It’s been rumored since a U.S. drone strike in Somalia on Monday that the co-founder and leader of the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate, had been killed, and the Pentagon confirmed the news today in a statement:

We have confirmed that Ahmed Godane, the co-founder of al-Shabaab, has been killed. The U.S. military undertook operations against Godane on Sept. 1, which led to his death. Removing Godane from the battlefield is a major symbolic and operational loss to al-Shabaab. The United States works in coordination with its friends, allies and partners to counter the regional and global threats posed by violent extremist organizations.

The Wall Street Journal has a touching tribute to a man who terrorized one of the world’s saddest countries, and, increasingly, its neighborhood:

The Somali militant leader targeted in a U.S. airstrike on Monday loved to quote the country’s old poets and lambast his critics via Twitter. He combined these ancient and modern passions as he turned al Shabaab, an obscure outfit from the plains of Somalia, into a potent, al Qaeda-backed terror group.
His death, confirmed Friday by the Pentagon, could throw al Shabaab into disarray.
Ahmed Abdi aw-Mohamed, more commonly known as Ahmed Abdi Godane, had over the years sidelined or eliminated other powerful figures in the organization. In addition, some of his closest allies appeared to have been traveling with him, and may also have perished. . . .
But Mr. Godane himself wasn’t seen as a fighter. He is described by those who study al-Shabaab as bookish. As a young man, he held debates with Somali clerics on Islamic principles.
He was also the strategist who sought to raise al Shabaab’s profile globally, seeking to draw recruits and donor funds away from other jihadi groups. In a designated al-Shabaab Twitter account, he sniped at dissidents, ordering his followers to “stop gossiping and asking questions.”

This is a nice sign of the capabilities of the U.S. military — we have partners but few operations on the ground in Somalia, but managed to take out the group’s leader.

There may be some larger lessons here, too. As Bill Roggio of Long War Journal explains, Godane oversaw the development of al-Shabaab’s alliance with al-Qaeda, which had been informal for some time before it was made official in 2012. He led al-Shabaab during its two deadly international attacks: a bombing at a Ugandan rugby club in 2010 and a massacre at a mall in Kenya in 2013, both of which killed dozens and seemed intended to target Westerners. (Uganda and especially Kenya are such insecure places that it’s not quite clear how much capability these attacks demonstrate, though.)

Abdi Aynte of Somalia’s Heritage Institute (bet you didn’t know Somalia has think tanks) notes that Godane didn’t groom a successor (as far as we know), and argues Godane’s death opens up an opportunity for regional governments (all of which enjoy partnerships with the U.S.) to splinter al-Shabaab and blunt the group’s efforts to radicalize and enlist youth. That’s possible, but it’s also important to remember that al-Shabaab has morphed from a national insurgency, intent on running an Islamic state in Somalia (which it did for a bit in some places), into more of a transnational Islamist terror group. Plenty of members might be more interested in overthrowing the Somali government than killing infidels, but they’ve already had reason to leave the tent. (On the other hand, the fact that Godane was behind some of the internationalization of al-Shabaab might mean that parts of the group, or even the whole, go back in the other direction after his death.)

As I explained after its horrific attack in Kenya, this transformation happened unexpectedly: The U.S., the Somali government, and regional government peacekeepers succeeded in driving al-Shabaab out of the cities, substantially diminishing its relevance at a national rebel group and improving Somalia’s security noticeably, while al-Shabaab continued to ramp up its international ambitions, perpetrated even more deadly terror attacks, and adopted a more al-Qaeda-like transnational ideology.

The parallels here to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are striking, as that group is now focusing on gaining and governing territory rather than raising its international-terror profile. Yet al-Shabaab reminds us that it doesn’t take much time to move from being a national insurgency to an ambitious transnational terror organization, in terms of both ideology and operational focus. Indeed, it can start happening behind the scenes a while before the group acknowledges or publicizes it — that’s what happened in Somalia.

Neither group has shown any credible capability to hit the U.S. homeland yet (no, there is absolutely no reason to believe there are Islamic State sleeper cells in the U.S.), of course, but the Islamic State’s resources far outstrip anything al-Shabaab has ever had. And their learned leader has not had a Hellfire dropped on him yet.