Somalia · Al-Shabaab · ATMIS
Drone strikes, African Union troops, US Special Forces, and billions in counterterrorism funding have all been deployed against it. The group still controls territory, collects taxes, and attacks capital cities. This explainer examines why.
Somalia has not had a functioning central government since 1991, when the collapse of Siad Barre's regime triggered a civil war that fractured the country along clan lines. The thirty years that followed produced a rotating cast of internationally backed governments, endless reconciliation conferences, and periodic stabilization — none of which held for long.
Into this vacuum, Al-Shabaab emerged. It grew from a militant wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which briefly controlled much of southern Somalia in 2006 before being driven out by an Ethiopian military intervention backed by the United States. That intervention was intended to be swift. It ended with Ethiopia bogged down for two years, the ICU replaced by something more radical, and a grievance narrative that Al-Shabaab has exploited ever since.
The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) deployed in 2007 with an initial mandate to protect the Transitional Federal Government. It has been present, under one name or another, ever since — now operating as ATMIS (African Union Transition Mission in Somalia). The international community has spent billions. Al-Shabaab has not gone away.
Al-Shabaab — "The Youth" in Arabic — is a Somali jihadist group that formally aligned with al-Qaeda in 2012. It is not a monolithic organisation. Its leadership, ideology, and local clan relationships are layered and often contradictory. It enforces a strict interpretation of Sharia law in areas it controls while simultaneously operating as a sophisticated taxation machine — more comparable to a shadow government than a conventional terrorist cell.
The group recruits through a combination of ideology, coercion, and economic necessity. In areas where the state has never existed and clan structures have broken down, Al-Shabaab offers something the Federal Government cannot: order, predictability, and employment. Its fighters are often poorly paid, but the alternative — no employment at all — is common in rural southern Somalia.
Al-Shabaab is not popular. Polls consistently show Somalis want it gone. But popularity and state capacity are different things. The group persists not because it is loved, but because the structures that should replace it — courts, police, civil administration — remain too weak, too corrupt, or too absent in the areas it controls.
Al-Shabaab does not hold major cities. It lost Mogadishu in 2011 and Kismayo in 2012. But controlling cities was never the group's primary strategy. It operates across large swathes of rural southern and central Somalia — Jubaland, South West State, and parts of Hirshabelle — collecting taxes, running courts, and enforcing movement through checkpoints.
Its estimated annual revenue exceeds $100 million, derived from:
This revenue base makes Al-Shabaab financially self-sufficient in a way that distinguishes it from many other jihadist groups. It does not depend on foreign donors. It is, in a meaningful sense, a going concern.
"Al-Shabaab taxes a business in Mogadishu in the morning and attacks a government convoy outside the city in the afternoon. This is not chaos. It is a system."
Horn Updates editorsThe standard explanation for Al-Shabaab's resilience points to clan politics, corruption in the Somali security forces, and gaps between international rhetoric and resources. These are all real. But the deeper structural issue is that military campaigns can clear territory that the state is not ready to hold.
The 2011 push that retook Mogadishu, and the subsequent offensives that cleared Kismayo, Baidoa, and other towns, followed a consistent pattern: AU and Somali forces advance, Al-Shabaab withdraws into rural areas and continues operating, and the vacuum left behind is filled by a federal or regional administration that lacks the resources to deliver services, justice, or basic security. Al-Shabaab then returns — not always frontally, but through intimidation, assassination of local officials, and re-imposition of taxation.
The 2022 offensive launched by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud — backed by clan militias called "macawisley" — followed the same logic. Initial territorial gains were significant. Sustaining those gains proved harder. By 2024, Al-Shabaab had recovered ground in parts of Hirshabelle and was conducting major attacks in Mogadishu again.
The macawisley clan militia model shows both the potential and the limits of community-based counter-insurgency. Local fighters are more motivated, more trusted, and harder to infiltrate. But they operate under clan command structures that do not integrate easily with the national army — and their interests do not always align with the federal government's.
ATMIS — the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia — has a mandate to draw down and eventually exit. The original full withdrawal timeline was set for December 2024. It has since been extended repeatedly as Somali security forces failed readiness benchmarks. The current framework sets 2026 as the target date for transition to a UN-led or bilateral security architecture.
The ATMIS drawdown is not just a logistics exercise. It is a test of whether the Somali National Army (SNA) can independently hold territory that AU forces have been defending for nearly two decades. The evidence from earlier ATMIS drawdown phases is mixed at best. Bases handed over to the SNA have in some cases been abandoned within weeks under Al-Shabaab pressure.
Contributing nations — Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti — are themselves navigating domestic political and economic pressures that make long-term troop commitments harder to sustain. Ethiopia in particular, with its own internal security challenges, has reduced effective engagement in Somalia over recent years.
How Sudan's war is pressuring Ethiopia's western border →The proposed successor to ATMIS remains undecided as of early 2026. Options on the table include a UN-authorised mission under African Union leadership, bilateral security arrangements between Somalia and individual countries, or a smaller residual AU force focused on training and logistics rather than combat operations.
Al-Shabaab is not about to collapse. But it is also not about to take Mogadishu. The more likely futures are somewhere in between.
Watch for the ATMIS successor arrangement announcement, SNA performance in Hirshabelle and South West State, and whether the federal government resolves its political tensions with regional states — particularly Jubaland, which controls the most contested territory and has its own complex relationship with both Nairobi and Al-Shabaab.