Al-Shabaab

Yohannes said that the security at this border was always high and that the authorities tended to be wary of Somalis passing through.

The Somali insurgent group al-Shabaab was at the height of its power, meaning anyone with a Somali accent was treated suspiciously.

If

they see you are going with a Somali, they may think you are a terrorist.

And the understanding is basically we hate everyone associated with the West and we hate the U.S.-led world order, so let's attack it.

Does this make it more complicated? Is there room in the middle to transit the straight if you've got the Houthis on one side and al-Shabaab on the other?

Yeah, I can comment on this.

It's one of the things I used to follow quite closely with the UN, and I've stayed in touch with the people who were sort of giving us information on this.

So we should be in no doubt that we are facing a coordinated Iranian campaign, and that whilst the Houthis don't take action, orders from Iran without at least considering whether they fit their own Yemeni agenda.

And obviously al-Shabaab is that much further away as well.

Nevertheless, these are all groups that are sympathetic to and coordinating with the Iranian agenda.

What happened when the U.S. killed Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in 2022? was that that meant that the new leader of al-Qaeda, Saif al-Adl, who had already been in Iran for many years, now he was effectively running al-Qaeda from Iran.

That is where Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison have come under tremendous scrutiny, but also Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, now running for Senate.

a lot of the ad spend in that state right now from michelle tafoya against peggy flanagan focuses on her role and culpability in this massive fraud scandal that took so much from taxpayers and ended up in places like mogadishu going to terror groups like al-shabaab expect this one to get a lot more attention and expect to see a lot more of that video

my name is peggy flanagan

Yesterday, we talked a little bit about Gavin Newsom, and as he prepares to run for president, all the issues that he's doing conveniently timed flip-flops, or as I call them, snip, snap, snip, snap, reversals on, like COVID lockdowns.

Hollowing out state control and straining any monopoly of force exercised by Addis as the government faces a coalescing of domestic and regional opposition.

Somalia too faces the twin pressures of al-Shabaab.

and political fragmentation, with a rising tide of armed hostilities between the centralising Turkish-backed Mogadishu administration and arrayed peripheral actors, including the Emirati-backed Puntland and Jubaland that increasingly look to foreign patrons rather than Mogadishu for security and economic opportunity.

The political settlements that historically anchored these states are fracturing.

Its transnational war economy stretches from Dubai to Benghazi in Libya.

Shielded by the UAE, the RSF has committed innumerable war crimes and faced accusations of genocide against Darfurian communities, but can endure because of the flows of bullying and weapons whilst what remains of a beleaguered quote-unquote international community averses gays.

and the RSF is just one of several sub-national actors operating outside state lines, be it the proto-states of al-Shabaab and the Houthis, or the Emirati clients of Somaliland and southern forces in Yemen.

In sum, political authority in the Horn is being refashioned into a sweeping interconnected system across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, binding increasingly fragmented territories into a self-reproducing regional conflict system.

It was an Islamist attack, yeah.

Al-Shabaab.

Right, well, right, well-

Yeah.

and maritime security in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mintan Strait.

Yesterday, Defense Report published an article on the deepening relations between the Houthi rebels, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Shabaab, which also puts more pressure on the Red Sea.

A link to that article will be in the show notes.

The United Kingdom agreed to Saudi Arabia's request to provide air-to-air refueling for Saudi fighter jets, but only for defensive operations.

I was talking the other day, not for this podcast, to the author, a guy called Alex Perry, a journalist who's written a book called Blood Will Flow, which is about the second biggest, in terms of loss of life, terrorist incident in history, which took place in 2021 in Mozambique that almost nobody knows about.

It happened in an oil and gas field, and al-Shabaab, the youth movement in Mozambique – and the way it was managed and mismanaged by the petrochemical giants and the rest of it.

And I was particularly interested in the way that he had gathered the information because it's a story of neocolonialism and neocolonial... near colonial petrochemical companies going and exploiting and getting all the oil and gas and so on and this didn't sit well and here's he a kind of middle-aged rich western white guy and he meticulously kind of charted and counted and captured the number of deaths which is 1564 extraordinarily and yet nobody talks about this story he's captured and written about this story But the way that he gathered that information was to employ six students who were unknown to him and he was unknown to them via fixes so that they could talk to the people who'd been bereaved in the terrorist attack.

So your point there, sorry, it's just fresh in my mind, but your point there about gathering information, not necessarily in brand marketing, it might be we'll use a market research company to understand what people might want.