Suspected Al-Shabaab Jihadists Arrested in Tanzania with Explosives

Tanzanian authorities said on Wednesday that its police arrested at least nine suspected members of al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist terror group based in Somalia, during a raid on a local mosque. An additional person was killed after trying to escape, and one officer was injured after a suspect tried to cut off his head.

The mosque was raided due to a tip from local citizens and is in the Kilombero district, Morogoro region. According to Leonard Paul Lwabuzala, the regional police chief, “The suspects arrested at a mosque were found in possession of 30 sticks of explosives, detonating cord, a black flag, military uniforms, masks and swords.”

Tanzania has been on high alert for al-Shabaab terrorist attacks since the gruesome massacre at Garissa University in Kenya earlier this month. Al-Shabaab jihadists killed at least 147 people at the school, most of them young students, primarily by separating the Christians from the Muslims to kill the former. Kenya borders Tanzania to the north, so violent spillover is a real threat.

Brutal acts like the Garissa attack and the aforementioned attempted beheading of one the Tanzanian officers are not reckless acts of violence; rather, they are part of al-Shabaab’s larger mission to first overthrow the Somali government en route to regional and global aspirations to impose sharia law. Therefore, despite al-Shabaab’s stated reason for waging jihad against Kenya – Kenyan troops helping Somalis fight the terrorist group – the jihadists would regardless commit such atrocities.

As a result, Tanzania, another state in East Africa, is a logical target for al-Shabaab’s plans even though it does not border Somalia and has not sent troops there. Tanzania is known for having relative peace and stability and a vibrant economy, making the increasing frequency of Islamist attacks all the more disturbing.

Earlier this year, for example, Tanzanian security forces clashed with men hiding out in northern Tanzania possibly affiliated with al-Shabaab. One army officer was killed, and six others were injured. The most well known Islamist terror attack targeted the U.S. embassies on August 7, 1998 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 11 and 213, respectively, and injuring many more people. Al-Qaeda, which is heavily linked to al-Shabaab, was responsible.

Many recent attacks in Tanzania have been unsophisticated and crude, but according to Dr. Andre LeSage of National Defense University, “As events over the past few years in neighboring Kenya have demonstrated, today’s seemingly minor and manageable threats can evolve quickly into something far more lethal and intractable.”

With these ideas in mind, growing jihadist activity in Tanzania is concerning. Tanzania is important to the stability of East Africa as a peaceful, prosperous state, and al-Shabaab is threatening such desirable qualities in a state, particularly in a chaotic region. Furthermore, al-Shabaab – and other groups that share its ideology like al-Qaeda and Boko Haram – pose a serious humanitarian crisis to any place it exists. How long can the world allow such crises to spread without seeing insufficient action as a contradiction to the notion of international laws?