storm, a Dane who said he has worked for several Western intelligence agencies, told CNN that he helped pass messages between Ikrima and Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen between 2008 and 2012.

Ikrima communicated directly with Anwar Awlaki, the American-born Al Qaeda leader in Yemen who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011, about going to Yemen but never made the trip, Storm said. Instead Ikrima, who speaks Norwegian, became a key handler of Shabab recruits from the West.