Starting Points: Shabab

Showing posts with label Shabab. Show all posts

May 3, 2010

Islamist Insurgents Seize a Pirate Base in Somalia - NYTimes.com

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and MOHAMED IBRAHIM

Radical Islamist insurgents in Somalia seized one of the country’s most notorious pirate dens on Sunday, raising questions about whether rebels with connections to Al Qaeda will now have a pipeline to tens of millions of dollars — and a new ability to threaten global trade.

Dozens of insurgents stormed into Xarardheere, a pirate cove on the central Somali coast, around noon, but instead of putting up a fight, the pirates sped off. According to witnesses, several pirate bosses raced out of town in luxury four-by-four trucks, with TVs packed in the back and mattresses strapped on top. Islamist fighters in a fleet of heavily armed pickup trucks then occupied the strategic points in town, including the defunct police station and several crossroads.

What will happen next is not clear. Two of Somalia’s biggest problems and its most troubling exports — Islamist extremism and piracy — seem to be crashing into each other.

For several years, an intense civil war has raged in the country between a weak United States-backed government and radical Islamist groups that are trying to overthrow it. The ensuing lawlessness has given rise to a thriving piracy trade, in which Somali thugs in small skiffs have commandeered some of the biggest vessels on the sea, including a 1,000-foot-long oil tanker.

Maritime experts estimate that Somali pirates have received more than $100 million in ransoms — an enormous sum for a nation with virtually no economy. The pirates prowl the busy Gulf of Aden, one of the most congested shipping lanes in the world, and recently struck as far away as 1,200 miles offshore.

The pirates of Xarardheere currently hold several hijacked ships. But before they fled, they sent the ships further out to sea to prevent Islamist insurgents from capturing their hostages — a worrying prospect for Western diplomats and others, who fear the insurgents could exploit the hostages for political ends.

An insurgent spokesman implied on Sunday that his movement would shut down Xarardheere’s piracy business.

“We have peacefully seized the town and now we will bring Islamic Shariah,” said Sheik Abdinasir Mohamed Afdhuub, a spokesman for the Hizbul Islam insurgent group.

But many people fear that the insurgents were actually attracted to Xarardheere because of its criminal enterprise and that different groups of insurgents will now battle for control of the town.

“Tension is very high,” said Nor Ahmed, a Xarardheere resident. “People are worried about possible Shabab attacks any time soon.”

Hizbul Islam and the Shabab are two of the most powerful insurgent groups in Somalia and were once closely allied. Both espouse a harsh Islamist ideology and have organized public amputations and stonings. American and Somali security officials said that the leaders of both groups have worked closely with wanted terrorists of Al Qaeda.

But recently, the two groups seemed to have turned against each other. On Saturday, a deadly bombing at a mosque in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, was believed to have wounded a top Shabab official. On Sunday, another mosque was bombed, this time in the southern port town of Kismayu, where the Shabab drove out Hizbul Islam in a power struggle last year. At least two people were killed and eight wounded, in a neighborhood controlled by the Shabab.

Under strict Islamic law, piracy is considered haram (forbidden), and in 2006, during a six-month period when an Islamist movement pacified much of Somalia, the Islamists curtailed piracy significantly.

But now that Hizbul Islam and the Shabab desperately need money, the situation may be changing. The insurgents’ draconian rules banning music, television and bras have steadily alienated much of Somali society, making it harder for the insurgents to raise money and find recruits.

Additionally, Hizbul Islam lost access to hundreds of thousands of dollars in port taxes when they were kicked out of Kismayu last year and may have needed to find a new source of cash.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mohamed Ibrahim from Djibouti.

Jan 2, 2010

Somali Charged With Attempted Murder Of Danish Cartoonist

Stefan Bos | Budapest 02 January 2010

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS

A man charged with the attempted murder of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard is carried into court on a stretcher in Aarhus, Denmark, Saturday, Jan. 2, 2010

A Somali man with alleged links to terrorist groups al-Shabab and al-Qaida has been charged with an attempt to kill a Danish cartoonist whose depiction of the Prophet Muhammed sparked outrage in the Muslim world.

Police and medical personnel carried an injured Somali man strapped to a stretcher into a Danish court Saturday, just hours after his alleged attempt to kill Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. The suspect's face was covered by a blanket and under Danish privacy laws his name has not been revealed.

The 28-year-old man was later charged with two counts of attempted murder for Friday's attack on Westergaard, whose cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban in 2005 ignited riots and outrage among Muslims worldwide. The suspect denied the charges.

Denmark's intelligence service claimed that the alleged attacker had close ties to the Somali terrorist groups al-Shabab and al-Qaida in eastern Africa.

The man apparently broke into Westergaard's home near the town of Aarhus about 200 kilometers northwest of the capital Copenhagen.

Seventy-four-year-old Westergaard fled with his granddaughter to a special safe room in his house where he could call police.

He said in remarks aired by Danish television that he escaped unhurt after a tense stand-off. Cartoonist Westergaard explains the man tried to enter the area where he and his grandchild sought shelter. He says the suspect also shouted abusive language as he tried to break down the (entrance) door. Westergaard adds that he was able to contact police. In his words "It was scary. It was close, really close, but we did it."

The deputy chief superintendent of the Aarhus police, Fritz Keldsen, told reporters that his forces arrived late Friday within minutes after receiving Westergaard's distress call.

He confirmed that the man was shot after apparently threatening police with an axe and a knife. Keldsen says police came in large numbers after receiving an alarm message from Westergaard's home. He explains that when police confronted the suspect he moved away from the scene. Keldsen adds, "He then attacked the police patrol. He did that, so they were qualified to shoot him."

Police reportedly shot the man twice, but said the suspect's life was not in danger.

Officials said artist Westergaard has been moved to an undisclosed location for his own protection.

The Associated Press reports that a moderate Muslim organization in Denmark, the Danish Muslim Union, condemned the attack in statement Saturday.

Somali Rebels Pledge to Send Fighters to Aid Yemen Jihad

Image via Wikipedia

By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Senior leaders of the Shabab rebels promised Friday to send their fighters beyond Somalia to Yemen and wherever jihad beckoned.

In a military ceremony here, where the rebels publicly showed off hundreds of new recruits, Sheik Muktar Robow, a senior rebel official, said the group would “send fighters to Yemen to assist our brothers.”

He said that the fighters had been trained to fight the African Union peacekeeping force and the transitional federal government in Somalia but that Yemen was just across the Gulf of Aden and that “our brothers must be ready for our welcome.”

While it was not clear when or whether the rebels could carry out their threat, the avowed goals signaled a shift in strategy from an Islamist insurgency that has drawn foreign fighters here to one that aims to provide them to insurgencies abroad.

The Shabab have increased their ties with Al Qaeda, which has recently been fighting the American-backed military in Yemen.

A Shabab spokesman, Sheik Ali Mohamoud Rageh, said the fighters, who had just completed military training, would fight in every corner of the world that is ready for jihad, or holy war.

The Shabab and allied Islamist insurgent groups control most of Somalia, while the weak transitional government controls a small enclave in Mogadishu, the capital, under the protection of African Union peacekeeping troops.

At the ceremony on Friday at a rebel camp near the former animal market in northern Mogadishu, hundreds of jubilant fighters paraded before reporters and senior rebel leaders chanting, “God is great.” It was the first time the rebels had presented their recruits to the news media.

The officials rebuffed reports of a split among Shabab fighters and vowed that they would unite with a rival rebel group, Hizbul Islam.

Somalia has not had effective central government since the former government was overthrown by armed clan militias in 1991, leading to the current chaos.

Oct 23, 2009

Militants’ Airport Attack Misses Somali President - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM

MOGADISHU, Somalia — The nation’s most feared Islamist insurgent group, the Shabab, attacked the nation’s main airport with mortars here on Thursday as the president prepared to board a plane to Uganda, Somali officials said.

The president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, was unharmed, the officials said, but the attack was followed by an artillery strike on the nation’s biggest market that left at least 18 people dead, according to witnesses and ambulance workers.

Several members of Parliament called a news conference to denounce the artillery barrage, which they said had been fired by African Union peacekeepers, who are here to protect the weak transitional government but are finding themselves increasingly under fire from militants. The troops maintain a base at the airport.

Bootaan Isse Aalin, one of the Parliament members, said the shelling was “unlawful and inhuman.”

But Maj. Barigye Bahoko, a spokesman for the African Union troops in Somalia, denied that the peacekeepers had fired the artillery. “Anyone is free to comment on what is going on in Somalia and those parliamentarians never condemned the assassinations and shelling by Al Shabab,” he said. “I don’t know if they have something to do with Al Shabab.”

Anger at the peacekeepers has been rising, with civilians accusing them of indiscriminately shelling residential areas where insurgents live side-by-side with noncombatants — a charge the peacekeepers deny.

Many Somalis turned against the peacekeepers after an episode in February, when troops responded to a roadside bomb attack by firing wildly into a crowded street.

Somali officials say the peacekeepers killed 39 civilians; the troops say that the toll was much lower and that the victims were hit in cross-fire.

On Thursday, witnesses said that because there was no gun battle with militants at the time of the artillery attack, they suspected that most of the dead at the Bakara marketplace were civilians.

The mortar strike on the airport as Sheik Sharif’s plane was leaving, for a summit meeting on displaced people in Africa, raised renewed concerns about the Shabab’s intelligence capabilities. The government had tried to keep secret the timing of Sheik Sharif’s trip.

“Of course, as the government has sources within the Shabab, so do they,” said Abdulkadir Mohamed Osman, a presidential spokesman. “That does not mean that they are part of the government.”

Witnesses and the members of Parliament said the artillery attack on Thursday started soon after the mortar strike on the airport.

Aamina Hussein, 30, who was slightly wounded by shrapnel in the right leg in the Howlwadaag neighborhood, where the market is, said she saw five bodies lying on the ground as she was hit. “I am lucky I survived,” she said in an interview.

Sources from Lifeline Africa, an emergency volunteer ambulance organization, said that more than 20 bodies and 60 wounded people had been picked up in Howlwadaag and the nearby Hodan neighborhood.

Somalia’s transitional government is facing intense resistance from insurgent groups trying to overthrow it and impose Shariah, the strict Islamic legal code. Western leaders say that Sheik Sharif, a moderate Islamic cleric who came to power in January, has the best chance of any leader in years to bring stability to the war-torn nation.

Sep 6, 2009

Several Dead in Somali Clashes, Possibly Including U.S. Jihadist - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By MOHAMED IBRAHIM and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Fierce fighting exploded in this capital city on Friday night and Saturday morning, and witnesses said at least 10 people had been killed in the past two days, possibly including a Somali-American who had joined the insurgents.

One battle began on Friday after soldiers from Somalia’s transitional government attacked an insurgent base with mortars and machine guns.

“Soon after breaking fast,” said Fatima Elmi, a Mogadishu resident, referring to the evening Ramadan holiday ritual, “we heard strange noises of weapons and we ran into a concrete building nearby.”

The government forces pushed back the insurgents, who belonged to an extremist Islamist group called the Shabab. But by Saturday morning, witnesses said, the Shabab had recaptured the territory and once again remained in firm control of most of Mogadishu.

Among the dead was a Somali-American identified as Mohamed Hassan, 21, from Minnesota, according to Shabab fighters.

“We lost a martyr who was from Minnesota in the overnight raid,” said a Shabab foot soldier. He did not provide any more information about when Mr. Hassan might have arrived in Somalia or what exactly he was doing.

According to the F.B.I., dozens of Somali-Americans may have joined the Shabab jihadist movement, which American officials have accused of having links to Al Qaeda. At least one Somali-American killed himself in a suicide bombing last fall.

In earlier fighting, witnesses said that eight people were killed Thursday when insurgents attacked an African Union base at a former military academy. The deputy mayor of the city, Abdifatah Ibrahim Shaaweeye, told reporters in a news conference on Friday that as soon as the holy month of Ramadan ended, the government would drive the insurgents out of the capital.

“We will capture neighborhoods that are not government controlled,” he said.

Mohamed Ibrahim reported from Mogadishu, and Jeffrey Gettleman from Nairobi, Kenya.

Aug 15, 2009

Islamic Rebels Gain Strength in the Sahara

Moving South From Algeria, al Qaeda-Affiliated Insurgents Find Support Among Locals in Mauritania, Mali and Niger

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania -- Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels are spreading far beyond their original battleground in Algeria and increasingly threatening Africa's Sahara belt, scaring away investors and tourists as they undercut the region's fragile economies.

Dozens of security personnel, as well as an American aid worker and a British tourist, were killed by militants in several attacks in the region this summer alone. The attacks -- which prompted this year's lucrative Paris-Dakar car race to relocate to South America -- have become more frequent and brazen. Recent hits occurred not just in the remote desert but also in Mali's tourist magnet Timbuktu and in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where a suicide bomber attacked the French Embassy last weekend.

Though still dominated by the veterans of Algeria's civil war, this Saharan insurgency has grown deep local roots. Armed bands roaming the desert include hundreds of recruits from Mauritania, Mali and Niger -- vast and impoverished countries that straddle the Arab world and black West Africa, and that relied on the now-collapsed tourism industry as the key source of foreign exchange.

"What had started out as an Algerian problem is now engulfing Mali and Mauritania. They are the weak link," says Zakaria Ould Ahmed Salem, a specialist on political Islam at the University of Nouakchott.

An Islamist insurgency that cost 200,000 lives erupted in Algeria 18 years ago, after that country's secular regime annulled the second round of elections that the Islamists were poised to win. But it is only in the past few years, as Algerian security forces contained the violence at home, that the rebels -- who seek to create an Islamic state encompassing North Africa -- began mounting operations in neighboring Saharan countries that had been unscathed by international terrorism.

Underlining its wider ambitions, the main Algerian insurgent movement, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, re-branded itself in 2007 as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. Actual operational links between AQIM militants in the Sahara and traditional al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan or Afghanistan are tenuous, if they exist at all, Western officials say.

But the group's new name has made it easier to find money and recruits for the cause outside Algeria. "Someone like Bin Laden is considered a hero here," explains Mohamed Fall Ould Oumere, publisher of La Tribune newsweekly in Nouakchott.

Mauritania, where most people speak Arabic and watch satellite TV chains like Al-Jazeera, is a particularly fertile ground for AQIM's growth, and accounts for a growing share of the movement's cadres, Western diplomats say. In Mali, Niger and Chad, the bulk of AQIM recruits also come from Arab-speaking communities, which in these countries are outnumbered by black African majorities.

AQIM is trying to spread south, "aiming to attract the young Muslims of the region -- white ones and black ones," says Isselmou Ould Moustafa, a specialist on AQIM who interviewed many of the group's members for his Mauritanian publication, Tahalil Hebdo.

Security officials in Nigeria recently claimed that AQIM trained in Algeria some members of Boko Haram, the Islamist sect whose armed uprising cost several hundred lives in northern Nigeria last month. According to some experts on AQIM, there is also evidence of contacts between the Saharan insurgents and the Shabaab, the radical Islamist militia controlling a chunk of Somalia. "It's an arc of fire," says Mr. Oumere.

All the governments in the region say they are fighting back. But the area's political instability and frequent bickering between neighboring countries have long made it easy for Islamist rebels to roam the Sahara, obtaining sanctuary and help from local tribes. Mali and Mauritania both have strained relations with Algeria. Planned regional summits to tackle the cross-border terrorism problem have been repeatedly postponed.

A military coup in Mauritania last year complicated the situation: The U.S. reacted to the overthrowing of Mauritania's democratically elected president by reducing military cooperation with the country and pulling out a reconnaissance plane that flew regular sorties over the Sahara to search for insurgents. Cooperation is likely to be restored now that Mauritania has held a democratic election last month.

Government officials here say that, without outside help, Saharan countries have little chance of defeating AQIM. "This is a zone that can't be controlled. We don't know who's out there in the vast desert and what are they doing," says Mohamed Ould Rzeizim, who served until this week as Mauritania's minister of interior.

To finance its campaign, AQIM is smuggling Europe-bound cigarettes, drugs and illegal immigrants through the desert, Mauritanian and Western officials say. Depots of untaxed cigarettes, often brought in by ship from South America, dot the desert along Mauritania's porous northern borders.

An equally important source of revenue for AQIM is ransom money -- estimated at tens of millions of dollars -- paid by European governments for the freedom of European tourists kidnapped in separate attacks in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali and Niger. The hostages were usually transported across the Sahara to AQIM's bases in lawless northern Mali, where local officials helped negotiate the ransom collection and the tourists' release.

Mali's role as a sanctuary for AQIM has long infuriated Algeria and the U.S. The country appears to be taking a harder line after the Islamist rebels -- who refrained from killing their hostages in the past -- announced in June that they executed their British captive, Edwin Dyer.

A few days after the killing of Mr. Dyer, suspected militants also gunned down in Timbuktu the regional chief of Malian intelligence, Lt. Col. Lamina Ould Bou. The colonel, an ethnic Arab and former Islamist rebel, had played a crucial role in Mali's efforts against AQIM. According to Malian government accounts and al Qaeda Internet postings, armed clashes in the region in following weeks killed dozens of Malian troops and Islamist guerrillas.

"We are now engaged in a total struggle against al Qaeda," Mali's President Amadou Toumani Touré declared last month.

The Saharan rebels have so far targeted only foreigners and security forces, sparing civilian targets like restaurants and hotels. In Algeria, Pakistan and Iraq, by contrast, al Qaeda-affiliated militants showed no concern about killing large numbers of Muslim civilians.

"These youngsters are not yet ready to carry out blind attacks and to explode car bombs, Algerian-style. They have not yet completely broken with the Mauritanian society," says Mr. Moustafa, the AQIM expert. But, he cautions, bloodier attacks are likely to happen soon: "They have bad teachers. Their future targets will be Mauritanian."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Jul 22, 2009

Radical Islamists Slip Easily Into Kenya

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

HULUGHO, Kenya — A thin, dusty line is about the only thing separating Kenya, one of the Western world’s closest allies in Africa, from the Shabab, a radical Islamist militia that has taken over much of southern Somalia, beheading detractors, stoning adulterers and threatening to kill any Americans or Europeans who get in their way.

In most places this line, the official international border, is not even marked, let alone protected. In the village of Hulugho, there is simply a tattered Kenyan flag and a cinderblock schoolhouse with chicken-wire windows. Then a meadow of thorn trees and donkey dung. Then Shabab country.

Kenya is widely seen as a frontline state against the Islamist extremism smoldering across the Horn of Africa. Few expect the Shabab to make good on its threats to march en masse across the border. But the creeping fear, the one that keeps the security staffs at Western embassies awake at night, is that the Shabab or its foreign jihadist allies will infiltrate Kenya and attack some of the tens of thousands of Westerners living in the country, possibly in a major strike like Al Qaeda did in 1998.

Last month, Western counterterrorism experts in Kenya sent out text messages warning expatriates to stay away from malls in Nairobi, Kenya’s usually laid-back capital, because of possible suicide attacks by the Shabab. A few weeks later, the group threatened to destroy Nairobi’s “tall, glass buildings.”

The Shabab has already penetrated refugee camps inside Kenya, according to camp elders, luring away dozens of young men with promises of paradise — and $300 each. It has carried out cross-border attacks, kidnapping an outspoken cleric in May from a refugee camp 50 miles inside Kenya. Last Wednesday, in one of its boldest cross-border moves yet, a squad of uniformed, heavily armed Shabab fighters stormed into a Kenyan school in a remote town, rounding up all the children and telling them to quit their classes and join the jihad.

“If these guys can come in with their guns and uniforms in broad daylight,” said one of the teachers at the school, “they must be among us.”

Then on Saturday it happened again: Somali gunmen, widely believed to be with the Shabab, stormed the offices of an aid organization and kidnapped three aid workers from a Kenyan border town before melting back into Somalia.

American and British advisers are working closely with Kenyan counterterrorism teams, but the area along the Somali border is known to be a gaping hole.

“The Kenyans don’t have the skills to close the border, even if they wanted to,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocol. “People are very concerned. But on some level, we can’t defend Kenya’s border for them.”

When asked to assess the level of security at the Somali border, the diplomat flatly stated, “There is no security.”

The raging war in the country next door, between Somalia’s weak transitional government and the Shabab, is rapidly becoming a proxy war — with Western arms and money keeping the transitional government alive, while Arab and Pakistani jihadists with links to Al Qaeda fight for the Shabab.

Late last month, American officials acknowledged that they had shipped 40 tons of weapons to Somalia’s transitional government, a disclosure that has only sharpened the Shabab’s anti-American sentiments.

Kenyan security forces are now flooding into their borderlands, marching along the shimmering roads and across the unforgiving landscape, their assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

But the 400-mile border is inevitably porous, and Somali-speaking nomads from both countries flow seamlessly back and forth in diaphanous shawls and worn-out wooden carts. And the biggest proverbial holes may be in the police officers’ pockets.

Just this month, Transparency International listed Kenya as the most corrupt nation in East Africa. The region’s most corrupt public institution? The Kenyan police.

Even though the border is officially closed, Hassan Mohamed, a refugee who used to build houses in Somalia but got driven out by war, explained how thousands of Somali refugees find their way into Kenya each month.

“It’s easy,” he said, rubbing his thumb and index finger together in the universal sign of a bribe. “If you pay, you can come in.”

The cracked wooden shelves in the border-town markets are heaped with the telltale signs of a flourishing smuggling business: sacks of Pakistani sugar, foreign brands of sodas and soaps, cigarettes with Somali labels — all illegal imports from Somalia that somehow made it past the dozen police checkpoints on the Kenyan side.

Abdi Dimbil Alan, an elder who lives in Alin Jugul, a town near the Somali border, says that nearly every night he witnesses the same Somali businessmen paying off the Kenyan police to allow consumer goods and even assault rifles to slip through the border.

“These guys are so corrupt,” Mr. Abdi said, referring to the border police, “that if 100 Shabab pulled up with a truckload of weapons and said they were coming to Kenya to kill the president, the police would let them through — for the right price.”

Erick Kipkorir, a district officer in Alin Jugul, said Kenyan forces were hard-working and honest.

“We can’t say that nothing is coming in because, as you see, the border is very expansive,” he said. “But as for bribes, that has never happened.”

Ever since Al Qaeda blew up the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 200 people and wounding thousands, American counterterrorism officials have been watching East Africa warily. But in the areas along the Kenya-Somalia border, it seems that anti-Americanism is still spreading, despite the millions of dollars the American government has spent on a hearts-and-minds campaign.

Take an American-built well in the village of Raya. No one is using it, though Raya is desperately poor and dry.

“The Americans wanted to finish us,” said one villager, Ibrahim Alin, convinced that the American water engineers who built the well had poisoned it to sterilize him.

The Somali-speaking areas of Kenya have always been an uneasy fit, and Kenya has often responded brutally.

This area tried to secede in the 1960s and join Somalia, leading to a guerrilla war. In 1984, Kenyan security forces imprisoned and then killed thousands of ethnic Somali men at a remote airstrip, according to Kenyan human rights groups.

In recent weeks, Human Rights Watch accused Kenyan security services of raping women and smashing the testicles of men during a crackdown in northeastern Kenya in October.

“We’re trying to find a way that when they do deploy,” the Western diplomat said, “they do more helping than hurting.”

Jul 19, 2009

Seizures Show Somalia Rebels Need Money

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — The Shabab, Somalia’s most fearsome Islamist group, the one leading a guerrilla war against the weak transitional government, may be running into a problem with its cash flow.

In the past week, Shabab rebels have seized two French security advisers originally captured by a different band of Somalian gunmen, and now they are widely suspected of another kidnapping on Saturday morning along the Kenya-Somalia border.

“They need money,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocol. “It’s a fact.”

Another fact: kidnapping is one of the few money-making industries left in shattered Somalia.

According to a new posting on a Somalian insurgent Web site, the Shabab will soon try the Frenchmen in an Islamic court. And though the Shabab’s brand of justice often involves amputations and even beheadings, the Web site said that in this case, commanders were considering a “fine,” a signal that they may be after money more than blood.

Recent events bear that out, analysts say. While Somalia’s transitional government got a 40-ton pile of guns and ammunition from the United States in June, the Shabab’s outside support may be slowing down.

Kidnapping has been a lucrative business in Somalia for years, but now more than ever. The country’s central government imploded in 1991, and ever since then marauding gangs, warlords, teenage street fighters and various Islamist factions have scrambled for power and money. Pirates off Somalia’s coast netted tens of millions of dollars last year alone, seizing ships and ransoming back the crews. These days, the few foreigners who enter Somalia need platoons of gunmen to make sure they are not the next victims.

At a meeting last week with reporters in Paris, Claude Guéant, chief of staff for the French president, was asked if the kidnapping of the two French security advisers, who were snatched from their Mogadishu hotel on Tuesday, was a “money issue.”

Mr. Guéant answered that “it was likely” to be one.