Al Shabaab

Al Shabaab is an Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamist terrorist organization based in Somalia. Al Shabaab is a brutal terrorist group which controls large swathes of the country and frequently projects attacks into neighboring countries, including Kenya and Uganda. Its precursor organization was founded in the mid-1990s, but al Shabaab did not affiliate with Al Qaeda until 2012. Although al Shabaab does not actively coordinate attacks in the West, it is deeply anti-Western in its rhetoric and ideology and has inspired terror attacks in the West while also recruiting Americans to travel to Somalia. There was a particularly active network of al Shabaab recruiters targeting the Somali community in Minnesota, which resulted in a number of convictions for individuals attempting to support a foreign terrorist organization.