Shabab

Insurgents in army uniforms stormed a hotel in the Somali capital Tuesday, killing at least 31 people, including six lawmakers, in an hourlong blaze of gunfire, explosions and smoke. The Shabab movement, an Islamic militant group fighting the frail internationally backed government of Somalia for years, claimed responsibility for the attack. Statements from the group cited by news organizations indicated that the assault was part of a "massive war" it declared Monday against the Somali government and the United Nations-backed peacekeeping force propping it up. Perpetually in crisis, the violent Horn of Africa country of Somalia has been a source of instability since the early 1990s.

A former university librarian on Thursday said he wanted to kill as many Americans as possible in bomb attacks that killed 76 people in the Ugandan capital last month. In a public confession at a news conference in Kampala arranged by Ugandan military intelligence, Issa Ahmed Luyima said he planned the July 11 attacks and roped his younger brother and others into the plot. His motive was a deep hatred of Americans, the 33-year-old Ugandan said. "My rage was with the Americans whom I deemed responsible for all the suffering of Muslims around the world," he was quoted as saying by news agency reports.

Fourteen people have been accused of providing support to the Somali terrorist group Shabab in indictments unsealed Thursday that shed light on "a deadly pipeline" of funding and fighters to the group from cities across the United States, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said. Most of those charged were U.S. citizens of Somali descent. It has long been known that disaffected Somali Americans were leaving their homes in Minnesota and other states to join Shabab, an Islamist army whose several thousand fighters are battling Somalia's weak government.

The streets of Mogadishu echo with the footsteps of Shabab fighters, the rattle of their rifles and their recitations of a medieval version of Islamic law that espouses public beheadings and the stoning of adulterers. The militant group has loomed as a dangerous and fanatical curiosity contained from the outside world by war and the cruel designs of a failed state. But Shabab expanded its battlefield by hundreds of miles Sunday when it reached across porous borders and claimed responsibility for twin bombings that killed 76 people in Uganda.

If there were any doubts that the bloody conflict in Somalia could pose a threat to African stability, they were buried in the Ugandan capital of Kampala this week along with the 76 people killed in twin bombings orchestrated by Somalia's extremist Islamic militia known as Shabab. The attacks, which targeted fans watching the World Cup final on televisions at a rugby club and an Ethiopian restaurant, were, in fact, a triple blow against Uganda, Ethiopia and what the radical group perceives to be ungodly Western influences such as soccer.

A powerful Al Qaeda-affiliated militant faction in Somalia claimed responsibility Monday for two bomb attacks in Uganda's capital that killed at least 74 people who had gathered to watch a broadcast of Sunday's World Cup championship game, sparking fears that Somalia's long and bloody conflict may spill into neighboring countries. The twin bombings in Kampala, within minutes of each other, were the first known attacks Al Shabab, or "The Youth," has mounted outside Somali borders.

Dressed in camouflage and hunkering among his soldiers, Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed appeared on the front lines Thursday in an offensive against Islamic militants in his country's shattered capital of Mogadishu, witnesses and government officials said. Fierce firefights rumbled across the city on the 50th anniversary of Somali independence, a landmark spoiled by years of civil war, a refugee crisis and the rise of an Al Qaeda-linked Islamic group that controls all but a few of Mogadishu's streets.

A million people in southern Somalia risk starvation after the World Food Program on Tuesday suspended humanitarian aid because of attacks and threats by Al Qaeda-linked Islamic rebels. "Rising threats and attacks on humanitarian operations, as well as the imposition of a string of unacceptable demands from armed groups, have made it virtually impossible for WFP to continue reaching up to 1 million people in need in southern Somalia," the United Nations organization said in a statement.

In swift retaliation for the U.S. killing this week of a suspected Al Qaeda fugitive in Somalia, insurgents attacked the main African Union peacekeeping base in Mogadishu with twin truck bombs Thursday, killing at least nine people, including four AU soldiers. Suicide bombers attempted to infiltrate the heavily guarded seaside base by impersonating U.N. personnel, AU officials said. Among the wounded were unidentified senior Somali government officials, who were visiting the base, and the newly arrived African Union force commander, Ugandan Maj. Gen. Nathan Mugisha, who suffered minor injuries, AU and government officials said.

The deadly U.S. military strike in Somalia this week, carried out by a team of commandos in helicopters, was designed to limit civilian casualties while targeting an Al Qaeda-linked suspect, American officials said Tuesday. A U.S. official familiar with details of the raid said the special operations forces had tracked Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan for some time, but waited for him to move away from a populated area before attacking. "We've all learned how important it is to avoid civilian casualties," the official said.