Al Shabaab emerged as a regional threat funded by
millions of dollars from activities ranging from extortion to taxing charcoal
exports, but its attack on a Kenyan shopping mall is expected to provoke a
counter-terrorism response aimed at crippling the Somali Islamist group’s
finances.
The money is important to al Shabaab, a group whose aims
include the wider imposition of Islamic law but whose ability to attract
fighters in one of the poorest countries of the world is based largely on its
ability to pay them, Reuters reports.
A report by U.N. monitors in July estimated al Shabaab
earned more than $25 million a year from illicit exports of charcoal to Gulf
Arab states and from taxing the trucking of charcoal to the Somali ports of
Kismayu and Barawe, Reuters reports.
Other funds come from informal taxes on small businesses
in areas of Somalia that al Shabaab controls, and from donations from Somalis
overseas, although these transfers are thought to be declining due to a general
disenchantment with the increasingly violent group in the diaspora, diplomats
say.
A security source in the capital, Mogadishu, said al
Shabaab was expert at extorting money from small businesses and at setting up
front companies whose income was funnelled to the group. Both sorts of company
also acted as informers.
“It’s the small little shops where you repair your
vehicle, or charge your mobile phone,” the source said. “It’s a myriad of
little businesses, who also help them in their surveillance.”
“There’s no need for heavy-handed daily enforcement
because everyone knows the penalties for non-compliance are drastic,” he said,
referring to the amputation of limbs or execution.
Suspected additional sources of income include militant
Islamists overseas and, according to U.N. sanctions monitors, the nearby state
of Eritrea.
The monitors said Eritrea was destabilising Somalia by
paying political agents and financing a warlord linked to al Shabaab.
The Eritrean government, accused by its critics of
seeking to use Somali territory to undermine Ethiopia, its old enemy, has long
denied meddling in Somalia, saying it has no links to al Shabaab’s fight
against the Somali government.
Al Shabaab has been waging an insurgency since 2007 and
formally became part of al Qaeda in 2012. It remains Somalia’s most powerful
non-government armed group despite being pushed out of Mogadishu by an African
Union force in 2011.
PENALTIES
Al Shabaab’s economic strength is vital to its operations
because it can pay its thousands of fighters a monthly salary normally varying
between $100 to $300 a month.
That, more than its declared aim of imposing a strict
version of Sharia or Islamic law, is the main incentive to join up, Somali
researchers say.
Ironically, al Shabaab’s income may have benefited from
an upturn in the Somali economy that followed the partial restoration of order
in Mogadishu over the past two years and a growth in investment amid hopes
of an end to years of war.
In the wake of the four-day attack by al Shabaab
militants on a Nairobi shopping mall in which at least 72 people were killed,
Western counter-terrorism agencies are expected to subject the group’s sources
of financial support to renewed scrutiny, Somali experts say.
The success of such efforts will depend to a large extent
on the choices made by Somalis, in particular the powerful Somali business
community in east Africa.
According to Ken Menkhaus, a leading U.S. scholar of al
Shabaab, the most formidable weapon against al Shabaab may be the Somalia
expatriate business community in Kenya, which has emerged as a force in
property and trade in the past 20 years.
Since the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, more than
one million Somalis have fled to or through Kenya, and many now have extensive
business and real estate investments there.
Fearing a crackdown on Somali firms by a Kenyan
government keen to be seen to be doing something, Somali businessmen in Nairobi
might now feel compelled to take their own steps against the group, he wrote on
the website www.thinkprogress.org.
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