As ITAC and GreyLogic predicted: Jihadists and Pirates are forming a marriage of convenience in East Africa

Last Updated on Tuesday, 9 February 2010 06:18 Written by Jeffreycarr Tuesday, 9 February 2010 06:18

Figure 1. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait (click to enlarge)

About two months ago, on December 3, 2009, I used an MMO (Means, Motive, Opportunity) model to demonstrate what I perceived as an emerging threat in East Africa: a practical merging of interests between Al-Shabaab and Somali pirates; particularly once the undersea cables are laid later this year.

Today, the Washington Post ran this story (hat tip to @Galrahn) “Yemen Al-Qaeda urges Jihad, Wants Red Sea Blocked“.

According to the article, Saeed al-Shehri “called on Somalia’s Islamist al Shabaab insurgents to help block a narrow strait at the mouth of the Red Sea that separates Yemen from the Horn of Africa. ”At such a time the Bab (al Mandab) will be closed and that will tighten the noose on the Jews (Israel), because through it America supports them by the Red Sea,” Shehri said.”

Galrahn at the excellent Information Dissemination blog provides more indepth analysis on this disturbing pairing of interests between Jihadists and pirates:

Targeting a strategic choke point at sea specifically would suggest the strategic sophistication of Al-Qa’ida is improving, although the number of attacks that could be carried out effectively to close the Mandab Strait are very limited – in fact so limited one can only name two types of attacks that could be useful, and only one with any sustainability.

Mines.

Given the IED has become the weapon of choice for Al-Qa’ida in every theater they have fought the west, that would be the most likely capability AQAP would seek to utilize in that area. Sea mines however are very difficult to acquire, not exactly available on the black market, and require a much higher level of capability to develop and deploy than IEDs.

The other form of attack would be suicide boats, but the use of a suicide boat against a US flagged vessel might be difficult to pull off with ships actively watching for pirates in that region. One thing is clear, non-lethal force is not going to stop a suicide boat bomber, so if any US flagged ship is counting on non-lethal capabilities to prevent an attack by Al-Qa’ida with small boats in the region – not being armed to deal with an a suicide boat would seem very foolish.

This is a very serious problem that has huge ramifications on the entire region. How can one tell the difference between a pirate or a suicide boat? Shipping companies can bet their bottom line that Al-Qa’ida recognizes this confusion and is planning on exploiting it.

Piracy has been allowed to fester for over two years at growth rates each year of over 90% from the previous year, and is now in a position to add enormous tactical confusion. If you thought the problem was hard when ships were just being hijacked, wait until ships are being hijacked and attacked by suicide boats in the same seas, with nothing distinguishing one type of attack from the other until it is too late. Don’t think they can sink a ship? That would be a foolish assumption, Al-Qa’ida has proven very resourceful in adding lethality to IEDs.

The question is whether the west waits and allows Al Qaeda to strike first before changing the rules of engagement dealing with small boat threats in the region. It is not an easy decision for the Obama administration, because the target could be a 50,000 ton chemical tanker that could potentially create an enormous environmental disaster in a region already struggling from drought on land and reliant on the sea for food.

Although I hadn’t seen it at the time I wrote my December 3rd post, the National Journal ran a story on the very same day entitled “Somali Militants Training Pirates“.  It quotes a classified document prepared by Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre and released under Canada’s Access to Information Act that describes a “marriage of convenience” taking place between Somali pirates and Al-Shabaab.

The report describes an “Islamist extremism-piracy nexus” that involves Al-Shabab providing “weapons, combat training and local protection” to the Mudug pirates of southern Somalia.

In return, “elements of Al-Shabab continue to receive portions of the spoils from successful hijackings either in cash or seized weapons and materiel,” it says.

Pirate attacks in the region have soared over the past two years but in addition to threatening international shipping, they are also apparently financing the Somali extremist group at the centre of several major North American counter-terrorism investigations.

I don’t mean to gloat, but I have to say that I love the fact that this article and my post came out on the same day – December 3rd. If anyone has a copy of the original report, please contact me privately. It has “sentimental” value.

Before I close, I want to point out that my forecast as well as ITAC’s do not represent the conventional wisdom. A Rand report on this topic which was written in 2008 said:

The presumed convergence between maritime terrorism and piracy remains highly questionable, however. To date, there has been no credible evidence to support speculation about this nexus. Moreover,the objectives of the two actors remain entirely distinct. The business of piracy is directly dependent on a thriving and active global shipping industry and is aimed at profit. In contrast, terrorists—at least inthe context of the contemporary jihadist network—are assumed to be seeking the destruction of the global maritime trade network as part of their self-defined economic war against the West. As Young and Valencia note, piracy is predicated on financial gain while terrorism is motivated by political goals beyond the immediate act of attacking a maritime target; the former will eschew attention and aim to sustain their trade while the latter will court publicity and inflict as much damage as possible.

So much for conventional wisdom. Africa will remain on our emerging threats list for the duration of 2010. Indepth original analysis by GreyLogic analysts will be forthcoming for this region in the near future via our FLASH Traffic products.

START Announces a Syllabi Repository of Terrorism Research

Last Updated on Sunday, 21 December 2008 01:28 Written by admin Monday, 15 December 2008 11:26

This is a fantastic resource. Kudos to the folks at the University of Maryland’s START program for creating it.

On Monday, December 15, 2008, START launched the Terrorism Studies Syllabi Repository. The repository currently contains 154 undergraduate, 56 graduate, and 1 K-12 syllabi relevant to the study of terrorism and
responses to terrorism. The Web interface for the repository allows visitors to search by instructor name, course level, discipline, or one of 36 discrete keywords. Each syllabus is available for download in PDF format.

The Terrorism Studies Syllabi Repository is located at www.start.umd.edu/education/syllabi.

If you have a syllabus you would like to have considered for inclusion in the repository, please email it to education@start.umd.edu. 

The Friday Web

Last Updated on Friday, 24 October 2008 09:13 Written by admin Friday, 24 October 2008 09:13

Two studies on the Dark Web make up today’s Friday Brief. I may have one more to add over the weekend if I can find a free copy for you.

On the Topology of the Dark Web of Terrorist Groups

Abstract. In recent years, terrorist groups have used the WWW to spread their ideologies, disseminate propaganda, and recruit members. Studying the terrorist websites may help us understand the characteristics of these websites and predict terrorist activities. In this paper, we propose to apply network topological analysis methods on systematically collected the terrorist website data and to study the structural characteristics at the Web page level. We conducted a case study using the methods on three collections of Middle-Eastern, US domestic, and Latin-American terrorist websites. We found that these three networks have the small-world and scale-free characteristics. We also found that smaller size websites which share same interests tend to make stronger inter-website linkage relationships.

Data Reduction for the Scalable Automated Analysis of Distributed Darknet Traffic

Threats to the privacy of users and to the availability of Internet infrastructure are evolving at a tremendous rate. To characterize these emerging threats, researchers must effectively balance monitoring the large number of hosts needed to quickly build confidence in new attacks, while still preserving the detail required to differentiate these attacks.