| Excellent review of the events in Somalia and worth the time to read. |
... Harakat ash-Shabaab al-Mujahidin aka the Mujahideen Youth Movement. It was originally the youth movement of the Islamic Courts, now pretty much all of what's left of it. They are aligned with al-Qaeda but operate more like the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban...
krazed killer dressed as a woman walked into a graduation ceremony at the Hotel Shamo in downtown Mogadishu and detonated his payload.
In the wake of the blast, 24 people lay dead, including three cabinet ministers of the Transitional Federal Government.
It looked like a big propaganda coup for al-Shabaab considering the number of senior government officials either killed or injured.
Instead, it proved to be one of the critical turning points that led to the decline of the krazed killer group and its eventual retreat from Mogadishu under pressure from African Union
...a union consisting of 53 African states, most run by dictators of one flavor or another. The only all-African state not in the AU is Morocco. Established in 2002, the AU is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was even less successful...
troops.