If the Islamists arrested in yesterday's pre-dawn raids were plotting to storm Australian army bases, it is unlikely that al-Shabaab told them to do it.
The al-Qaeda linked extremist group has been conducting a massive international recruitment among the Somali diaspora to bolster its forces as it fights for control of Mogadishu and the imposition of strict Islamic rule across Somalia.
The young men it lures from Western countries such as Britain, Germany, Canada, Australia and the United States join a Somali jihad, not a transnational movement, such as al-Qaeda, which has global aspirations.
In May, The Times reported that up to a thousand foreign fighters, including Britons, have answered the call to jihad in Somalia and its war-torn capital, Mogadishu.
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What al-Shabaab cannot do is stop the foreign fighters it has radicalised in its training camps from returning home to attack domestic targets in the name of Islam. Western intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned of the risk of returning ethnic Somalis doing just that.
Al-Shabaab is keen to keep its foreign fighters committed to the Somali jihad. Their efforts are said to have greatly contributed to the Islamists' recent military successes.
But to attract such recruits, al-Shabaab's own propaganda plays up its ties with other Islamist insurgencies such as Algeria and Chechnya. And al-Qaeda's promotion of al-Shabaab — Osama bin Laden has personally urged followers to join the fight there — has widened its appeal among Islamist communities around the world with broader concerns than just Somalia.
The fear is that an al-Shabaab takeover will make Somalia into a magnet for foreign jihadist seeking training, just as Taleban rule in Afghanistan gave al-Qaeda a haven to establish training camps where thousands of foreign militants flocked.
Al-Shabaab is already drifting towards the kind of dependency on al-Qaeda that the Taleban developed, allowing the extremist group to call its shots.
The United Nations and Western intelligence agencies have warned that hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters are on the move from Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia.
The CIA has attributed the move to the pressure placed on al-Qaeda by drone missile strikes that have killed more than twenty senior leaders.
Terrorist experts, however, say that for the moment, al-Qaeda fighters travelling to Somalia are more likely to be seeking war than sanctuary. Even with the threat of drone strikes, Pakistan's tribal areas remain the safest place for senior al-Qaeda leaders to hide. CIA missile strikes on Yemen and Somalia have killed several al-Qaeda operatives since 2001 without provoking anything like the backlash they do in Pakistan. In that respect, the weakness of the Somali government is an asset.
The US is the latest Western country to voice concern about the threat of radicalised youth returning home from Somalia after the discovery of a huge recruiting ring in Minneapolis. US interference in Somalia, backing the government against al-Shabaab and its allies in the ousted Islamic Courts regime, may have made the West a greater target for al-Shabaab than it ever was.
Catherine Philp, Diplomatic Corresponden
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6739264.ece
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