...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
is trying to expand its territory by establishing a branch in what its fighters call the "little emirate": the war-torn country of Somalia.
Winning ground there won't be easy. Al-Shabaab
... Somalia's version of the Taliban, functioning as an arm of al-Qaeda...
, a Somali group linked to al-Qaeda, has a long-standing presence in the country at Africa's eastern edge and has threatened those who join the Islamic State with death. But that hasn't stopped a trickle of fighters -- likely a few dozen -- from switching sides, raising concerns among U.S. officials, who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars of aid in a new Somali government and a regional military campaign against Islamist murderous Moslems.
Somalia holds potentially huge rewards for the murderous Moslem group: It is a marginally governed nation with the continent's longest coastline and borders three U.S. allies -- Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya.
"Looking at Somalia, ISIL is trying to insert itself and then may threaten to move into Kenya," Rose Gottemoeller, the State Department's undersecretary for arms control and international security, said at a roundtable in Johannesburg this month. ISIL is an acronym for the Islamic State.