Some news on AQ EO and Al-Shabaab
Two news pieces of interest
1. Foreign militants in Al-Shabaab
Just a quick excerpt. The rest can be found here
Eleven insurgent militiamen were killed by their own bombs when they went off prematurely in Somalia’s capital, the government said on Saturday.
“They are three Pakistanis, two Indians, one Afghani, one Algerian, and two Somalis, (and) a leader who was in charge of praying for suicide bombers before they were dispatched,” the ministry said in a statement.
Not sure of the veracity of this, but nonetheless very interesting.
2. AQ External Operations
Entirely unsurprising to see that AQ’s External Operations modus operandi remains the same, as I outlined in my Jane’s piece last year. Below excerpts are from a news piece that can be found here
Passport photographs of Ibrahim Adam, 23, who has been on the run for three years, have been discovered after British intelligence began unraveling one of the biggest terrorist networks discovered since September 11.
Adam, 23, is the younger brother of Anthony Garcia, one of the men arrested for plotting to blow up the Ministry of Sound night club or the Bluewater Shopping Centre with a fertiliser bomb in 2004.
Adam’s passport photographs were discovered in an apartment in Oslo after undercover Norwegian security service officers broke into the flat.
Members of all four cells were in Pakistan at the end of 2008 and there are fears that there could be other sleeper cells that remain unaccounted for.
All the groups except the Belgian cell communicated with a more junior commander, who calls himself Sohaib, Ahmad or Zahid and is now in Pakistani custody, according to security sources.
Two questions for me. Have we seen the last of the 08 alumni? I suspect there’s a few more floating around. But more importantly, where is the 09 class?
As for the guy in detention, there’s *always* more than one doing the coordination and liaison.
I suppose Faisal Shahzad is one of the 09 class, since he went there is July 2009. According to released information, the route he took was very similar to that followed by Zazi and co.
Back in 2008, the Report of the Monitoring Group on Somalia pursuant to Security Council resolution 1853 was already mentioning foreign jihadi precense in Somalia with jihadists coming from Bangladesh, Chechenia, Pakistan, Soudan and Tanzania… The only real news is WTF about the two Indians ???