section_path: Foreign recruitment/Current status
section_name: Current status
paragraph_text: Current status
  
  As of 2020, estimates of the number of foreign recruits still active in al-Shabaab ranged from 450 to 2,000. Most of those recruits are from East Africa – primarily Kenya, but also Tanzania and Uganda, all countries in which al-Shabaab recruitment networks are well entrenched. The flow of recruits from Arab countries and the West has diminished substantially since 2014, except for in the case of Yemen. Moreover, few foreign fighters hold strategically important roles in the group. Many are among the rank-and-file of the military wing. Those in leadership positions tend to have prominent, but strategically marginal or mid-level, roles – for example, in managing the group's public relations or external relations, or in supervising and training other foreign recruits. (Godane's nationalist critics, however, argue that earlier, under his leadership, foreign fighters did in fact gain significant influence over the group.) Since 2013, al-Shabaab has also established two external military units, on Godane's initiative: one, in Ethiopia, has struggled, but the other, in the Great Lakes region, has carried out several attacks in Kenya.