The Intelligence Review | volume 3 | issue 5 |

AMISOM announced its exit strategy from Somalia at the beginning
of 2017. In May 2017, AMISOM officially announced its plans to
withdraw 1,000 troops from Somalia by the end of 2017. It also
announced that it would withdraw the remaining 1,000 troops by the
end of 2018, leaving roughly 200 troops in country with an indefinite
timeline in place. AMISOM believes that its new exit strategy will ultimately
reduce the threat from al-Shabaab, secure the country’s political process
and successfully transfer security responsibilities to Somali government
forces (Williams 2017). However, political feuds between the national
government and Somalia’s regional administrations, pervasive corruption,
and recent setbacks against al-Shabaab, threaten to derail AMISOM’s
exit strategy.
High-profile attacks on government officials and armed raids on
AMISOM bases throughout southern Somalia have become an almost
weekly occurrence in 2018. March was a particularly busy month, and
one which began with one of al-Shabaab’s most high-profile attacks,
when its fighters tried to assassinate government and military officials
throughout Mogadishu for three consecutive days (Anon. 2018c).
These incidents received relatively scant media attention in the West,
likely due to the attacks failing to actually kill any of the government
officials targeted. However, the significance of these attacks should
not be overlooked. They were well-planned and had specific targets
and objectives, which suggests that careful surveillance was carried
out on the targeted officials prior to the attacks. The attacks also
revealed how well-equipped al-Shabaab was, due to the amount of
resources that were used to carry them out. Notably, these attacks
were carried out just days after al-Shabaab reportedly lost 32 of its
fighters in a lengthy firefight with the SNA (Anon. 2018b). The group
suffered those losses in a central Somalian village, where a group of
Somali citizens refused to pay its taxes to the organization’s members.
It was reported that once the al-Shabaab militants began killing
anyone who refused to pay them, some of the villagers took up arms
against al-Shabaab until SNA forces arrived and began engaging the
militants as well. The engagement lasted 6 hours, and the SNA forces
reported killing 32 al-Shabaab members.
Outside of the urban centers in southern Somalia, al-Shabaab’s prowess
as a traditional insurgent force has also been on display in 2018. In
April, the group successfully attacked multiple Ugandan People’s
Defense Force (UPDF) bases near the Southern Somalian town of
Bulo Marer, roughly 80 miles southwest of Mogadishu (Anon. 2018d).
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