Signs point to Somali war blowback
Devastating bombings in Uganda are likely to have been the work of al-Qaeda-allied Somali militants seeking to wreck a regional challenge to their growing hold on the failed Horn of Africa state.
On Sunday, suspected Somali militants carried out two bomb attacks in the Ugandan capital that ripped through two bars packed with soccer fans watching the final moments of World Cup final in an Ethiopian-themed restaurant and at a gathering in a rugby club in Kampala.
The top suspect in the Sunday night blasts, which killed over 64 among World Cup soccer fans in Kampala, is the Somali armed group al-Shabaab. Analysts said that if that turns out to be the case, then this will have been its first foreign strike.
The change of tactics, the theory goes, would have been decided in order to press home in the most dramatic way the group's opposition to an African Union peacekeeping mission it sees as Western-inspired.
A Western intelligence source said it was reasonable to see the force as the top suspect, in part because it had threatened Uganda for its participation in the African mission to end Somalia's two decades of war, chaos and periodic famine.
"Shabaab is clearly no longer a parochial threat," said Henry Wilkinson, of Janusian Security consultants in London.
"It's potentially a very important development because the attack, if it was carried out by them, shows they can strike far away from their operational centre of gravity."
The possibility of al-Shabaab's involvement is especially worrying since the group contains several al-Qaeda men who have contributed to the global network's anti-Western campaign.
These include high profile al-Qaeda suspects like Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, indicted for his alleged role in the 1998 Kenya and Tanzania U.S. embassy bombings that killed 240 people.
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