Al Shabaab has engaged in increasingly menacing attacks, usually against civilian soft targets, since the 2013 strike at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, which killed 67 people. In December 2014, al Shabaab killed 36 non-Muslim Kenyan quarry laborers in the Mandera region near the Somali border; it be-headed several of them. It has conducted a series of suicide bombings in Somalia’s capital city, Mogadishu. The most recent horrific attack occurred in April 2015 at Garissa University College in northeast Kenya. It resulted in 147 deaths, nearly all of them non-Muslim Kenyan students. These and other attacks have led to a robust debate among those who follow al Shabaab’s activities in the Horn of Africa. Some have argued these tactics suggest “al Shabaab is desperate” (Maruf 2015), while others say al Shabaab “looks stronger than it has in years” (Dörrie 2014).