Who Are the Al-Shabaab Militants Plaguing Kenya?

The Islamic militant group al-Shabaab, based in Somalia, has carried out a string of attacks on Kenyan soil. An American soldier and two U.S. defense contractors were killed in a Jan. 5 assault on a defense facility Kenya shares with the U.S. One year earlier, the group claimed responsibility for a coordinated attack on a hotel and office complex in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, that left 26 people, including five attackers, dead. Al-Shabaab warns that attacks will continue as long as Kenya maintains its soldiers in an African Union force that is helping prop up Somalia’s government.

It’s an affiliate of al-Qaeda that grew in reaction to Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion of Somalia, which targeted the Islamic Courts Union’s brief control of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The group swore allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2012 and has vied with Islamic State for members and support. The group’s most violent operations include a 2015 raid on a university campus that claimed at least 147 lives and an assault on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall in 2013, which killed 67. Besides having staged more than 150 attacks in Kenya since the country intervened in Somalia, its members have carried out bombings in Uganda and Djibouti, which have also contributed personnel to the African mission. Al-Shabeeb is Arabic for “the youth.”