They argue that the raid on the port town of Palma last month by the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
-affiliated local al-Shabaab
...... the personification of Somali state failure...
group, which killed dozens and displaced thousands, marks a watershed moment in the escalating four-year conflict.
"This is the first time that foreign nationals have been targeted," Bulama Bukarti, a sub-Saharan terror analyst with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said of the attack on the Hotel Amarula used by contractors working on vast multinational gas projects nearby.
Bukarti also highlighted the relative sophistication of the assault, with tactics to target banks and warehouses — for money and food — derived from other Islamist groups in Africa.
"This is outpacing other insurgencies in Africa; it took Boko Haram
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...in Nigeria six years to get to where this group has got to in three," Bukarti added. "The situation is getting more and more desperate, and it needs something like a regional intervention from African nations with western logistical support."
The attack on Palma was launched on 24 March by an estimated 100 or so fighters, who seized control of the town, which has a population of roughly 75,000. Reports circulated that beheaded bodies were seen in the streets, while a convoy of foreigners trying to escape was repeatedly ambushed. A Briton was among the dead. Eleven days later, the true corpse count remains unknown, with internet and mobile phone networks disrupted.
The al-Shabaab insurgents emerged in Cabo Delgado province in 2017, a historically neglected Muslim area in a Christian-majority country. Last year, an estimated 1,600 were killed in the region, three times the number in 2019, and in the worst incident 50 villagers were beheaded in a football field.
