Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) have announced that they have arrested several ISIS members in the country. The announcement comes as intelligence reports from SI had earlier warned of growing presence of ISIS in Ethiopia.
Earlier in August, a video released by Islamic State Somalia (ISS) and approved by ISIS-central showed members chanting in Amharic the most spoken language in Ethiopia an indicator that the group is expanding into the country. The video posted the words to one of Islamic State’s best-known chants in Amharic and promised IS will release more materials in the language. The Ethiopian government has also maintained that there is a presence of individuals hailing from various places in Ethiopia and who are trained and indoctrinated by ISIS militants.
IS Somalia in the past has maintained that it draws membership from both Somalia and Ethiopia with a key propagandist for the group identified as Abu Zubayr Al-Habash being Ethiopian. It is paramount to note that while pressure has been mounting on ISS from Somali and Allied troops, US airstrikes and rival Al Shabaab the group may seek haven to regroup and recruit and Ethiopia offers ample conditions.
Why Ethiopia
The recent recruitment and mobilization campaign by ISIS include exploiting politically and ethnically restive countries and regions to seek recruits and affiliates and Ethiopia offers that. Ethiopia’s Muslim population comprises at least 35% of the at least 112 million people and as such offering a clear backdrop to nurture radical Islam and sectarian divide.
The vestiges of ancient Ethiopian civilization and the lynchpins that have kept Ethiopia together as a unified country is under a constant attack from radical Islamist and ethnic extremists. The political and ethnic unrest in Ethiopia has given rise to an Islamic Radical offshoot that seeks to give Oromo youths who are steadily equating themselves to extremism that could quite easily offer ISIS with recruits.
Security experts at Strategic Intelligence (SI), believes Islamic State through this video announcement is reaching out to Ethiopia’s Muslim community in an attempt to take advantage of ongoing ethnic and political unrest in Africa’s second-most populous nation thus multiplying threat levels in East Africa region. So far, IS operations have been reported in The Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Mozambique.
Threat Matrix
Despite the threat by ISIS in Somalia seeming small, countries like the United Kingdom have given travel advisories that might indicate a growing threat of terror activities in the country. Additionally, Oromo which is the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia has people scattered across the country with the youth movement identified as Qeerroo having radical Islamic undertones it is quite possible that the ISIS threat is prominent.
Qeerroo is a youth movement that has been characterized with preaching ethnic cleansing and with key leaders propagating a sectarian agenda as well as supporting al Shabaab in Somalia. Such characteristics are indicative of a movement disgruntled and prone to violence all prerequisites for ISIS recruitment. The ISIS arrests made in Ethiopia are worrisome as they could indicate a greater threat from the terror organization and could quite possibly be the genesis of a larger organization in the Horn of Africa region. While the threat may appear minimal, continued unrest in Ethiopia and Somalia and lack of political cohesion would quite possibly offer conditions that would grow ISIS in the region and Sub-Saharan Africa at large.
