AQIM’s leadership has never hidden its ambitions of expanding further into West Africa, partly due to the pressure from an aggressive counterinsurgency campaign by the government in its native Algeria.

An al-Shabaab video, nearly a month after an assault by the group in El-Adde on a Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) base that killed over 100 Kenyan soldiers serving under the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), demonstrates a clear sign of the group’s renewed focus on Kenyan targets.