It could have been the deadliest terror attack on Australian soil, but it was thwarted after some 400 police conducted raids across Melbourne this morning and arrested men of Somali and Lebanese descent, men allegedly intent on attacking an army base outside Sydney which is the nerve centre for Australian counterterrorism forces. read more

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I am told the Americans are in the midst of a major rethink of their policy towards Somalia, as fighting within the last few days threatens to topple the government in Mogadishu, such as it exists. read more

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Perhaps the most interesting line in the US homeland security secretary’s interview with me this morning concerns her fears over Somali Americans carrying out terrorist attacks inside the United States.

She concedes that a small number of Somalis have travelled from the US to Somalia to train in jihad.

“Right now we are talking about people going over there,” she says, “but any time you have individuals who are being trained, if they want to return, would have the operational-type skills to carry out an attack.. That is an area you need to pay attention to.”
 
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Somalia is off-limits to most western reporters and five Somali journalists have been killed there so far this year. Aid workers are frequently kidnapped – a million dollars is the going rate to have them released – and four WFP workers have been killed since last August.
 
So, to put it mildly, this was a difficult investigation to mount, relying heavily on the skills and bravery of the Somali member of our team. read more

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Watch out for my colleague Alex Thomson’s report tonight on how the much-hyped G20 protests, policed at a cost of millions, were today dominated by a few hundred Somalis, Ethiopians and Eritreans, which was not what much of the media, on hand in case of a scuffle, had in mind.

They were protesting about human rights abuses pepetrated by the government of Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, interviewed by this programme yesterday (see interview below). read more

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Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, is supposed to represent the whole of Africa at the G20 this week – apart from the South Africans, who are the only African G20 members.

Yesterday afternoon one of his advisers told me she doesn’t want him to be seen as yet another African leader out with the begging bowl. “Why not?” I countered. read more

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We’ve now had not one but TWO audio messages from Osama Bin Laden in the past week, urging Somalis to rise up against their new president, Sheikh Sharif, and wage jihad. Even though the sheikh has been quoted as saying he wants to introduce sharia law, Osama is not a happy man.
 
The latest Osama missive is called “Fight on, champions of Somalia” and goes like this:  read more

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The Washington Post has decided to put the issue of Somali jihadists on its front page.

Somewhat belatedly – National Public Radio and ABC News were ahead of the Post, and this doesn’t take us that much further than a Jamestown Foundation report in January.

But in a way it is a bigger deal over in the US than here, because the security services here still see extremists within the British Pakistani community as a far bigger threat than the relatively small Somali community. In other words, we have far more on our plates to worry about. read more

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It seems the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are taking more interest in Somali suicide bombers setting out from the US/UK to blow themselves up in their motherland.

I blogged briefly about this yesterday.

Today’s New York Times has another example - Militants Drew Recruit in US, FBI Says. It is interesting that the FBI thinks Shirwa Ahmed was indoctrinated in Minnesota. In other words, the radicalisation was homegrown.

Far more tentative is the question of whether a militant who returns to the US or UK from Somalia then poses a threat.

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