section_path: Relationship with other militant groups/Islamic State
section_name: Islamic State
paragraph_text: Islamic State
  
  In early 2015, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) published online the first of a series of videos aimed at al-Shabaab, calling on the group to switch allegiances from al-Qaeda to ISIL and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. These public appeals had reportedly been preceded by informal ISIL attempts to establish a relationship with al-Shabaab. Yet al-Shabaab publicly ignored the overtures. By September 2015, it had issued an internal memo, directed at pro-ISIL elements in its ranks, reaffirming the group's allegiance to al-Qaeda and banning any discussion about ISIL. The group also detained several fighters who had voiced support for ISIL.
  
  In October 2015, senior al-Shabaab commander Abdul Qadir Mumin and approximately 20 of his followers in Puntland pledged allegiance to ISIL, establishing what became Islamic State in Somalia (ISIS). Further defections in al-Shabaab ranks occurred in the border region between Somalia and northern Kenya, leading the head of al-Shabaab in the Lower Shabelle region, Abu Abdalla, to announce that all pro-ISIL members should leave the group or be killed. The groups clashed violently on several occasions, most fiercely during 2015, and al-Shabaab's internal security service continued to arrest, and sometimes execute, suspected ISIS supporters within al-Shabaab's ranks.
  
  Violent conflict between the groups was reinvigorated in 2018 by ISIS provocation, and, in December, al-Shabaab's spokesman announced an offensive – code-named Operation Disease Eradication – against ISIS. The same week, al-Shabaab's general command released an 8-page treatise rebuking ISIS's ideology and listing crimes it had committed under the Quran.