10/30/13 – Francis Nesbitt – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's a, uh, oh, I was gonna say anti-war radio.
Still pretty much.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest on the show today is Francis Nesbitt.
He is associate professor of African studies at San Diego State University and is currently a visiting professor at the United States International University in Nairobi, Kenya, where he joins us on the telephone now.
Hi, Francis, how are you doing?
Good.
Good, good.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
Appreciate talking to you again.
Thank you.
Okay, so, uh, you have this very important article at ForeignPolicyInFocus, that's F-P-I-F dot org, ForeignPolicyInFocus.
It's called Al-Shabaab's Savage Coming of Age and How to Respond.
And, of course, that's a reference to the horrible attack on the mall in Nairobi, Kenya, a couple of weeks ago.
First of all, can you just remind us or catch us up to date on exactly what happened there and the significance of it right off the bat as far as, uh, it took how many days, four or five days for the thing to end?
And then if you can tell us how many killed, how many wounded and just sort of give us an overall sense of the news from Nairobi before we continue about Al-Shabaab, please, sir.
Sure.
On September the 21st, which was a Saturday, a group of militants walked into a mall, a very high-class mall, and just started shooting at both security guards and civilians.
This attack, they walked into the mall and holed up there for four days.
Over 60 people were killed, up to 70 were killed.
They were shooting randomly into the crowds, you know, men, women, children.
And they apparently had access to some other heavy weapons within the mall, which they used to keep the the Kenyan defense forces from taking over the mall for over four days.
So it was quite a siege.
And eventually when the siege was over, it turned out that the Al-Shabaab, which is a group based in Somalia, it's an al-Qaeda-associated group based in Somalia, they took responsibility for the attack and claimed that the attack was revenge for Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011.
Kenya was forced to go into Somalia because of this cross-border attack on tourists, on Western tourists at the coast in 2011.
And so Kenya joined the African Union mission in Somalia.
This is a mission that is supported by the West and the United Nations.
And it's designed to pacify parts of Somalia, including the capital city.
And so Al-Shabaab, which is this Islamist group, which is associated with al-Qaeda, said that they had attacked Kenya because of the Kenyan involvement in the African Union mission.
So this is a very short background to what happened on September the 21st at the Westgate mall.
Okay.
Now, one of the things that's most notable, and there's a lot of them, but one of the things that's most notable about this story, Francis, I think, is the presence of so many foreigners among the Al-Shabaab fighters there.
Not Somalis at all, but Americans and Brits, and who else with them there?
Yes, Norwegians.
And yeah, well, one of the important things about this, you're absolutely right, is that this is an internationalist jihadi group.
And it has become an internationalist jihadi group over time.
Initially, Al-Shabaab started off as a nationalist group within Somalia with the goal of overthrowing the Somali state and taking over and establishing an Islamist state under Sharia law.
But today, more recently, especially after the AFRICOM troops, the African Union and Somalia troops, and the Kenyan troops have managed to pressurize Al-Shabaab within Somalia.
They have evolved, you know, metastasized into this internationalist jihadi group.
Rather than a nationalist group within Somalia, they are now more interested.
They have recruits, they have funding, they have training, they have equipment from jihadi groups that are more interested in attacking Western targets in the region, rather than overthrowing the Somali state and, you know, following those nationalist views.
So yes, absolutely.
Today, Al-Shabaab boasts that it has over 100 recruits from the European Union and 40 from the United States.
And we do know, indeed, that several of the militants were internationalists, that is, holding passports.
One of them, for instance, was from Norway, and others were from Britain, others from the United States.
So it's not yet absolutely clear who was involved, but it seems that a significant proportion were international.
Well, it's very interesting that, well, first of all, is this attack necessarily itself an indication of that internationalism?
I don't just mean in the fighters who carried it out, but as far as their goals, because previously, back a couple of years ago, in fact, they had attacked the soccer game or an audience watching a soccer game on TV in Uganda as revenge for a Ugandan government attack on a Somali soccer field.
And that was, you know, seen as more of just a tit-for-tat nationalist response against the Ugandan nation that was, you know, occupying with their military, occupying Somalia.
And then I noted also that you wrote in your article that Ameriki, as they call them, one of these Americans who is a leader of al-Shabaab, who was recently killed by the more internationalist types, he was, I think you're saying he was more of a Somali nationalist than these internationalists, even though he was an American, and Godain, their current leader, is a Somali.
Do I understand you right?
Yes.
They were the power struggle within al-Shabaab.
There's been an ongoing power struggle between those who are nationalists, who want to overthrow the Somali government and take over and, you know, govern Somalia using the Sharia law.
And there's the other faction led by Ahmed Ghandani, which is internationalist.
That is, they are more interested in attacking Western targets in the region rather than just overthrowing the Somali government.
And what has happened over the last two years is that the Ghandani faction has taken over.
That is, they have defeated in a very vicious and very hardcore way, they have defeated the nationalist faction.
And al-Ameriki, who is sometimes known as al-Hammami, was an American, an American-born jihadi.
He had some problems with the leadership of al-Shabaab under Ahmed Ghandani.
Particularly, Ahmed Ghandani is known to be a very ruthless leader, and his implementation of Sharia law in the areas that he controlled in Somalia even caused the al-Qaeda central to complain about this, about his leadership, his extreme implementation of Sharia law.
And it's thought that Omar al-Hammami was one of the more moderate jihadis who did not support this kind of beheadings, stoning, amputations, and very extreme implementation of Sharia law in Somalia.
So, yes, there has been a power struggle.
But it seems this last attack shows, in fact, that the extremist faction, the internationalist faction, has won the war within al-Shabaab, and that now the group has generally gone international.
It's become internationalist, and the nationalist faction has been marginalized.
And so it's become more of an international threat rather than just a national issue.
You know, al-Shabaab has been marginalized by AMISOM, which is the African Mission in Somalia, within Somalia.
Militarily, it has been defeated in Mogadishu.
It has been defeated in Kif Mayu and other port areas.
And so, as a result of this defeat, it has changed its tactics.
And now the tactic is international.
Yes, so, yeah, definitely, there was a power struggle, and one faction has won.
Well, now, that doesn't necessarily mean they're a threat to the West, just Western targets in the East, right?
Yes, currently, well, yes, they are a threat to Western targets in East Africa currently.
But the fear is that because many of the fighters have international passports, have links to people in the West, the fear is that they could export this kind of tactic that they're using to the West, because this tactic has already been used in Mumbai in 2008.
It was used in London.
It was used in Spain.
This is a new tactic that uses a small group of activists, a small group of highly trained and motivated activists who are willing to die to attack, you know, landmark targets in major cities in the world, and just cause mayhem.
And so the fear is that these activists who are being trained today, these militants who are being trained by Al-Shabaab, many of whom have these international passports, could actually export this abroad.
Right.
Well, you know, I don't mean to contribute to fear mongering or and I certainly wouldn't want anyone to, you know, be unfairly, you know, implicated by anything like this.
But it seems to me inescapable, kind of a supposition that we could have a problem among the Somali American population, centered in Minneapolis, but not necessarily all there.
But there have been a somewhere on the order of 20 or a couple of dozen or maybe more American Somalis or Somali Americans, whichever hyphen, who have gone back to Somalia to take part in this thing.
So it's obviously you don't necessarily need a bunch of training to just get a rifle and use it if they wanted to stay here and take that part of the war to the United States.
And this was something that the Obama administration even admitted.
I forget now if it was the Washington Post or the New York Times, but one of the two most official Oregon newspapers there, where they said that, yeah, actually, we're afraid that the longer we carry on this, you know, our part of the war in Somalia there, the more likely it is that Al-Shabaab will, in essence, grow up and become more of a danger and break from a regional danger into an international one.
And then, lo and behold, here we are at the end of October 2013.
And by messing around and messing around all these years, they finally begun to turn Al-Shabaab into a little mini Al-Qaeda, something which I'm sure Al-Shabaab wants us to think of them as being, right?
I mean, the whole point of an attack like this is to get a reaction.
Are they trying to get America to invade?
Or they're trying to get America to do what?
They're trying to get Kenya to do what in response to this attack, do you think?
Yes, you're absolutely right.
The goal of such an attack is to get Kenya and its allies, including the United States, you know, first the United States, to overreact and to attack Somalia and to attack Somalis in Kenya and the East African region, and even abroad, in order to mobilize support for the organization.
But as I mentioned earlier, they have been marginalized militarily.
They've been defeated militarily within Somalia, at least in the bigger cities, and pushed out of the bigger cities.
But then it changes tactics, like many terrorist groups do, like Al-Qaeda did and various other groups did, from nationalism to internationalism.
And internationalism means they get more money from abroad, they get more recruits from abroad if they can demonstrate that they can attack Western targets in the region.
So this is their current tactic, that is, trying to attack Western targets in the Eastern African region and probably abroad.
You know, they're hoping that they can go abroad, using their recruits from America, from Norway, from England, people with passports, Western passports, who can travel around.
And so this is the new ultra-bug.
You know, they've metastasized into something different because of the pressure that Kenya and AMISOM were able to put on them.
So unfortunately, you know, places like Kenya and the United States and Europe are in a rock-and-hard place, because on the one hand, their strategy in Somalia is working by putting pressure on Al-Shabaab.
But on the other hand, this has forced Al-Shabaab to change its tactics and to go international, where they can use just a small group of people, you know, five or six militants, to cause mayhem in what we call soft targets, like malls or schools or hospitals and so on.
And the problem is that this can easily be exported abroad.
And now, you know, it's funny, I have to bring up the irony of, well, and it was predictable enough, I forget exactly when it was last year, if it was a year ago or more, Francis, that the Kenyans, specifically of the AU force there, the Kenyans kicked Al-Shabaab out of Kizmeo and cheered their own great victory that, see, we've finally defeated Al-Shabaab and they're no more and whatever, instead of knowing what everybody knows, that an insurgency will just melt away, all they have to do is not lose.
And then, as you say, it was getting kicked out of Kizmeo and being denied access to the charcoal sales and all that revenue that forced them then to look for international donors, start speaking the language that, you know, Saudi benefactors like to hear about internationalizing their movement because the Kenyan move put them in that position where that was their only choice now.
Exactly, exactly.
That's what I meant, that it's an extremely difficult situation where, yes, you could defeat them militarily, kick them out of Kizmeo, kick them out of Baraway and other ports and Mogadishu and so on, but that just forced them to internationalize their struggle, right?
Because Kizmeo, for instance, was a source of $50 million a year for Al-Shabaab, right?
They got this funding from extortion at the port, they got it from smuggling of charcoal, smuggling of arms, and so on.
And so, once they lost that source of funding, they were forced to find other sources.
And the most obvious source, of course, was the international Salafist forces in the Arabian Peninsula, where there is funding for those who can show that they have the ability to attack Western targets, particularly Israeli-related targets.
Westgate Mall, for instance, where they attacked, was partly owned by Israeli, several stores in there were owned by Israelis, and that kind of attack is a fundraising gamut.
You know, once they show that they can attack this kind of target, they can get international funding.
I mean, the whole question of funding is so important, because, for instance, traditionally, Al-Shabaab's funding came from Somali businessmen who had businesses in Nairobi, right, and other major cities in Kenya.
These Somali businessmen, however, had created a kind of a situation where Al-Shabaab would not attack Nairobi, major targets in Nairobi, would not make a major attack on Nairobi, because of these business ties.
This was the thinking for years, that is, you know, Al-Shabaab is not going to attack Kenya, it's not going to do a major attack on Kenya.
They can do small attacks, small drive-by shootings or lobbing grenades at security targets and so on, but they will not make a major attack on Kenya, because many of the supporters of Al-Shabaab were actually based in Kenya and had ties with Kenyan businessmen.
But it seems today that this has changed.
This attack on Westgate shows that something has changed, and this change, I think, is because of the Kenyan attack on Kismayo, and they are pushing Al-Shabaab out of Kismayo, so they need alternative sources of funding.
They are no longer beholden to those businessmen in Nairobi, and therefore they have found other sources of funding, and therefore, you know, the international community must deal with this new source of funding.
And I think this is one of the key points in my article.
Right, yeah, for sure.
Well, and to end on, the only piece of good news in there, Francis, very quickly here, could you please talk about how the minority Muslim population in Kenya have not found themselves at the receiving end of a bunch of anti-Muslim backlash, that that part of the provocation has failed?
Yes, it does seem that the goal of Al-Shabaab, which was, in fact, to turn Kenyans against each other, we have a big Muslim population here in Kenya that has been marginalized for many years, for 50 years.
The goal of Al-Shabaab and other groups such as Al-Shabaab is to marginalize these, marginalize these, the Muslims, and especially the Kumalis in Kenya.
I've been working this time.
I'm sorry I got to interrupt you.
We got to go.
It's Francis Nesbitt.
Thanks very much, Francis, for your time on the show.
Foreign Policy and Focus, fpif.org.
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