By Guled Ahmed
Guest Writer, Middle East Inst. Scholar
On 10 August 2026, a United Nations monitoring report on al-Qaeda and the Islamic State disclosed that Al-Shabaab fighters had traveled from Somalia to Afghanistan. At first glance, the finding could be read as a striking new development. It was not. Open-source reporting and human-source intelligence had pointed toward renewed Somalia–Afghanistan movement well before the UN acknowledgement, and I had publicly reported Al-Shabaab travel to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in January 2025. The warning signs were visible even earlier. On 23 April 2024, Afghanistan International reported comments by former Afghan intelligence chief Ahmad Zia Siraj, who said that Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab had come to Afghanistan and argued that the country had become a center for terrorist organizations after the Taliban returned to power. Yet those warnings received surprisingly little sustained international attention. The larger question is therefore not simply whether the travel occurred, but how large the intelligence and reporting gap surrounding Afghanistan has become since the fall of Kabul, and how much Western intelligence and military agencies may know that has not entered the public record.
Official U.S. oversight reporting adds weight to that question. Lead Inspector General reporting for Operation Enduring Sentinel has continued to track the status of ISIS-K, al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, including assessments informed by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Reports covering 2025 and 2026 show that Afghanistan remains an active counterterrorism concern rather than a closed chapter. (Office of Inspector General) The historical contradiction is clear. Before the Taliban takeover, U.S. oversight reporting stated that the Taliban continued to maintain its relationship with al-Qaeda and provided it safe haven. (Office of Inspector General) After the takeover, the July 2022 killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, at a house associated with a senior Taliban figure, again raised questions about the Taliban’s commitment to preventing Afghanistan from becoming a sanctuary for internationally connected jihadists. (Office of Inspector General)
At the same time, the Taliban actively fights ISIS-K, which it regards as a major threat. That produces an unusually complex security environment: the Taliban can simultaneously suppress one jihadist organization while preserving or tolerating historical relationships with others. This matters for understanding Al-Shabaab. Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, the relationship linking Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Somalia, and Al-Shabaab appears to have developed across several levels. Al-Shabaab and other al-Qaeda affiliates publicly celebrated the Taliban victory, while the wider al-Qaeda movement treated Kabul’s fall as proof that a long insurgency could survive overwhelming foreign pressure and eventually convert military endurance into political authority.
According to our source reporting from Mogadishu, the relationship did not remain purely ideological or propagandistic. Senior Al-Shabaab figures traveled four times to Afghanistan between 2022 and 2026 for medical treatment, military strategy, organizational coordination, procurement, and broader political or geopolitical discussions. Some visits allegedly involved senior commanders receiving medical care, while others were linked to strategic and military consultations. There are also reports of movement in the opposite direction, including allegations that Taliban-linked individuals traveled to Somalia in 2025 and interacted with Somali actors. These specific identities and meetings still require independent corroboration, but the broader pattern became increasingly difficult to dismiss after the UN independently confirmed that Al-Shabaab personnel had traveled from Somalia to Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda transitioned from a non-state actor to a state-embedded actor following the fall of Kabul and Damascus and remains the most plausible institutional bridge linking these developments. Al-Shabaab is an al-Qaeda affiliate and proxy, but that relationship predates the 2012 merger and reaches back to the Afghanistan experience of the movement’s founding generation. The post-Kabul relationship should therefore not be understood as the sudden emergence of a formal Taliban–Al-Shabaab alliance. It is better interpreted as the reactivation of an older jihadist ecosystem in which al-Qaeda provides historical continuity, while Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and increasingly Syria perform different strategic functions that benefit Iran, Russia, China, and, to an extent, the growing Mecca Agreement alliances.
The financial and commercial dimensions are equally important. Taliban-controlled Afghanistan remains constrained by sanctions, limited access to formal finance, and restrictions affecting the banking system. Those conditions create strong incentives to attract trade, investment, tourism, hard currency, and alternative financial flows. The Taliban’s own media strategy increasingly highlights development and normalization. The Washington Post documented in March 2024 how Taliban authorities cultivated YouTubers and video bloggers, rewarded favorable creators with access to ministries and official stories, and tightened pressure on critical content. (The Washington Post)
In that context, Afghanistan has become what I describe as the “WeWork of terrorism”: not a centralized terrorist headquarters, but a permissive environment where former mujahideen, jihadist networks, financiers, legitimate investors, traders, religious intermediaries, and political actors can reconnect while operating under very different identities. The distinction is essential. A businessman is not a terrorist because he invests in Afghanistan, nor is a religious traveler suspect because he is Afghan. The analytical problem lies in identifying the point at which legitimate commercial, religious, or political activity begins to overlap with legacy militant relationships, opaque capital, informal finance, and historical jihadist networks.
To understand the contemporary Al-Shabaab–Taliban relationship, it is therefore necessary to return to the pre-9/11 Afghanistan generation. Future Al-Shabaab leaders trained or fought in the same broader jihadist milieu that included al-Qaeda and the Taliban. What changed after Kabul fell was not the existence of that historical connection. What changed was that the connection appears to have become physical again, and then widened into medical, military, financial, political, informational, commercial, and geopolitical channels.
1. Historical Foundation: Before 2021
The Afghanistan connection predates Al-Shabaab itself. Several early leaders—including Aden Hashi Ayro, Ahmed Abdi Godane, Ibrahim Haji Jama al-Afghani, and Mukhtar Robow—were reported to have trained, fought, or developed jihadist ties in Afghanistan or the wider Afghanistan–Pakistan environment. Most of this founding core was later killed; Robow is the principal surviving figure from that generation. The United States removed him from its Rewards for Justice wanted list in 2017, and he later entered the Somali government as Minister of Endowments and Religious Affairs.
Al-Qaeda later became the clearest institutional link between Somalia and the wider Afghan jihadist milieu. Al-Shabaab publicly addressed bin Laden in its 2009 “At Your Service, Osama” message; 2010 correspondence between bin Laden and Ahmed Godane shows discussions over formal unity; and in February 2012, Al-Shabaab formally joined al-Qaeda. Public evidence of a separate Taliban–Al-Shabaab command structure remained limited, but al-Qaeda clearly connected Al-Shabaab to the broader Afghan jihadist network. After the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, al-Qaeda celebrated the victory, reinforcing a long-war model centered on surviving foreign intervention, exploiting state weakness, preserving organizational cohesion, and outlasting external political will.
The post-Kabul phase began with ideological celebration. After the Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021, Al-Shabaab media outlets praised the U.S. withdrawal and explicitly drew parallels between Afghanistan and Somalia, arguing that just as the Taliban had captured U.S.-supplied military vehicles, Al-Shabaab would eventually seize Turkish-supplied vehicles from Somali forces. The message framed the Taliban victory as proof that a patient insurgency could outlast foreign military support and ultimately defeat the government it sustained. Al-Shabaab’s reaction was part of a wider jihadist response: al-Qaeda’s central leadership formally congratulated the Taliban, portraying the U.S. withdrawal as a historic defeat and presenting jihad as the path to victory; JNIM and AQIM issued their own congratulatory statement; and jihadist figures and groups in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere similarly celebrated the Taliban takeover. For Al-Shabaab, Kabul therefore became more than a symbolic victory: it offered a contemporary model for surviving sustained foreign intervention, weakening an internationally backed government, and waiting for external political will to collapse.
According to our HUMINT from Somali military-intelligence sources in Mogadishu, the first reported post-Kabul Al-Shabaab travel to Afghanistan occurred in November 2022, when Al-Shabaab Amir Ahmed Umar Abu Ubaidah (Ahmed Diriye) traveled for medical treatment with three senior associates: Dahir Gacamey, Abdi Ali Kahin, and Bashir Abdi Samad. The reporting states that the four were treated at a regional/general hospital in Kandahar City; because the source does not identify the facility by name, possible major hospitals fitting that description include Mirwais Regional Hospital, Aino Mina Hospital, Mohmand Hospital, Al Farhad Hospital, Ayoubi Hospital, Sial Curative Hospital, and Sidal Hospital. The same HUMINT identifies this as Al-Shabaab’s first post-2021 visit to Afghanistan and its first direct engagement with Taliban authorities after the fall of Kabul, and states that during the visit Ahmed Diriye provided $3 million to the Taliban government for reconstruction, adding a financial dimension to what began as a medical trip and marking an early stage in the renewed Al-Shabaab–Taliban relationship.
The reported travel route began in Jilib, from where the group moved by road through Somalia to Puntland. They then crossed the Gulf of Aden by boat to Houthi-controlled Yemen, where the route reportedly included contact with AQAP. From Yemen, they traveled by air to Syria, then continued overland through Iraq and Iran, moved into the Waziristan region of Pakistan, and finally crossed by land into Afghanistan, continuing onward to Kandahar Province for medical treatment. The HUMINT further identifies two reported liaison figures in Afghanistan: Abdusatar Abu al-Junud, described as the Taliban contact for Al-Shabaab, and Abdulaziz Higmatiyar, described as the al-Qaeda contact for Al-Shabaab in Afghanistan. Both names are reported aliases rather than confirmed legal identities.
Phase 2 — February 2024: Al-Shabaab Delegation to Afghanistan
In February 2024, according to multiple Somali military-intelligence sources I interviewed, Al-Shabaab dispatched a three-person delegation to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in an effort to secure materials connected to its IED program. Correction: earlier reporting had placed this travel in August 2024, but after recently re-verifying the timeline with the original sources for this investigation, the delegation’s departure was confirmed as February 2024. The delegation reportedly included Daahir Gacmey, also known as Cadi Al Xaq; Sheikh Hassan Yacquub; and Mahamed Abdi Samakaab. Source reporting indicates that the men traveled on Somali passports and remained in Afghanistan until early November 2024, operating under the protection of al-Qaeda-linked and Taliban networks.
The reported mission reflected a broader logistical problem facing Al-Shabaab. Somali military-intelligence sources assessed that the group was experiencing shortages in materials used for IED production and was looking beyond its traditional supply networks in Yemen. The Red Sea crisis had reportedly disrupted those channels, pushing Al-Shabaab to explore Afghanistan as an alternative source while still seeking to rebuild ties with the Houthis. The broader assessment at the time was that Al-Shabaab was preparing for a more aggressive campaign in 2025, including attempts to seize additional territory and intensify pressure on the Somali government in Mogadishu.
The first major public warning that Al-Shabaab had established a presence in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan came from Ahmad Zia Siraj, the former head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security. In April 2024, Siraj said that representatives of Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram were present in Afghanistan and in contact with the Taliban. He described Afghanistan under Taliban rule as a “training center for all terrorist groups” and said al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other groups had invited members from abroad to travel there because they enjoyed freedom of action. Siraj went further, warning about the permissive environment surrounding these networks. Referring to the ability of outside actors to exploit militant groups in Afghanistan, he said: “Anyone can enter Afghanistan with a bag of money and take over these groups.”
At the same time, the Taliban appeared to be deliberately courting Somali-born influencers living in Western countries to project a softer image of Taliban rule to Somali audiences. Somali-Australian creator AbdiXplorer traveled to Afghanistan in June 2024, met Taliban members, called them “brothers,” and portrayed Afghanistan as safer than many Western countries. Somali-American influencer Marian Abdi, known as Geenyada Madow, traveled separately in July–August 2024, posting favorable content from Kabul and Bamyan; her portrayal drew backlash from Afghan women, who accused her of presenting a sanitized image of Taliban rule while women faced severe restrictions. In the wider context of the evolving Taliban–Al-Shabaab relationship, this outreach functions not only as propaganda and a potential recruitment tool, but also as a means of normalizing Taliban-style governance for Somali audiences—making an Al-Shabaab political model appear more familiar, acceptable, and governable rather than purely insurgent.
That information campaign later became more openly political. On 21 March 2025, a prominent pro-Taliban account posted an image of Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud under the caption “A Puppet President.” Historically, this was a notable shift: Taliban-aligned messaging was no longer limited to promoting Afghanistan positively to Somali audiences, but had begun directly attacking Somalia’s sitting president. In the context of growing Taliban–Al-Shabaab ties facilitated through al-Qaeda, the message fit the same broader narrative—delegitimizing the Somali government while presenting Taliban-style rule as a more legitimate alternative model.
Phase 3 — January–July 2025: Al-Jolani Outreach, Sunni Alignment, and the Taliban Model
In January 2025, according to Somali military-intelligence sources, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani reached out to Al-Shabaab emir Ahmed Diiriye and Mahad Karate. The conversation, reportedly held on 9 January, focused on persuading Al-Shabaab to reduce attacks on Sunni Muslims in Somalia, distance itself from al-Qaeda, and consider a broader Sunni alignment against Iran and the Houthis. By April 2025, a subsequent intelligence briefing from Mogadishu alleged that al-Jolani and Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi had held extensive phone discussions with ISIS-Somalia leader Abdul Qadir Mumin and Ahmed Diiriye. Those talks reportedly expanded beyond reducing civilian attacks to a wider political-security alignment involving Somalia, the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, and governing models resembling those emerging in Syria and Afghanistan. These specific calls remain source-derived and require independent corroboration.
The broader militant environment makes such outreach conceivable. U.S. Lead Inspector General reporting citing the Defense Intelligence Agency noted that HTS retained Islamist roots in al-Qaeda and that, even after Hurras al-Din announced its dissolution, some al-Qaeda-associated elements continued operating with a degree of autonomy under Syria’s interim authorities. At the same time, ISIS remained an enemy of Syria’s new rulers. This illustrates how former al-Qaeda-linked, ISIS, and post-HTS networks can remain deeply adversarial while still existing within overlapping militant ecosystems.
By 13 May 2025, I had publicly argued that militant movements were increasingly looking toward three governance models—the Taliban, Syria, and Lebanon models. That assessment was later reinforced by the UN Security Council’s S/2025/482, dated 24 July 2025. Paragraph 74 reported that AQAP hosted hundreds of Al-Shabaab fighters in Yemen for training, supported them with weapons, and urged Al-Shabaab to repeat in Somalia what the Taliban had achieved in Afghanistan. The UN therefore documented that the Taliban model was being actively promoted to Al-Shabaab within the wider al-Qaeda network.
The reported January–April 2025 push to reduce attacks on Sunni civilians also appears consistent with what followed operationally. My Mogadishu data for April 2025–March 2026 records only 22 incidents targeting civilians, compared with 129 targeting security forces. The UN’s 4 February 2026 report, S/2026/44, similarly found that Al-Shabaab primarily targeted security forces and that attacks inside Mogadishu were “largely directed at security installations and government officials,” reflecting “a focus on military targets rather than mass civilian casualties.” The same report also described Al-Shabaab as maintaining pragmatic relationships with other armed groups, including continued collaboration with AQAP and transactional cooperation with the Houthis. This does not independently verify the al-Jolani–Muttaqi calls, but it provides notable later evidence consistent with the strategic direction described by the sources.
According to Afghan open-source reporting dated 11 August 2025 and Somalia military-intelligence sources I later cross-checked, the clearest evidence of this financial dimension came when Afghan reporting showed a Somali man meeting the Taliban governor of Panjshir. Two days later, on 13 August 2025, I identified the man as Saeed Adami. The open-source photographs establish the meeting itself; the identity and background came from Somali military-intelligence reporting, which described Adami as a former al-Qaeda-linked mujahid trained during the bin Laden era who later relocated to Malaysia or Indonesia after leaving Afghanistan in the mid-2000s with substantial funds. Those sources further described his later business activity as commercial cover for moving money through Taliban/al-Qaeda-linked networks and said his return to Afghanistan was being presented publicly as an “investment” role. By May 2026, Taliban-linked messaging was publicly highlighting new development projects, including a new passenger terminal at Kabul International Airport, reinforcing the regime’s effort to present investment and infrastructure growth as evidence of normalization. Taken together, the evidence shows a visible Taliban political relationship around a Somali “investor,” overlaid with source reporting tying that individual to legacy al-Qaeda networks—suggesting the re-entry of old jihadist financial actors into the Taliban economy through commercial investment, overseas capital, political access, and a broader modernization narrative.
That financial opening was accompanied by another trend: two-way movement between Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Somalia, with a parallel Syrian connection. The Somalia e-Visa breach first surfaced publicly in November 2025; the U.S. Embassy warned on 13 November 2025 that hackers may have exposed at least 35,000 records, while Somalia formally acknowledged the breach on 16 November. The leaked dataset included 66 Afghan nationals and 222 Syrian nationals, but a separate public post we obtained before it was later taken down exposed additional traveler-level data that had not been reflected in subsequent reporting, including entries tied to Afghan and Syrian travelers. That raised an obvious question during Somalia’s war with Al-Shabaab: who were these travelers, and who were they meeting? According to Somali military-intelligence sources in Mogadishu who confirmed this to us, some of the Afghan travelers were Taliban members sent to meet Al-Shabaab figures under Tablighi cover. The pattern fits the post-Kabul relationship that began with Ahmed Diiriye’s first reported visit to Afghanistan in November 2022, followed by later contacts involving Ahmed al-Sharaa, Afghan Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, Ahmed Diiriye, and Abdul Qadir Mumin. Together, the Afghan and Syrian travel data points to a wider Somalia–Afghanistan–Syria corridor of people, access, and influence, with al-Qaeda serving as the principal bridge and the relationship increasingly extending beyond ideology into personnel movement, political contact, religious cover, and governance messaging.
Phase 4 — March–December 2026: Governance Training, Al-Qaeda Camps, and Lessons from TTP
According to Somali military-intelligence sources in Mogadishu, Al-Shabaab dispatched four senior amirs to Afghanistan in March 2026 for direct engagement with Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked networks. The primary purpose of the mission was to study the Taliban governance model for possible adoption in areas already controlled by Al-Shabaab and, more significantly, as a framework for governing Somalia in the event Al-Shabaab were to seize Mogadishu. The sources state that the four amirs were placed on a six-month governance course, with follow-on instruction continuing through December 2026, covering administration, security control, taxation, political messaging, and the transition from insurgency to territorial governance.
The same sources say the Al-Shabaab delegation was given guided access to al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan through its al-Qaeda contacts, allowing the group to review training structures, command systems, and militant organization under Taliban rule. The delegation also traveled to Waziristan, where it met with TTP figures to study guerrilla warfare against a state actor. The purpose was to compare TTP’s experience fighting Pakistan with Al-Shabaab’s own campaigns against Ethiopia and Kenya, including lessons on attrition, border sanctuaries, decentralized operations, and sustaining a long insurgency against stronger conventional forces. Taken together, the mission marked a shift from simple ideological alignment toward structured governance learning, military exchange, and comparative insurgency planning across the Taliban–al-Qaeda–TTP–Al-Shabaab network.
Strategic Assessment: From Non-State Terrorism to a State-Embedded Jihadist System
The evidence presented in this report suggests that, twenty-five years after 9/11, the threat has changed. Al-Qaeda has evolved from a primarily non-state terrorist organization into a state-embedded jihadist network operating through weak, failed, fragmented, or captured Muslim-majority states across Africa and Asia. Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Libya illustrate this transition: jihadist movements are no longer merely hiding from states; they are exploiting, paralleling, embedding within, or capturing state-like authority. The Taliban controls Afghanistan, Al-Shabaab operates parallel taxation, courts, security, and administration in Somalia, AQAP survives inside Yemen’s fragmented war economy, Libya provides space for militant networks within fractured authority, and Syria shows how a movement rooted in al-Qaeda’s former affiliate can move from insurgency into political power. Afghanistan increasingly resembles what I describe as a “WeWork of terrorism”: a permissive hub where al-Qaeda, TTP, Al-Shabaab, ISIS, Boko Haram, and other militant networks can intersect through travel, training, finance, facilitation, and political learning even when they remain organizationally separate or hostile.
The result is an emerging hybrid state–non-state architecture involving governments, quasi-state authorities, insurgent administrations, terrorist groups, financiers, criminal networks, and geopolitical actors whose interests can overlap without formal alliance. These relationships are often transactional, built around sanctions evasion, weapons, logistics, maritime routes, illicit finance, political leverage, and shared enemies. Houthi networks can intersect with AQAP and Al-Shabaab logistics, and could also collaborate with Sudanese armed actors through illicit trade, maritime smuggling, and weapons-trafficking channels where interests overlap. Afghanistan can likewise serve as a connective node linking Taliban authorities, al-Qaeda, TTP, Al-Shabaab, and other foreign militants. This is the defining post-9/11 shift: jihadist movements increasingly gain not just sanctuary, but access to state-like governance, territory, financial channels, international markets, and long-term institutional survival.
This also exposes the weakness in framing Africa as the new global “epicenter” of al-Qaeda and ISIS. Africa is clearly a major and expanding battlefield, but the wider ideological, financial, logistical, and operational architecture remains deeply connected to Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and the broader Middle East–South Asia system. The same analytical problem appears when the latest U.S. counterterrorism framework reduces Al-Shabaab primarily to a “tribal-based Islamist insurgency.” Al-Shabaab is a wealthy, globally connected al-Qaeda affiliate with networks extending through Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and East Africa, and with an economic and financial ecosystem assessed in my research at more than $1 billion. If U.S. strategy fails to recognize al-Qaeda’s evolution into a state-embedded and quasi-state actor, it risks a serious strategic miscalculation twenty-five years after 9/11.