Militant group al-Shabab becoming rising threat in East African states

Piece on this already ran in Black Swans on 16 August - Bloomberg article can you fork the piece from there?

 

East Africa's Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) has claimed that al-Shabab has now become a "transnational" organisation which projects threats of extremist violence far beyond Somalia. Due to al-Shabab having staged attacks in Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti and Ethiopia, the IGAD report emphasises that the threat posed by the group through out East Africa has only increased. Abdirahman Sahal, director of a Mogadishu-based centre on extremism, has claimed that a key factor for this increase is the fact that "they only need one or two people to attack a key place, to blow themselves up". 

IGAD came to the same conclusion, that it needs to counter al-Shabab both inside and outside Somalia. But whether the countries of the region can exert more pressure on al-Shabab inside Somalia, by cooperating at a level they have not achieved during the past nine years, remains to be seen.