Ugandan police say they believe the double bombing in Kampala was the work of the Somalian group, al—Shabab. If this proves to be the case, it will mark an evolution in the movement's activities.
So far, al—Shabab, which means “the youth” in Arabic, has kept to a very local agenda, in deed if not always rhetoric. This has reflected its origins. The Harakat al—Shabab al—Mujahideen (the Union of Mujahideen Youth) is a splinter group from the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a coalition of Islamist groups that established control over much of Somalia.
The UIC imposed a strict sharia—based code, which it saw as the solution to the poverty-stricken and war-racked country's many woes.
After being routed by the Ethiopian army at the end of 2006, the UIC broke up. The biggest remaining fragment was its armed wing or youth movement, al-Shabab.
In successive campaigns, al-Shabab, under the leadership of a group of senior clerics and “sheikhs”, has taken over at least a third of Somalia, including most of Mogadishu, the capital. Now numbering several thousand, its expansion has been marked by two main trends: radicalisation and internationalisation.
The former has led to executions, amputations and patrols of young men who, in a manner reminiscent of the Taliban's religious police in the 1990s, seek out anyone in breach of strict, puritanical and increasingly arbitrary codes of behaviour. The internationalisation has meant a pledge of allegiance to Al-Qaeda's senior leadership as well as a number of foreign volunteers joining al-Shahab's ranks. These are primarily American but include some Britons, security sources say. Other links with militants in the Yemen appear to have been consolidated too.
There have been fears of Somalian Islamist militant groups — al-Shahab is not the only one — launching international attacks for some time.
If al-Shahab is responsible for the bombings in Uganda, the reasons are most likely to be local: Ugandan troops provide most of the 5,000 African Union peacekeepers who replaced Ethiopian troops when they pulled out last year and are the main reason Somalia's U.N.—backed government has not yet been entirely driven out of Mogadishu by the Islamists. Recent pledges to reinforce the peacekeepers have drawn threats of jihad from al-Shabab against any countries which send more troops.
Why attack people watching the World Cup? First, because they are a soft target. Second, because al-Shahab has already made clear it disapproves of the football, threatening players and fans with violence in Somalia. Here, the group is only following broader thought among jihadis. In a recent web posting, one extremist scholar said that watching the World Cup was un-Islamic as it involved gambling, competition, women being shown on TV, sinful behaviour by players, cursing among supporters and “unnecessary fun”. There are signs that al-Shabab is increasingly internally divided. The past 18 months have seen a number of high-profile figures quitting its ranks in disgust at the increasingly indiscriminate violence.
Some analysts believe growing extremism within radical movements is a sign of fierce competition among factions which can eventually lead to total fragmentation. Certainly, other radical groups which rejected local roots and agendas to become steadily more extreme and more international in their outlook — in Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s or in Iraq, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia more recently — suffered as a result, rapidly losing any popular support. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010
