Somali telecommunications company, Hormund, continues to feature predominantly in intelligence organizations ‘homeland security strategic frameworks for countering terrorism’ discourse. The company continues to directly finance the Al-Qaeda branch in Somalia besides providing logistical support in specific frontier prefectures. These subversive activities continue to pose significant threats to the regions security. Kenya and Ethiopia are victims of these subversive activities by Hormund Telecom.
The 9/11, Paris bombing, Westgate bombing in Nairobi, and various other terrorist attacks brought an international sense of urgency to disrupting terrorists’ financial and logistical networks. The greatest difficulty is that Hormund Telecom continues to provide strategic logistical support to the Al-Qaeda branch in Somalia, Harakat Shabaab Mujahideen, and this has helped this particular terrorist organization stay aware of governments’ efforts to stymie their activities and adjust their operations accordingly.
Hormund Telecom allows the terrorist group to exploit its telecommunications network to help domestic and cross-border terror cells in planning and funding attacks in Kenya and near the border with Ethiopia. Intelligence shows the company has provided the terrorist organization access to its systems and worse gives the organization commissions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for sabotaging telecom services of competitors. Along the border with Ethiopia, particularly the Oromo prefecture, Hormund Telecom has provided saboteurs with long-range network jammers to disrupt and occasionally jam telecom services of other providers. This discredits the quality of services offered by the targeted service providers subsequently forcing end-users/customers to do away with them and subscribe to Hormund Telecom services.
In Kenya, apart from covert jamming of Safaricom Telecommunication network, subsequently weakening the quality of the signals, Hormund Telecom pays Shabaab terrorists organization thousands of dollars to destroy BTS that generate quality signals along the border. One such recent attack was reported at Fafi in Garissa County in middle NEP.
