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Somalia's al-Shabaab have welcomed the appointment of Ayman al-Zawahri as the new head of al-Qaeda, the global terror group to which al-Shabaab have pledged allegiance. (Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)
Somalia’s al-Shabaab Islamist militants have welcomed the appointment of Ayman al-Zawahiri as the new head of al-Qaeda following the killing of Osama bin Laden by US Navy Seals in Pakistan last month.
“We welcome Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, Allah protect him,” said al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamed Rage.
“We shall work with him the way we worked with our late brother Sheikh Osama bin Laden. The blood of Osama shall not be for nothing,” he said in a statement broadcast on Shabaab-controlled radio stations in Mogadishu.
Rage also issued a warning to the US. “Americans and their allies, be aware that there are thousands of Osamas who stand to fulfil the ideology of our hero,” he said.
In recent years more than 20 Somali-Americans have left the US to fight alongside al-Shabaab and the FBI is concerned that some may plan to return to the US to carry out terrorist attacks.
Although al-Shabaab has fought a fierce and bloody insurgency in Somalia it has shown only a limited capacity for attacks on foreign soil, its first – and so far only – being the suicide bombings in Uganda during the World Cup Final last year.
Al-Qaeda in East Africa was dealt a blow earlier this month when Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, wanted for masterminding the US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, was killed in a shootout at a roadblock in Mogadishu.
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