Al-Shabaab

In order to learn more about the conflicts we decided to make use of the short summary (text field) of each of the events that stores the most important details surrounding the conflict that can give us more context. To analyse it, we preprocessed the text data and created word clouds to discover the main themes in the context of each conflict type.

There are a couple of interesting things to see here. Firstly, a word that is certainly most visible is al Shabaab which is present in almost all types of conflicts. As it turns out from our data, this is an organisation which is most often categorized as a Rebel Group and is mainly active in Somalia, which can already shed a light on such an extreme high number of events recorded for that country. Almost 20 000 people died in events which Al Shabaab was one side of. Additionally, they definitely most frequently engage in battles but it must be noted that the next two highest categories are remote violence and violence against civilians which can indicate that al Shabaab may be a terrorist organization.

How is Al Shabaab classified in our dataset?

Actor Type
Rebel groups	7263
Political Militias	175

In what countries is Al Shabaab most active? (Top 3)

Country
Somalia	6943
Kenya	292
Tanzania	7

Whom (what particular actors) Al Shabaab fights most often with?

Actor Name
Military Forces of Somalia (2012-)	1933
AMISOM: African Union Mission in Somalia (2007-)	1104
Civilians (Somalia)	925
Military Forces of Somalia (2004-2012)	837
Military Forces of Ethiopia (1991-)	240
Unidentified Armed Group (Somalia)	209

From the Wikipedia page we can see that Al Shabaab is in fact the largest terrorist organization and a jihadist fundamentalist group based in East Africa [1]. It is estimated to consist of 5 000 - 9 000 armed fighters and it is in control of most rural areas in S/C Somalia [2]. Al Shabaab in Arabic means The Youth. Its broad aim is to establish an Islamic state in Somalia [3]. Despite a long-running African Union offensive against the Islamist group (AMISOM: African Union Mission in Somalia is among the actors that most frequently fight with Al-Ahabaab according to our data), the organisation remains capable of carrying out massive attacks in Somalia and surrounding countries [3].