- The Daily Beast 09.25.2013
The president of Somalia—hub of the terrorist group of that claims credit for this week’s mall attack in Nairobi—says the U.S. could be a target, too. He tells Josh Rogin what the world needs to do to stop them.
The Somali-based terrorist organization al-Shabab, which claimed credit for the devastating attack in Nairobi this week, is an international organization that could attack anywhere, including the United States, according to the president of Somalia.
Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was in Washington this past weekend when a group of attackers stormed the Westgate shopping center in the Kenyan capital and took hostages in a siege that ultimately left at least 72 dead and 170 injured. Mohamud, who has been leading the fight to push al-Shabab from its territory inside Somalia since he became president last year, gave his take on the organization, its structure, its funding, and what the world needs to do to stop it in an interview this week with The Daily Beast. His main message was that al-Shabab is foreign-financed, filled with foreign fighters, and has wide international reach.
“Al-Shabab is not a Somali agenda, it’s an international agenda. Al-Shabab is working with an international capacity in terms of trading and financial resources,” he said. “Al-Shabab is more of an international problem than a Somali problem. It can happen here in the United States as it is now happening in Nairobi.”
U.S. intelligence officials disputed this assessment in interviews with The Daily Beast. On Monday, Rep. Ed Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said, “I think at this point we do not have any evidence that al-Shabab has a capability of carrying out attacks on the United States. This points to the importance of our surveillance and intelligence capabilities on the ground in east Africa because there are a number of Americans who have joined the group.”
Mohamud’s government, which was ++recognized by the Obama administration in January after a two-decade break in formal U.S.-Somali diplomatic relations, is widely regarded to be Somalia’s best hope for continuing a transition to a functional democracy and reestablishing government control of the few parts of Somalia now under al-Shabab control. He says that while it’s true the terrorist group still calls Somalia home, it’s not true that the group is Somali in origin or makeup.
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