The recent al-Shabab attack in Somalia can be blamed in part on one American, Joe Biden. His actions in overturning President Trump’s policies can be tied to this attack.
CNN reported on May 3rd:
As Somalis are celebrating Eid Al-Fitr for the second day, the Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Al-Shabaab launched a dawn attack on a major military base housing AU forces, witnesses and officials said.
Col Muse Hassan, a Somali military commander in Middle Shabelle region, told CNN that heavily armed Al-Shabaab gunmen attacked the Burundian base in El-Baraf, some 160 km north of the capital Mogadishu, from different directions early Tuesday.Hassan said a suicide car bomber drove into the main gates of the base, allowing the fighters to enter the camp, where they engaged in a heavy gunfight with the AU soldiers for about an hour.The base is located along the main road connecting Mogadishu to northern parts of the country.In a statement posted on its affiliated websites, Al-Shabaab claimed its fighters killed 59 soldiers as they have taken control of the base, but authorities have not confirmed those claims nor the number of possible casualties. It is the second time the camp has been raided by the terror group this year.
But CNN’s report doesn’t tell the whole story. Within days after President Trump made the call, ISIS was wiped out of Iraq and Syria. Obama said that they would be around for a generation.
But things changed fast. As soon as Biden took power, Trump’s policies were gone and weakness and appeasement, the old Obama policies, became the new Biden policies. This weekend Iran was bragging about being able to build a nuclear bomb.
Another result of the Obama-Biden Middle East policy is ISIS is back. This is after President Trump had wiped them off the map in Iraq and Syria.
A recent piece at the Jewish World Review described the al-Shabab attack in Somalia and noted that ISIS is now on the comeback [emphasis added]:
The [terrorists] now control roughly 70% of south and central Somalia, a country nearly the size of Texas. While the fragile government rules Mogadishu and provincial capitals, al-Shabab and its 5,000 to 7,000 fighters oversee much of the countryside. In other areas, they use fear and mafia-like tactics to extort taxes while providing health, educational and judicial services in an effort to undermine the government and build loyalty.
“We’ve seen an expansion of their territory,” said Samira Gaid, executive director of the Hiraal Institute, a think tank focusing on Somalia and the Horn of Africa. “We are seeing them be more audacious.”
The group’s attacks nearly doubled from 2015 to 2021, according to data compiled by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. Last year, much of the violence involved confrontations with security forces. If the current pace continues through December, attacks will have increased another 71% overall in only a year.
This surge coincides with a deadly sweep of violence across Africa by Islamist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Both are seeking to revive their fortunes on the continent after the fall of the latter’s self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria and the weakening of al-Qaeda in Yemen and Afghanistan. Al-Shabab, which in Arabic means “the youth,” accounted for more than a third of all Islamist attacks in Africa in 2021.
“Al-Shabab remains al-Qaeda’s largest, wealthiest and most deadly affiliate, responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents, including Americans,” Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, head of the Pentagon’s U.S. Africa Command, said in February during a visit to Mogadishu, the Somali capital.
Biden’s weakness is an opportunity for terrorists to “revive their fortunes” across the world and they’re taking advantage of it.
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