The October 14th bombing in Somalia is the most recent of Al-Shabaab’s attacks. Al-Shaabab is a jihadist terrorist group, linked to Al-Qaida, which controls large areas of Somalia. They target locations in Somalia and Eastern Kenya to exert their dominance on the surrounding area. Their key effort is to oppose the UN backed government in Somalia. Tensions have been rising in the past year with talks of increased US and UN involvement. While the group has been active in the region for more than a decade, this attack marks a turning point in their targeting methodology. This is because of both the scale and the indiscriminate nature of the recent killings. In the past, Al-Shabaab has taken a more careful approach, for instance, killing individuals who cannot recite passages of the Koran. However, after the killing of over 300 people in the Mogadishu bombing, it is clear that they are moving towards a different approach. According to Somalian crisis expert\u00a0Rasheed Abdi, Al-Shabaab think nothing of killing civilian populations which are close to the government. The consequences of this more generalized attack strategy could be tremendous if attacks of this type continue. The number of innocent people killed in this past attack has already drawn a great amount of attention to the often overlooked terrorist organization and will likely lead to increased US involvement in the region as a parallel to anti-ISIS and Al-Qaida campaigns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The October 14th bombing in Somalia is the most recent of Al-Shabaab’s attacks. Al-Shaabab is a jihadist terrorist group, linked to Al-Qaida, which controls large areas of Somalia. They target locations in Somalia and Eastern Kenya to exert their dominance on the surrounding area. Their key effort is to oppose the UN backed government in Somalia. Tensions have been rising… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1019"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1021,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions\/1021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}