Somalia is facing challenges of Al-Shabaab embedding moles inside government.
The July 24 suicide bombing that killed the Mayor of Mogadishu was disturbing on all levels, security experts say. Abdirahman Omar Osman was killed by one of his own aides, a female who was blind, and who acted in covert with another one of his employees, also a female.
Osman’s death highlights unsettling fact, a cold and hard reality, that the Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Shabaab had once again infiltrated an important Somali government entity.
In April 2019, Somali authorities arrested the commissioner of Mahaas, a town in central Somalia for facilitating Al-Shabaab suicide bombing that killed the commissioner’s deputy.
In 2016, a court convicted Abdiweli Mohamed Maow, who was the head of Mogadishu airport security, for aiding in smuggling a laptop computer bomb onto a outbound flight.
The bomb exploded 15 minutes after takeoff but luckily failed to bring down the plane, which safely returned to the Mogadishu airport.
In 2014, Abdisalam Mohamed Hassan, a top official in Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), was found guilty of providing photos of security agents and other identifying data to Al-Shabaab.
After the recent attack on the Mogadishu mayor, Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, better known as Farmajo, ordered the government to come up with a comprehensive plan to root out individuals in government agencies “aiding terrorists directly and indirectly.”
Said Abdulle Dilib, a former Al-Shabaab operative who defected to the Somali government says the militant group works hard to infiltrate government agencies, offices and security teams.
“They infiltrate in three ways,” he said. “They infiltrate by sending one of theirs into the government agencies; they also try to recruit someone already working with the government, and they try to secure the services of an agent, someone they can pay in return for assistance.”
He said the group has been most successful in buying the services of people working for the government, who tend to get paid on an irregular basis. “They pay them, it’s not a lot of money – two to three hundred dollars,” he said.
