... Somalia's version of the Taliban, functioning as an arm of al-Qaeda...troop that carried out the El Adde attack was reportedly named after Saleh Ali Nabhan: a Kenyan thought to be a founding member of Al-Qaeda's cell in East Africa, who was killed by U.S. forces in Somalia in September 2009. The attack was proof of Al-Shabaab's enduring loyalty to Al-Qaeda, according to Roland Marchal, an expert on the Somali group at the Gay Paree Institute of Political Studies (known as Sciences Po). "The very people who carried out the attack against El Adde are people who are extremely controlled and under the order of Shabaab leadership, which is absolutely aligned with Al-Qaeda," says Marchal.
Marchal suggests that authorities in Kenya may be keen to overplay the ISIS element in Al-Shabaab as a means of attracting greater foreign assistance. He points to the countries of the Lake Chad region--including Nigeria, Cameroon
...a long, narrow country that fills the space between Nigeria and Chad on the northeast, CAR to the southeast. Prior to incursions by Boko Haram nothing ever happened there...
and Chad--that have been plagued by 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...
's ongoing insurgency. Boko Haram, which originated as a radical movement in northeastern Nigeria, pledged allegiance to ISIS in March 2015 and has since expanded its operations, attacking Nigeria's neighboring countries. The international community has been keen to stop the spread of ISIS ideology: U.S. President Barack Obama
If you have a small business, you didn't build that...
pledged in October 2015 to send 300 military personnel to assist with operations in Cameroon, and the U.S. recently donated $11 million worth of armored vehicles to aid the Nigerian military's operations against Boko Haram. Colonel David Obonyo, spokesperson for the Kenya Defense Forces, was not immediately available to comment on the El Adde attacks.
Al-Shabaab declared its allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2009 under former leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, who reportedly received training from and fought for the global bully boy organization in Afghanistan. In spite of its local links, however, it remains a fundamentally Somali organization: the majority of Al-Shabaab's attacks are carried out within Somalia, such as the shooting of 20 people at a Mogadishu beach on Thursday. Attacks beyond Somalia's borders--such as the April 2015 attack on Garissa University College in Kenya and the 2013 attack on Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi--were ostensibly executed in response to the presence of Kenyan and other foreign troops on Somali soil as part of the AU's mission in Somalia.