Know about Al-Shabaab, which banned samosas, announced camels as reward for targeting Obama

New Delhi: Al-Shabaab means (The Youth). It is a Somalian group affiliated to the dreaded Al Qaeda. Al Shabaab was designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government in March 2008. Al Shabaab is seeking to turn Somalia into a fundamentalist Islamic state, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, which published a backgrounder on the group in July.The group is believed to be responsible for attacks in Somalia that have killed international aid workers, journalists, civilian leaders and African Union peacekeepers.It has struck abroad, too. It was responsible for the July 2010 suicide bombings in Kampala, Uganda, that killed more than 70 people, including a U.S. citizen, as they gathered to watch a World Cup final soccer match.Al Shabaab once issued a fatwa banning consumption of samosas saying the triangular fried samosa looks like the Christian Holy Trinity and was anti-Islamic. In Somalia, traders sell samosas filled with meat keema and veggies. Al Shabaab activists used loudspeakers and asked people to avoid eating samosas saying it was against Islam.According to a CNN report, Al Shabaab once announced a reward of 10 camels for anybody targeting US president Barack Obama and 10 hens for anybody targeting the then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. This announcement was posted on a jehadi website by Fouad Mohammed Khalaf, an Al Shabaab leader. Fouad, according to US sources, used to collect donations for Al Shabaab.On its part, the US has announced a reward of 7 million dollars (roughly Rs 38 crore) on the head of Al Shabaab's founder Ahmed Abdi Al-Muhammad. Decades of weak government amid grinding poverty have long made Somalia a target for radical Islamist groups.Al-Shabaab's predecessor was al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAI), which worked to create an Islamist emirate in Somalia. It was, in part, funded by former al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.AIAI, which the U.S. State Department designated as a terrorist organization, strengthened after the fall in 1991 of Siad Barre's military regime and amid the years of lawlessness that ensued.In 2003, a rift erupted between IAIA's old guard -- who were seeking to establish a new political front -- and its younger members (Al-Shabaab, which means "the youth"), who were seeking to establish fundamental Islamic rule.That led the latter to ally with a group of sharia courts -- the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) -- that was seeking to impose order over a landscape marked by feuding warlords in the capital city.Working together, the ICU and Al-Shabaab succeeded in 2006 in gaining control of Mogadishu. That sparked fears in neighboring Ethiopia that violence would spill over there, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.Those fears -- combined with a request from Somalia's transitional government -- led Ethiopian forces to enter Somalia in December 2006 and to remove the ICU from power.That move proved to be a turning point, one that radicalized Al-Shabaab, which attacked Ethiopian forces and gained control of parts of central and southern Somalia, according to a 2011 case study by Rob Wise, who was then with the Counterterrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.