Somali militants threaten to attack Israel

Yedioth Ahronoth reports that al-Shabab militants in Somalia are threatening to attack Israel over what they call an Israeli plot to destroy part of the al-Aqsa mosque.

I'm not sure how seriously to take this story. On the one hand, Mogadishu is a long way from Jerusalem. It's sort of like if Mullah Omar threatened to attack Israel: Nasty rhetoric, yes, but very hard to put into action.

That said, East African immigrants regularly find their way to Israel. It's obviously a dangerous trip: a long slog across Sudan, Egypt and the Sinai desert, ending with the very real possibility of being shot by Egyptian guards at the Israeli border. But thousands of them make the trip each year.

Two more general points, though. First, this story suggests that the al-Shabab movement is trying to transform itself from a local insurgency into a wider terrorist organization. The group already has long-standing ties to al-Qaeda, and it has reportedly been recruiting members of the Somali diaspora to come back and fight.

But the external focus is a relatively recent trend in Somalia. Until late 2006, the country's Islamist insurgents were united under the banner of the Islamic Courts Union, and they had decidedly local aspirations. They didn't like the central government, and they wanted to overthrow it.

The ICU fell apart in 2006; hard-line members broke off to form splinter groups like al-Shabab, which seem to have loftier goals.

In other words: Somalia is now a safe haven for an al-Qaeda-affiliated terror group with professed global aspirations. I don't think the U.S. is planning to (re-)invade Somalia, though, which undermines the argument that we need to keep fighting in Afghanistan to deny al-Qaeda a safe haven.

Second, this story is a good reminder of the utility of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a jihadi recruiting tool. Somalia is a devastated country. Islamist groups should have no trouble finding disaffected young men to fight the central government. And yet the leaders of the group are talking about the al-Aqsa mosque to drum up support.

That's not to say al-Shabab would have trouble finding recruits if Netanyahu and Abbas could only reach a peace agreement. I'm not naive. But I think it's notable that a largely local insurgency is using Israel as a recruiting tool.

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