– Shabaab a threat despite strikes –
Kenya has suffered a series of attacks since invading Somalia in 2011 to attack the Shabaab, later joining an African Union force battling the Islamists.
The Shabaab carried out the September 2013 attack on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall, killing at least 67 people as a warning to Kenya to pull its troops out of southern Somalia.
During the Westgate attack, some of the victims were killed after the gunmen weeded out non-Muslims for execution by demanding they recite the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith.
The Shabaab has lost a series of key towns and ports to the AU force and Somalia government army, heralded as advances that would stem the militants’ multi-million dollar trade of charcoal to Gulf countries.
But in a recent report, UN investigators warned that the air and drone strikes on the militia have done little to damage it in the long term and that the insurgents continue to pose a serious regional threat.
Indeed, pressure on the fighters has forced them to “become more operationally audacious by placing greater emphasis on exporting its violence beyond the borders of Somalia” and across the Horn of Africa, said an October report by the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea.
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