New Military Offensives Put al-Shabab Terrorist Group on the Back Foot

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Sad news today, as cleaning guru Marie Kondo admits she has “kind of given up” on tidying after having three kids. In less significant news here at SitRep, we’re also announcing our official retirement from cleaning our rooms. What will we be doing instead? Following in the footsteps of new Czech President Petr Pavel, your hosts will dedicate our newfound free time to hiking in the mountains with kegs of beer on our backs.

All right, here’s what’s on tap for the day: New offensives are putting the al-Shabab terrorist group on the defensive, the Biden team calls out Russia for violating its last remaining arms control treaty, and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has choice words for one Fox News host.

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The leaders of four East African countries met this week to chart a strategy to once and for all destroy the powerful al-Shabab terrorist group that has operated in Somalia and carried out attacks in the wider region for nearly two decades.

The leaders of Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti issued a joint plan calling to “search and destroy” the terrorist group after a meeting in Mogadishu on Wednesday.

It’s not the first time African leaders have vowed to destroy al-Shabab. Nor is it the first time that al-Shabab has faced a series of military defeats only to later bounce back. And yet, things seem like they are finally starting to go Somalia’s way, according to regional experts and terrorism analysts.

A new hope. Somalia, with the help of regional powers and the United States, has launched a massive new military offensive that has uprooted al-Shabab from territories it controlled for years and sent the terrorist group reeling.

“It is obvious that al-Shabab has been losing ground and were squeezed out of major towns and villages they have been controlling for more than 10 years,” Col. Abdullahi Ali Maow, a former Somali intelligence official, told Voice of America. “I think it is the beginning of their end.”

The stars seem to be aligning in Somalia’s favor politically, too. Kenya’s new president, William Ruto, has made defeating al-Shabab a top priority. Western officials have high hopes that Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud can carry out his pledged “total war” on al-Shabab, and a peace deal ending the the devastating conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region seems to be holding, at least for now, giving space for Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to focus more on the fight against al-Shabab.

“There’s clearly a regional and international effort underway, a much more earnest and sincere effort from all corners” to finally defeating al-Shabab, said Cameron Hudson, a former CIA and State Department official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

“You have a new willingness on the part of the region to try to really end this fight once and for all.”

The clerics strike back. In a political effort that parallels the military offensive, Somalia has rallied the support of influential Muslim clerics to condemn the terrorist group. Some 300 clerics attended a recent conference in Mogadishu backing the government’s offensive, in a move aimed at combating the strains of Islamic extremism that led to al-Shabab’s emergence in the first place.

The new offensive in Somalia comes as the United States has started notching its own high-profile wins against terrorist groups in the chronically impoverished and unstable East African country.

Return of the Biden. The Biden administration has re-energized U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa over the last two years. President Joe Biden redeployed around 450 troops to Somalia last year, reversing a decision by former President Donald Trump to remove troops from Somalia in January 2021, shortly before exiting office.

U.S. special operations commandos killed a top Islamic State leader, Bilal al-Sudani, in northern Somalia last month, and in 2022 U.S. Africa Command stepped up the number of airstrikes it carried out against al-Shabab over the last year to back Somalia. (Though AFRICOM has a checkered history of inaccurately counting its strikes against terrorists and tallying up civilian casualties, according to human rights groups.)

A phantom menace. Still, no government can roll out the “mission accomplished” banner on al-Shabab just yet.

Taking back territory from al-Shabab won’t necessarily destroy or even cripple the notoriously resilient terrorist group—something the United States and its fellow interlopers in the world of counterterrorism have learned the hard way. (Remember Iraq? Or Syria? Or Afghanistan? Or the Sahel?) Al-Shabab, like other terrorist groups, has shown a remarkable ability to fade into the ether even if it loses territorial control, only to come back swinging with attacks against civilian and government targets later.

Plus, violent terrorist attacks have steadily been on the rise in the Horn of Africa and Sahel region in recent years, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. and Western funding that goes toward counterterrorism campaigns across Africa.

There were a record-shattering 6,255 violent events linked to terrorist groups in the Sahel and Horn of Africa in 2022, according to data from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies think tank—a 21 percent increase from the previous year.

To make matters worse, Somalia is facing a historic drought that has pushed it to the precipice of famine, according to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who recently visited Somalia. Thomas-Greenfield urged foreign powers to increase their aid to Somalia to avert famine, while also touting U.S. support for Somalia in its counterterrorism offensive to “destroy al-Shabab’s ability to terrorize the people of Somalia, to terrorize the region, and to terrorize the world.”

Don’t clone the last wars. Still, some experts fear the United States and its regional allies aren’t learning the lessons from past failed counterterrorism campaigns in Somalia even if things are looking up now. They’re laser-focused on the military campaign, without thinking through the types of state-building initiatives required to help push Somalia out of its failed-state cycle and address all the underlying grievances that led to the rise of extremist groups in the first place.

“We’re learning lessons the hard way in lots of other theaters that you can have no definitive defeat of a terrorist group without a much more holistic and organic plan for the political and economic development of the country,” Hudson told SitRep.

“It’s the lack of any kind of future that drives the recruitment of new people to these terrorist groups in the first place,” he added. “And that’s what strikes me as missing from this broader discussion on Somalia.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has tapped career foreign service officer Louis Bono to serve as the agency’s senior advisor for Caucasus negotiations, making him a key middleman in the peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh and Russia’s ongoing occupation of two Georgian territories.

The State Department also opened an embassy in the Solomon Islands capital of Honiara on Wednesday. No ambassador for the post yet, though. Russell Comeau—who has been in place since 2021—will continue to serve as U.S. chargé d’affaires ad interim.

Philip Reeker, a former top U.S. career diplomat, has joined the global consulting firm ​​Dentons Global Advisors-Albright Stonebridge Group.

Sylvain Aubry has joined Human Rights Watch as a deputy director in the organization’s economic justice and human rights division.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

False START. The United States has accused Russia of violating the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), the last nuclear arms control agreement in place between the two powers, after Moscow failed to facilitate inspections required to comply with the deal.

New START, which dates back to 2010 and was reauthorized by Biden for a half-decade at the beginning of his administration, is still good for another three years, but officials and experts have warned that Russia is continuing to build tactical nuclear weapons outside of the framework of the deal.

Ace of base. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is leaving his latest trip to Southeast Asia with a big win: The U.S. military will be granted access to four new bases in the Philippines, in addition to the five bases that American forces already use to train and pre-position equipment.

The new bases could give the Pentagon a jumping-off point if a conflict in the region flares up over Taiwan or in the South China Sea, where the Philippines has contested China’s vast maritime grabs. It’s also another sign of warming ties under newly-inaugurated Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the infamous dictator of the 1980s, after former President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to expel U.S. troops from the island country.

Gas, gas, baby. Bulgaria and Serbia have agreed to build a gas pipeline that will link the two countries as Europe tries to crack down on Russia’s dominance in the energy marketplace nearly a year into Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The 105-mile pipeline will allow gas from nearby Azerbaijan to run all the way into Western Europe, and it gives Serbia a way to access liquefied natural gas from Greece. Both countries have long sought to diversify away from Russian gas.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius talks to a German soldier driving a Leopard 2 tank as he visits Bundeswehr Tank Battalion 203 in Augustdorf, western Germany, on Feb. 1.Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images

Thursday, Feb. 9: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to hold a hearing on U.S.-China competition.

“I’ve been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson. Has anybody ever heard of Tucker Carlson? What is it with this guy? All these wonderful Republicans seem somehow intimidated by his perspective. I haven’t watched anything that he’s said, but I’m struck by how often this comes up. Bad ideas are starting to infect some of the thinking around the world about what Putin stands for, what he believes in. It’s a disaster. He stands for war, aggression, systematic murder, rape, and destruction. That’s what he stands for.”

—Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in Washington on Wednesday at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council think tank. Shoutout to our FP colleague Amy Mackinnon for catching it. 

People experiencing Frenchness. The Associated Press had us worried there for a second. The largest news agency in the United States was taken to task after its stylebook Twitter account called on reporters to avoid using the word “the” to potentially dehumanize subjects such as “the disabled, the poor and the French.” Hmm.

Not to be further dehumanized after years of ridicule in the U.S. papers, the French Embassy in Washington briefly changed its name to “Embassy of Frenchness in the United States.” Properly chagrined by the episode, the AP later took down the tweet.