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ARTICLE IN BRIEF:
This article traces the rise and decline of the Somali jihadi-insurgent group al-Shabab from 2006 to 2014. Particular attention is paid to the group's implementation of a philistine and coercive interpretation of Shariah in areas under its control, the political economy of insurgent violence, local governing administrations, and internal schisms and recent deadly infighting. The group's potential future trajectory is also assessed
he Somali jihadi-insurgent group Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen1 (the Mujahideen Youth Movement) faces a continuing decline in its fortunes on both the domestic and international fronts. This decline, however, Is relative to its successes from 2008 until the spring of 2011, when it controlled the majority of Somalia south of the autonomous region of Puntland. A number of factors have contributed to the group's decline. These include increasing battlefield pressures following the start of a major military offensive against it by the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), the Somali federal government, and allied militias in the spring of 2011, a marked increase in the size of the AMISOM force inside the country, the entrance of Kenya into southern Somalia in October 2011, and the failure of al-Shabab's 2010 "Ramadan offensive" inside Mogadishu, which sought to finally overrun the besieged Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which led to increasingly virulent internal divisions.
New dynamics on the ground have necessitated al-Shabab, led by the group's amir (leader), Ahmed "Mukhtar Abu al-Zubayr" Godane, who violently purged the group in 2013 of potential rivals and critics, to strategically reposition in order to ensure its continued viability as a Somali political and military actor. This military restructuring and refocusing of the group requires the abandoning of the strategically costly bravado of the past and the adoption of a strategy more appropriate to the group's capabilities in light of its technological and numerical inferiority to its enemies. This has primarily entailed a shift back to guerilla warfare, including the use of hit-and-run attacks, roadside bombs, ambushes, assassinations, and "martyrdom operations" against the Somali government, AMISOM forces, and anti-Shabab militias.2
The refocusing and "rebalancing" of al-Shabab's military strategy and operations has thus far yielded a number of positive results for al-Shabab, though this is as much due to the continuing failure of its opponents to...