The ongoing African Union offensive against Al Shabaab in western Somalia represents “a turning point in Somalia’s struggle to bring lasting peace to all its people,” United Nations envoy Nicholas Kay declared last week.

His statement came soon after Al Shabaab killed several AU and Somali government soldiers in a suicide bomb attack on a hotel in a town recently captured from the Islamist insurgents.

It was the most recent in a series of deadly explosions carried out by the group that has been fighting in Somalia for nearly 10 years.

A spokesman for Amisom, the AU’s military mission in Somalia, said three Somali soldiers, three AU soldiers from Djibouti and seven Al Shabaab fighters died in the blast. The militants said they had killed 30 Amisom troops.

The AU refuses to specify the number of casualties it has sustained in Somalia since Amisom’s establishment in 2007. UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said last year that about 3,000 Amisom soldiers have been killed in that time.

Amisom currently has about 22,000 soldiers and police in Somalia, with personnel drawn from Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sierra Leone and Uganda.
All those countries have reasons to fear attacks by Al Shabaab operatives, warn US and European experts on Somalia.

“Al Shabaab will likely continue to attack countries that have deployed forces in Somalia,” Norwegian author Stig Jarle Hansen wrote last month in a journal published by a counter-terrorism centre at the US military academy at West Point, New York.

A similar prognosis was offered by Somalia specialist Ken Menkhaus in the same edition of the counter-terrorism journal.

“Kenya, and possibly other countries in East Africa and the Horn, is likely to be the target of additional al-Shabaab attacks, especially as al-Shabaab responds to a major Amisom offensive inside Somalia in the first months of 2014,” Prof Menkhaus wrote.

Tanzania, too, has cause to worry about Shabaab activities, Mr Hansen, author of the book Al Shabaab in Somalia, said at a forum in Washington in December.

Source: The East African