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The United States on Tuesday placed the leader of an elite unit of Al-Shabaab on its terror blacklist accused of a January attack in Kenya that killed three Americans.
The State Department said it was listing Maalim Ayman, leader of Al-Shabaab Jaysh Ayman’s team, as well as Abdullahi Osman Mohamed, who manages both explosives and media for the Al-Qaeda-related movement as a whole, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.
Authorities say the Jaysh Ayman unit carried out the January attack on Camp Simba on the northern coast of Kenya, killing three American personnel and destroying several planes.
A 2018 study by the Jamestown Foundation described Jaysh Ayman as an attempt by Somalia-based Al-Shabaab to create a well-equipped “local” unit within Kenya.
Kenya has suffered a series of devastating attacks since sending troops to Somalia in 2011 as part of an African Union mission that ousted Al-Shabaab from the capital Mogadishu.
Al-Shabaab – designated by Washington as a terrorist movement in 2008 – was suspected of another suicide attack on Tuesday in a Mogadishu restaurant that killed at least five people.
Nathan Sales, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, said the United States is working with Kenya, Somalia and other nations to apply “all instruments of national power” against Al-Shabaab.
The designation freezes all assets that individuals may have in the United States and makes it a crime to assist them.
“Whether or not they have resources in the United States, sanctions have very powerful secondary consequences because it makes it much more difficult for designated individuals or organizations to move money into the international financial system,” Sales told reporters.
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