Alshabab joins Alqaeda

[Shinbir Majabe]

Somalia's extremist Shebab fighters have joined ranks with Al-Qaeda, the terror network's chief Ayman al-Zawahiri announced in a video message posted on jihadist forums on Thursday.

 

"I will break the good news to our Islamic nation, which will... annoy the crusaders, and it is that the Shebab movement in Somalia has joined Al-Qaeda," Zawahiri said.

 

"The jihadist movement is with the grace of Allah, growing and spreading within its Muslim nation despite facing the fiercest crusade campaign in history by the West," said Zawahiri in the video released by Al-Qaeda's media arm As-Sahab.

 

In the first part of the video, Shebab's leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, also known as Mukhtar Abu Zubair, addressed Zawahiri, saying: "We will move along with you as faithful soldiers."

 

"In the name of my mujahedeen brothers, leaders and soldiers... I pledge obedience," Zubair said.

 

"Lead us on the road of jihad and martyrdom, in the footsteps that our martyr Osama bin Laden had drawn for us," he added, referring to Al-Qaeda's former leader who was killed last year in a covert US raid on his hide-out in Pakistan.

 

"Our brothers in the Shebab al-Mujahedeen, were the rock... that stood in the face of the joint American-Ethiopian-Kenyan-crusade attack on Islam and Muslims in Somalia," said Zawahiri.

 

On January 24, a Shebab suicide bomber blew himself at an Ethiopian army base in the central Somali town of Beledweyne.

 

Hardline Shebab officials said 33 Ethiopians were killed in the blast in Beledweyne, a town about 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the Ethiopian border, but the claims could not be verified.

 

Zawahiri urged the Shebab to treat Somalis with "leniency" and "humility" and to help them "solve their problems and fulfill their demands, especially those in need such as widows, orphans, the ill, the elderly and the poor" and to "spread justice."

 

He also appealed to the Islamist group "not to forget their imprisoned brothers and sisters held in the jails of the corrupt and oppressive crusaders and to capture crusaders and Zionists wherever they can to exchange them with Muslim prisoners."

 

Shebab insurgents, fighting to overthrow a fragile Western-backed transitional government in the war-torn Horn of Africa country, proclaimed their allegiance to bin Laden in a video documentary distributed in 2009.

 

They control large parts of central and southern Somalia but are facing increasing pressure from government forces and regional armies.

 

Armies from neighbouring countries are converging on the Shebab -- Kenyan forces in the south, Ethiopian soldiers in the west, and an African Union force in Mogadishu made up of 10,000 troops from Uganda, Burundi and Djibouti.

 

Source

[Che -Guevara]

I have decided are legally insane-very stup!d move.

[GoldCoast]

^ That and absolutely desperate. I think this confirms they are on the verge of falling apart.

[Mario B]

I hope the TFG uses this for the propaganda's worth.

[Che -Guevara]

GoldCoast;787422 wrote:

^ That and absolutely desperate. I think this confirms they are on the verge of falling apart.

Even if they weren't desperate, this is political suicide. This is what happens when people have no any political sense and I am most Somalis seem to fall in this category.

[GoldCoast]

Che -Guevara;787425 wrote:

Even if they weren't desperate, this is political suicide. This is what happens when people have no any political sense and I am most Somalis seem to fall in this category.

Agreed but I think its been obvious for a while they have no sense of pragmatism whatsoever. The Taliban look like noted statesmen compared to this idiocy. The Talibs have long ago understood the rules of the game, while these guys are not operating on this planet.

[Che -Guevara]

^This is what happens when movement is not indigenized and tailored to the realities on the ground.

[Sensei]

As idiotic as this union may seem to us, this clearly serves Al-Qaida's short-termism agenda of recruiting international. Not surprised this happens at a time when Al-Shabaab is in decline, obviously an attempt to shore up AS. But the sad part : the TFG and the rest of us are always caught in WTF moment, and then find themselves reacting to the adjustment. We shall see how this helps though.

[Che -Guevara]

^You are assuming TFG is well run machine with foresight and an actual political agenda.

[Faarax-Brawn]

I thought they were already alligned with one another yaa che?

[Mario B]

Al-Qaeda is finished, Al Shaabab are joining a franchise on its deathbed.

[Che -Guevara]

Faarax..They have never officially said they were part of AQ though they shared same ideology.

[Sensei]

Che -Guevara;787442 wrote:

^You are assuming TFG is well run machine with foresight and an actual political agenda.

Not at all. I assume they would have the political common sense of winning the perception-war, now that AS is defeated militarily, the TFG will have to at least rhetorically compete with them to undercut their legitimacy- there are masses of people that see AS as legit org- by turning their military victory into the bigger perception of powerless/irrelevant Al-Shabaab. At the very least that will dampen AS's suicide recruits.

 

Moral rhetoric basically.

[Faarax-Brawn]

Che -Guevara;787448 wrote:

Faarax..They have never officially said they were part of AQ though they shared same ideology.

oh well- birds of the same feather

[Sensei]

Seems to me that AS has attracted whole a lot of attention they do not need. I can see the US getting more involved in the horn.