Five years after an attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, Al-Shabaab appears committed to striking targets across East Africa. Security crackdowns have blunted its capacity to stage regular assaults, but complacency could roll back those gains, as could failure to engage with communities in which the group recruits. Al-Shabaab aims to pressure regional governments to withdraw troops from Somalia, where an African Union mission has been battling the militants since 2007. The group also uses its attacks in East Africa to raise its profile, seek new recruits and solicit funding.
Despite losing territory in Somalia and cutting back recruitment in Kenya under pressure from authorities, Al-Shabaab has adapted by finding new areas of operation, including by building relationships with militants in southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique. Authorities should avoid blanket arrests and extrajudicial killings, argues the International Crisis Group in its report Al-Shabaab Five Years after Westgate: Still a Menace in East Africa. Instead, they should involve local leaders in efforts to tackle recruitment, while taking steps to address broader grievances that Al-Shabaab taps into in its narrative, including the political and economic exclusion of Muslim minorities in East Africa.
Five years ago, on 21 September 2013, four Al-Shabaab militants stormed the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, killing 67 during the ensuing four-day siege and demonstrating the movement’s reach outside Somalia. Kenyan authorities’ subsequent indiscriminate crackdowns fuelled Muslim anger and accelerated militant recruitment. In 2015, however, top officials switched approaches, better involving community leaders in efforts against Al-Shabaab. The movement reacted by relocating operations, including by forging closer ties with militants in Tanzania, parts of which saw more attacks. Tanzanian authorities launched their own campaign, replicating some of Kenya’s mistakes. Both countries’ track records suggest that blanket arrests and police brutality consistently backfire.
More effective is to combine steps that disrupt militant recruitment with policies aimed at addressing the grievances their propaganda exploits, notably Muslims’ political and economic marginalization. In Uganda, too, though Al-Shabaab has made no major inroads, security forces’ mistreatment of Muslims risks creating problems where thus far few exist.
While Al-Shabaab remains focused on recapturing power and enforcing its variant of Islamic law in Somalia, it has long operated elsewhere in East Africa. At first it built networks to generate funds and recruits, largely refraining from attacks. That changed in March 2007, after the deployment of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), a regional force sent to prop up the body then recognized as the Somali government. The group has repeatedly struck countries that had dispatched troops to AMISOM.
