They then disinterred hundreds of remains from the former Italian cemetery in the capital, Mogadishu, to make way for the base, which was named after the Islamic warrior Salahudin.

That site would, years later, become the first fully-fledged, training camp for what would emerge as the first Al Qaeda-linked group in the Horn of Africa.

In his new book, Al-Shabaab in Somalia — The History and Ideology of a Militant Islamist Group,2005-2012, Norwegian scholar and Somali expert, Stig Jarle Hansen attempts to connect the dots on East Africa’s most dangerous Islamist group, the Al Shabaab.

Although Al Shabaab founders took advantage of the lawlessness in Somalia — the result of an armed conflict that started in 1991 following the overthrow of the dictator Siad Barre — the author argues that Islamist movements have been around since the 1960s. He, however, notes that the actual push for a puritanical Islam in Somalia only started after the return into the country of Saudi-educated Somali students in the 1970s.

Those clerics, according to the author, “opened a new interpretation of Islam,” creating divisions among the usually moderate Somali Muslims.

During Somalia’s civil war, clerics served as the only hope in a country torn by clannism, especially in Mogadishu where residents endured predatory warlords, rapists, armed robbers and common thieves.

Islamists played two roles: To console the public through Islamic teachings, and to take up arms to boost their influence in the Somali-speaking zones in neighbouring countries.

By 1998, Al Qaeda had carried out its most prominent attack before September 11, 2001, against the US embassies in Nairobi and  Dar es Salaam, killing hundreds of people.

Hansen, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, says Somalia played a minimal role in those attacks as Al Qaeda imported its expertise from outside Somalia. Those attacks piqued US’s interest in Somalia more, and between 2003 and 2006, a war was raging in the country between Islamists and US-financed warlords.

That silent war led to a full-blown confrontation in which the Islamists routed the warlords and seized the capital Mogadishu in June 2006.  This shadow war “played a role in birthing Al Shabaab,” writes the author.

The desecration of the Italian graveyard in 2005 put the nascent group on the international map, or as the author calls it, it was the “founding moment.” By then, Al Shabaab members had started to hide their faces, recruit independently and control a few mosques. They also started shutting down cinemas in Mogadishu and seized control of a town in central Somalia.

The period between 2007 and 2008, in many ways, saw Al Shabaab go from being a network to having the largest territory controlled by an Al Qaeda affiliated group. But while the group scored battlefield successes, it had relative success and some failures on the management front. In effect, it became a “victim” of its own success.

For example, its taxation system — collected by untrained former fighters — was and is still unpopular and borders on extortion, says the author. Its intelligence wing — Amniyat — has carried out instant punishments for relatively less serious crimes. Its court system was not as professional as many had expected it to be.

Like many observers, Hansen cites the 2010 war — known as “the end of the aggressors” — against the African Union peacekeepers as a source of “the largest losses and cause for fragmentation.”

But the loss of Bakara market in the capital and Kismayu port in 2011 and 2012 respectively, marked the biggest revenue loss for the Islamists, who were also driven out of the capital.