On August 27, 2012, Aboud Rogo Mohammed, an influential sheikh primarily based in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa, was driving north on the highway, away from the city, with his wife and five others when an unknown car pulled in front of their vehicle.1 As it was overtaking them, its doors opened and two gunmen opened fire, killing Rogo immediately and wounding members of his family.2 Authorities have never conclusively identified the armed assailants, though many suspect Kenyan security personnel.3 Immediately after the sheikh’s killing, large-scale riots among the local Muslim population befell Mombasa for the next two days, leaving portions of the city in ruins.4
Though Aboud Rogo’s killing took place 13 years ago, his legacy still thrives today. Jihadists across the global ideological divide—that is, adherents or members of either the Islamic State or al-Qaeda—continue to regularly consume and propagate the sheikh’s sermons, teachings, and videos across social media, including YouTube, Telegram, and TikTok. Long after his death, the Kenyan ideologue continues to radicalize, inspire, and ultimately recruit individuals into violent jihad across Swahili-speaking East Africa and beyond. Much of today’s jihadist violence occurs in Africa—the continent has been dubbed the current “epicenter” of jihad.5 Therefore, it would greatly benefit the wider analytic and academic community, as well as relevant policymakers and stakeholders, to better understand the exact nature of Rogo’s legacy.
Through a combination of his particular skills as a respected jihadist sheikh and the personal connections and networks he fostered through his former students and adherents, his direct influence is apparent across three separate ongoing jihadist conflicts in Africa, including in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Mozambique. This is to say nothing about his remaining influence on the radicalization and recruitment of others in places without current jihadist insurgencies, such as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. As such, Rogo is either directly connected to or in some degree influencing effectively half of the current jihadist theaters on the continent.6 It is for this reason that observers should pay specific attention to the lasting legacy of one of the most important figures in the history of African jihad.
Aboud Rogo is thus another person who fits Thomas Hegghammer’s description of a “jihadi superstar,” one of the few people with outsized influence in the global jihadist space.7 Starting with a brief background of Rogo and his role in supporting the East African jihad, this article then turns to explaining how and why he continues to be so influential so long after his death.
Who Was Aboud Rogo?
Many details of Aboud Rogo’s early life remain shrouded in mystery. What is clear, however, is that he was born in the mid-1960s in the small town of Siyu on Pate Island in Kenya’s northern Lamu County. According to some biographies, Rogo obtained a basic education in Siyu before working in menial labor and pursuing a religious education on Pate Island.8 An al-Qaeda-affiliated media outlet released a brief biography of the sheikh in 2013, which stated that he had traveled to an unspecified part of the Arabian Peninsula to further his religious studies.9 However, this account is unique, and the jihadist media outlet likely added it in an attempt to increase Rogo’s credentials.
What more analysts seem to believe is that by 1989 Rogo had relocated from Siyu to Mombasa.10 In Mombasa, he pursued further religious studies before joining the Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK) in 1992.11 Muslim political and religious leaders in Mombasa, the informal historical capital of Kenya’s Muslims, had founded the IPK as Kenya’s first prominent Islamist political party in response to long-standing communal grievances.12 Muslims in Mombasa—and indeed along much of the larger Swahili Coas13—have long felt that populations in Kenya’s upcountry discriminate against them as a result of historical religious and ethnic differences and the legacies of divide-and-rule British colonialism (divisions that persisted after Kenya’s independence).14
The repressive government of Daniel Arap Moi (president from 1978 to 2002) refused to register the IPK as an official party. Moi subsequently cracked down on its supporters and regularly arrested one of its top leaders, Sheikh Khalid Balala, further exacerbating tensions between coastal Muslims and the Nairobi elite.15 These moves aligned with other authoritarian policies of the Moi regime to consolidate power and suppress other ethnic groups and political parties for the benefit of his own regime and ethnic constituency.16 It is within this sociopolitical backdrop that another prominent religious official who supported the IPK, Sheikh Abdulaziz Rimo, began to establish the religious frameworks that Rogo later expanded.17
According to the scholar Hassan Juma Ndzovu, Rimo, who received Islamic education in Saudi Arabia, brought a form of strict Salafism to Kenya. He offered many Muslims an outlet for feelings of dispossession and marginalization by the Kenyan state. In addition, he encouraged them to turn inward to Islam and find acceptance in the wider Islamic community, the Ummah, as the solution.18
These feelings of dispossession and marginalization in Kenya are not unfounded. Coastal Muslims, especially in Mombasa, indeed faced land dispossession by upland communities following independence,19 straining relations between coastal Muslims and the government.20 Some on the Swahili Coast have also felt that Islam, which populations have practiced along the coast for centuries as a result of historical ties to the Arab world,21 has been under attack. Christianity had become the dominant religion in Kenya under British colonialism.22 Rimo used these historical grievances as well as criticisms of the Moi government in his preaching, which gained him a significant following on Kenya’s coast.23 This naturally drew the ire of Moi himself, who had Rimo arrested in 1990.24
Following his imprisonment, Rimo founded an insular community, Ansari Sunnah, attracting various individuals seeking to learn more about what he dubbed the “true” Islam. As it insulated itself from broader society, the group also offered Muslims in Mombasa a segregated space wherein they lived more closely to what Salafis consider a “true” Islamic society. One of the men who joined Rimo in this community was Aboud Rogo.25 Through these lessons in the Ansari Sunnah community, Rogo learned many of the religious concepts about which he eventually preached so prolifically.
By 1998, Kenyan and American authorities had accused Rogo of assisting in the twin suicide bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (in neighboring Tanzania). They believed he had organized individuals involved in the plot for al-Qaeda senior leader Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, one of the planners of the attacks.26 Rogo maintained ties with Fazul, also known as Fazul Harun, in the following years. He took the Comoros-born al-Qaeda leader to his hometown of Siyu in 2001, wherein Fazul married a woman related to Rogo.27
While little is known about Rogo’s direct involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings, his role in the 2002 Mombasa attacks is slightly clearer. An al-Qaeda suicide bomber detonated himself in a vehicle at an Israeli-owned hotel while other gunmen fired surface-to-air missiles at Israeli aircraft.28 Authorities allege that Rogo, among others, helped Fazul Harun plan and coordinate those attacks,29 and they arrested Rogo and three other suspects for their involvement. However, a judge dismissed the charges in 2005 due to a “lack of evidence.”30 Rogo returned to preaching in Mombasa, primarily at Masjid Musa but also periodically at Masjid Sakina, which former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu also attended.31
In 2006, Ethiopia invaded Somalia with U.S. backing to oust the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Courts Union (ICU) from Mogadishu and other areas of the country.32 The ICU’s youth wing, al-Shabaab, led an insurgency that soon emerged against the Ethiopians and their allies in the Somali transitional government—an effort that continues today. In 2007, Rogo began preaching in earnest about the Somali mujahideen (warriors for the Islamic faith and community), referring to al-Shabaab in particular and arguing that all Muslims should support its fight and that “Islam shall prevail in Somalia and the whole of Africa.”33 Rogo himself allegedly attended one of al-Shabaab’s training camps in southern Somalia in 2010, according to the aforementioned biography of him by an al-Qaeda affiliated media outlet.34 The Kenyan ideologue also began recruiting many Kenyan Muslims to join al-Shabaab’s ranks,35 especially in the wake of the Kenyan military’s Operation Linda Nchi, its invasion of southern Somalia against al-Shabaab in October 2011.36 Arguing that the Kenyan army was out to destroy Muslim Somali lands, Rogo lambasted the invasion and called for pious Muslims to help defend their brethren in Somalia while declaring takfir (the excommunication of Muslims) on any Muslim Kenyan soldiers taking part in the invasion.37 One former al-Shabaab member from Kenya whom Rogo recruited said this exact line of reasoning encouraged him to travel to Somalia and fight.38
Around the same time, Rogo became affiliated with the Muslim Youth Center (MYC), which Sheikh Ahmad Iman Ali founded in the late 2000s as an organized network of Islamic sheikhs and educational centers affiliated with al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda.39 The MYC was influential in recruiting other Kenyan nationals into al-Shabaab’s ranks, and Rogo’s preaching and lectures were instrumental in this recruitment.40 Iman Ali joined al-Shabaab in Somalia, having previously studied under Rogo.41 In January 2012, al-Shabaab confirmed Iman Ali as its overall leader in Kenya, a position he still holds to this day.42
In February 2012, MYC publicly changed its name to al-Hijra, meaning “migration,” referring to the migrations by the Prophet Muhammad and his companions in the early days of Islam. In jihadist parlance, hijra connotes traveling for the sake of jihad, and thus the name clearly highlighted the group’s nature as a conduit into the Somali jihad.43 In the same statement, the group publicly reaffirmed Ahmad Iman Ali as its leader and openly stated it was part of al-Qaeda in East Africa (al-Shabaab having recently made public its affiliation with al-Qaeda).44 As such, in changing its name and reaffirming its leader as directly part of al-Qaeda, the MYC left behind any ambiguity surrounding its aims and aspirations and became outwardly jihadist in its character. Both the United States and the United Nations consequently placed Rogo under sanctions in July 2012 for his ties to al-Shabaab, the MYC/al-Hijra, and al-Qaeda.45
As noted previously, gunmen killed Rogo in Mombasa under mysterious circumstances in August 2012, just a month after nations worldwide blacklisted him for his ties to terrorism. After his death, both al-Hijra and al-Shabaab itself publicly revered him. In its eulogy following his killing, al-Hijra, which former student Iman Ali still led at this time, described Rogo as a “shining example of a true and pious Muslim, unwavering and steadfast in his determination to fight injustices against Muslims all over the world. . . . Aboud Rogo used his unique gift and knowledge of Islam to inspire and inform Muslims all over East Africa.”46 In its statement, al-Shabaab noted that “while Aboud Rogo was not officially a member . . . he, like the rest of the Muslims in Kenya, shared unbreakable religious ties with the Mujahideen.”47 Capitalizing on Rogo’s death to inspire more radical Muslims, the group also stated that his killing was “vividly indicative of the kuffar’s [infidel’s] deep-rooted hatred towards Islam and Muslims.”48
Rogo’s direct influence on jihadist violence in East Africa did not end with his death. Though various jihadist-linked sheikhs were already being killed, likely by Kenyan security forces, as early as 2012, Kenya launched a wider crackdown on extremist elements that authorities suspected in the country following al-Shabaab’s September 2013 attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall.49 During this crackdown, security forces raided dozens of mosques and arrested hundreds of suspected extremists.50 Kenyan security forces violently raided Rogo’s former mosque in Mombasa, Masjid Musa, in early 2014.51 As a result of these crackdowns, many Kenyan extremists, including those who had been students and adherents of Rogo, fled to Somalia or Tanzania.52
In addition to his ties to al-Shabaab, Rogo already had extensive ties to the Tanzanian jihadist milieu at the time of his death, primarily through his links to the Ansar Muslim Youth Center (AMYC), many of whose members had also studied under Rogo in Mombasa.53 The AMYC was responsible for recruiting numerous Tanzanians into al-Shabaab’s ranks at this time,54 while other militant networks associated with al-Shabaab were also active in northern Tanzania in the early 2010s.55 Kenyan extremists flowed into the Tanzanian jihadist sphere following the 2013–14 crackdown in Kenya, and jihadist violence began to increase in Tanzania, mainly in the coastal Tanga and Pwani Regions of the country in 2015.56 This unsurprisingly led Tanzanian authorities to engage in their own crackdown on these suspected jihadists—in addition to working with local Muslim organizations to prevent local radicalization and recruitment57—pushing these extremists to flee yet again by 2017.58
Some of these militants reportedly went to the DRC, where they joined the Islamist rebels known as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State that year, becoming the Central Africa Province.59 Others ended up in northern Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado and joined a group, Ahlu Sunna Wal Jammah, which locals called “al-Shabaab” though it was entirely separate from the group in Somalia.60 This group eventually became the Islamic State’s Mozambique Province, and some of the Tanzanians who had fled their government’s crackdown in 2017 became its senior leaders.61
In light of the movement’s evolution, Rogo’s role in the East African jihadist scene becomes quite clear. Beginning as a relatively obscure religious student and scholar, he transformed into an active member of regional jihadist networks and recruited people into al-Qaeda’s jihad in East Africa. His former students and adherents also had a central role in fomenting violence in Tanzania and eventually an indirect role in establishing an Islamic State wing in northern Mozambique. Aboud Rogo was thus one of the most important figures for the global jihadist movement in Africa, especially eastern and central Africa. Unlike other prominent Kenyan sheikhs within al-Qaeda’s sphere who were killed in Mombasa under mysterious circumstances around the same time, such as Samir Khan62 and Abubakr Sharif Makaburi63 (both of whom were associated with Rogo), only Rogo continues to have an outsized degree of importance today.64
Aboud Rogo’s Continued Importance
A variety of jihadist communities online (and even some non-jihadist Salafist ones) still routinely share Rogo’s teachings and lectures across Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Telegram, and TikTok.65 Many of these videos receive thousands of views and shares, undoubtedly reaching a whole new generation of jihadists and would-be recruits to various groups across eastern, central, and southern Africa.
The reasons for Rogo’s enduring legacy appear to be threefold. First, no other sheikh within the Swahili-speaking world was as prolific or as popular as Rogo, making him a member of the aforementioned “jihadi superstars” cadre. Second, his death occurred before the global jihadist movement split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and his former students and adherents have joined both sides, meaning both global jihadist franchises can claim his lineage. Finally, no group within eastern, central, or southern Africa has any particular Swahili-speaking sheikh with the same pedigree, respect, or profile as Rogo, meaning that no modern-day successor has risen.
A Prolific Orator
During Rogo’s time as a prominent sheikh at Mombasa’s Masjid Musa (among other mosques in Mombasa, and periodically Nairobi),66 he was known as a skilled and prolific orator.67 As such, there exists a wealth of audio and video of his preaching and sermons, accounting for hundreds of hours of content. In conjunction with the vast area of Swahili speakers across (parts of) eastern, central, and southern Africa, this large volume of content can reach an audience across a significant geographic space on the continent.
The messages Rogo espoused also continue to hold a certain weight among Muslims across the Swahili-speaking world today. Capitalizing on a perceived marginalization of Muslims in Kenyan society, Rogo, much like his mentor Abdulaziz Rimo, often spoke about the sense of an increased “Christianization” of Kenya to the political, social, and economic detriment of its Muslim inhabitants.68 According to Rogo, Kenyan society and its government favored Christians, keeping Muslims economically challenged and politically disenfranchised even though Muslims had ostensibly been the dominant class in Kenya for centuries.69 This mode of argument aligned with many of Kenya’s coastal Muslims, who felt more connected to the various historical Islamic polities along the Swahili Coast than to the political elite in Nairobi, who represented the more recent, colonially created (and largely Christian) Kenyan state.70
Going further than Rimo in this regard, Rogo justified violence against Christians, churches, and political officials he accused of advancing this so-called Christianization.71 Based on Rogo’s teachings, this violence was “rightfully” called for as a legitimate jihad to protect the Muslims of Kenya and wider East Africa. Rogo also routinely touted al-Shabaab as vanguards against what he believed was the forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity via policies Nairobi had established.72 Some Muslims drew Rogo’s ire for not being sufficiently harsh against the “infidels” and for complicity in this perceived Christianization of the Muslim community in Kenya.73
Rogo’s preaching was primarily specific to Kenya. However, the wider messages he espoused, requiring a violent response to marginalization and discrimination against Muslims by Christians—real or imagined—holds broader appeal in other countries and contexts. Both in mainland Tanzania and on the island of Zanzibar, Muslims have also felt varying degrees of marginalization (again, both real and perceived). The Zanzibari population and some Tanzanian coastal communities have for centuries identified with Islam and the broader Islamic world, typically more so than with the various populations on Tanzania’s mainland.74 The widespread advent of Christianity in these regions is relatively new, beginning in earnest only in the mid-1800s via colonial missionaries.75 Following the unification of Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika) in 1964, political and social tensions have persisted between Zanzibar and the more populous and Christian-majority mainland.76 Zanzibar has faced political repression by Tanzania’s dominant Chama Cha Mapinduzi, which is officially a secular, left-wing party but in fact often has Christian leadership (although the current president is Muslim).77 This backdrop again leaves some individuals susceptible to Rogo’s religious framing of regional political tensions and his teachings that urge violent jihad as a means of so-called defense of fellow Muslims.78
The same is true of Muslims in Uganda’s capital city, Kampala, and in the country’s east, who also face a degree of marginalization by Uganda’s Christian-dominated government. Ugandan security services have cracked down on certain Muslim institutions and populations in the wake of the War on Terror and Ugandan jihadist violence, particularly following al-Shabaab’s 2010 suicide bombings in Kampala and continued violence perpetrated by the Islamic State’s Central Africa Province.79 80 While Rogo primarily preached in a Kenyan context, jihadist recruiters can and have applied the same arguments and justifications for violence using Rogo’s preaching.
For starters, it is not only jihadists who propagate Rogo’s message. When looking online, one can find dozens of generalized Islamic81 accounts across social media, including Facebook, X, YouTube, Telegram, and TikTok, routinely sharing clips of Rogo’s lectures and sermons espousing the beliefs described above.82 For example, though TikTok nominally prohibits his videos for breaching “community guidelines,” more mainstream Muslim accounts have published dozens of videos featuring Rogo that garner a combined total of hundreds of thousands of views on the platform (see figure 1).
Figure 1: A sampling of videos featuring Aboud Rogo’s sermons on TikTok (collected May 2025)
These videos include Rogo speaking on more innocuous topics, ranging from the importance of studying Islam in today’s current society to reliance on Allah to overcome one’s struggles and even to the importance of Ramadan. Entire lectures by Rogo also appear on Telegram and YouTube. The social media accounts that post this material are almost exclusively Swahili and are naturally catering to individuals across the Swahili-speaking world, including Kenya, Tanzania, parts of Uganda, northern Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda, and even the eastern DRC, meaning these videos have a wide geographic reach for those who may discover such content online and ultimately find it inspiring.83
At the same time, social media channels with direct links to either al-Qaeda or the Islamic State also appear on all aforementioned platforms sharing Rogo’s work to this day. For example, al-Shabaab-linked Telegram channels routinely post Rogo’s lectures on jihad, fighting nonbelievers, and the fundamental jihadist belief in separation of the world between Dar al-Kufr (infidels) and Dar al-Islam (pious Muslims living under “true” Islamic law). These same speeches by Rogo are also in clips on Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.84 One such TikTok account, which is probably linked to al-Shabaab given its proclivity for posting videos from the group,85 features Rogo speeches on jihad and the Dar al-Kufr vs. Dar al-Islam division in abundance. Another Telegram channel, which posts videos from both al-Shabaab and the Islamic State, hosts Rogo’s speeches on the obligatory nature of jihad and necessity of hijra. On a Swahili-language Facebook group that Islamic State supporters run, members likewise quote Aboud Rogo liberally.86
Content creators in a very large chunk of Africa, working with hours of freely available content online, are therefore able to create digestible clips of Rogo’s radical preachings for viewing and quick consumption by potentially millions of people for little to no cost at all. In doing so, they have not only kept Rogo’s legacy alive but also potentially used his lectures to recruit and radicalize an entirely new generation of people into violent jihad.
Beyond the al-Qaeda-Islamic State Divide
Rogo’s material is freely accessible online—particularly on TikTok, where creators mix it with more generalized Islamic content as a result of the platform’s algorithms. The real-world consequences of this free access became apparent last year when Kenya arrested two individuals who had allegedly recruited people for, interestingly enough, both al-Shabaab in Somalia and the Islamic State in Congo.87 TikTok videos of Rogo’s speeches radicalized at least one of the al-Shabaab recruits, while they both routinely used Rogo’s works in their recruitment activity more broadly.88 Although ostensibly rival jihadist factions recruited them, the fact that both men could point to Rogo’s speeches as a radicalizing factor underscores another key source of Rogo’s longevity in the jihadist sphere.
Following the Islamic State’s split from the al-Qaeda network and subsequent declaration of a caliphate in 2014,89 the two jihadist organizations have offered competing models of jihad. At times, they have violently opposed each other, and their respective cadres have battled for influence and control across multiple theaters around the world.90 As such, both organizations, and their respective branches and affiliates, have largely used their own ideologues, sheikhs, and leaders to promote their own specific brands of global jihad. For example, an Islamic State video will not feature a contemporary al-Qaeda ideologue or leader in a positive light, and vice versa. One set of exceptions exists, however. In their propaganda and recruitment strategies, both groups can claim and use prominent jihadist leaders or ideologues killed before the tumultuous split.
Turning back to Thomas Hegghammer’s idea of a jihadi superstar, these men continue to hold outsized importance and relevance within the global jihadi movement, regardless of any current factional splits.91 For example, members of both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda continue to share videos of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi online,92 and these dead leaders make occasional appearances in official media produced by either global group.93 That these men were all at one point part of al-Qaeda is irrelevant to today’s jihadist scene as both the Islamic State and contemporary al-Qaeda claim to be carrying the torch of global jihad. Rogo is another individual to place on this jihadi superstar list for the same reasons, as discussed above. As a result, he continues to periodically appear in media produced by al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s East African branch, and also routinely appears on the social media channels linked to the Islamic State’s so-called Central Africa Province (based in the DRC and Uganda) and Mozambique Province.
Unsurprisingly, Rogo is a regular fixture within al-Shabaab’s media and features prominently in any Swahili-language propaganda or Kenya-specific content. This type of content appears to be on a proverbial dial that al-Shabaab can move up or down depending on its needs to reach such an audience, and al-Shabaab has drastically reduced its production of Swahili-language media in recent years. However, when the group does produce Swahili-language material, it typically features Rogo. For example, many videos within al-Shabaab’s “And Incite the Believers” messaging campaign, which was a video series released between 2017 and 2022 showcasing Swahili-speaking foreign fighters from around East Africa, featured Rogo’s words.94 This was also especially true during the lead-up to Kenya’s general elections in 2017, when al-Shabaab released two videos featuring Kenyan members of the group lambasting the elections as anti-Islamic, drawing on Rogo’s speeches on this very topic to further make the point.95 In another video related to the 2017 Kenyan elections, al-Shabaab’s official spokesman, Ali Mahmud Rage, warned Kenyan Muslims against participating at the polls, again directly quoting from Rogo’s speeches.96 More recently, the group made a 2020 video commemorating al-Shabaab’s attack on the Dusit D2 commercial complex in Nairobi the year prior, which again used Rogo’s speeches to justify the attacks.97
Though to my knowledge no official Islamic State media has featured Aboud Rogo, social media channels linked to the Central Africa Province (ISCAP) regularly promote him.98 For example, ISCAP previously operated a Telegram channel for its members and supporters that it explicitly named after Rogo and that routinely shared the sheikh’s sermons to further inspire and radicalize potential recruits.99 One ISCAP-affiliated TikTok channel recently used a Rogo speech criticizing democracy to bolster its criticisms of the upcoming January 2026 Ugandan presidential elections.100 Other Telegram channels or WhatsApp groups used to promote the Islamic State in the Swahili-speaking world also routinely share content related to Aboud Rogo.101 Members of the Islamic State’s Mozambique Province (ISM)102 are also known to consume Rogo’s content. On laptops they recovered from Islamic militants in northern Mozambique in 2021, Rwandan troops found lectures and sermons by Aboud Rogo.103 The scholars Saide Habibe, Salvador Forquilha, and João Pereira have also found the ISM flooded its social media channels with audio and video of Aboud Rogo’s sermons in the past, reportedly using his lectures as material in its own madrasas.104 The extent to which ISM is known to use Aboud Rogo’s material is unsurprising given reports of how influential the sheikh's sermons were to ISM’s founders, many of whom were Tanzanian and within Rogo’s former milieu, as discussed earlier.105
A Lack of Equivalents in Today’s Jihadist Space
As noted previously, Rogo was not the only jihadist cleric mysteriously killed in Kenya in the first half of the 2010s. Others, such as Samir Khan, Ibrahim Ismail, and Abubakr Sharif Makaburi (Ismail and Makaburi being the unofficial successors to Rogo in Mombasa), were also part of the wider al-Qaeda-linked jihadist milieu in East Africa before their deaths in 2012, 2013, and 2014 respectively.106 However, none had the same rhetorical prowess or network among the region’s jihadists as Rogo, and the jihadists therefore have not continuously lionized them to the same degree after their deaths.
Similarly, since Rogo’s death, no other prominent jihadist ideologue within the Swahili-speaking world has emerged, leaving a dearth of new voices in this space. The continued relevance of Aboud Rogo’s teachings is thus also likely attributable to the simple fact that individuals or groups cannot use anyone else quite as effectively as they can by sharing Rogo’s older content to radicalize and recruit.
Both al-Qaeda, by way of al-Shabaab, and the Islamic State, through ISCAP and ISM, have Swahili-speaking sheikhs that sometimes produce content to share for purposes of incitement and recruitment.107 But while these videos or audios may be effective in the short term for recruiting some individuals, none of these ideologues have achieved sufficient popularity in the Swahili-speaking world to enjoy the staying power that Rogo has. And much as al-Shabaab’s Swahili-language media output waxes and wanes, ISCAP is inconsistent in producing propaganda to target a broader East African audience. Though it publishes some Swahili-language material, it still produces most of its local content108 in Luganda, which limits its reach to Ugandans (I have less insight into ISM’s media output in local languages).109 As such, it is clear that neither al-Qaeda nor the Islamic State are even attempting to find successors to Rogo and are instead content with using his large archive of taped sermons.
It is also quite possible that neither franchise currently feels it has an appropriate successor. While al-Shabaab could theoretically make this case for Ahmad Iman Ali, given his long pedigree of jihadist activity in Kenya and Somalia as well as his personal ties to Rogo, Ali still lacks a certain ferocity in his oratory skills to truly rival Rogo. For the Islamic State, the Swahili-speaking sheikhs in either ISCAP or ISM may also lack a certain scholarly pedigree in addition to lacking Rogo’s oratory prowess.
Another potential factor is that Aboud Rogo was most active prior to (and immediately after) Kenya’s military intervention against al-Shabaab in Somalia and subsequent crackdowns on Kenyan extremists. This afforded him a degree of freedom (until his killing, of course) that more contemporary jihadist ideologues simply do not have. For instance, more contemporary jihadist sheikhs in East Africa, such as Uganda’s Abdul Rahman Faiswal, formerly of Kampala’s Usafi Mosque and himself a former student of Rogo’s in Mombasa,110 have had less ability to freely incite people to jihad and are under more intense government (and often public111) scrutiny when making inflammatory remarks. Ugandan authorities raided Faiswal’s mosque in April 2018 after he made a series of public pro-jihad lectures, forcing the sheikh to flee the country and cutting short his rise within East African jihadist networks.112 Ugandan authorities also stated that Faiswal was involved in acts of terrorism and active recruitment for ISCAP, potentially giving him a role similar to Rogo’s relationship with al-Shabaab in the mid- to late 2000s.113 It seems, then, that the lack of any successor to Rogo also likely results from an environment less conducive to such radical rhetoric following East Africa’s growing role in the War on Terror.
Conclusion
Thirteen years after his death, the Kenyan sheikh Aboud Rogo Mohammed continues to be an important figure in the global jihadist scene, especially in the Swahili-speaking world across eastern, central, and southern Africa. Potentially millions of people, both jihadists and generic social media accounts focusing on Islam in Africa, continue to regularly share and consume his sermons, lectures, and teachings in both audio and video formats. Affiliates of both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State share and use his content with the explicit objective of further radicalizing their members and recruiting new ones into their respective folds.
Given that Rogo had direct links to several jihadist insurgencies across Africa, the continent that is today the geographic locus of jihadist violence,114 it would behoove our wider analytical community to appreciate the sheikh’s continued reach and influence. His specific role in the African jihad, arguably beginning in 1998 if not earlier, also underscores the long history of global jihadist organizations on the continent, especially in East Africa. Rogo’s history makes it clear that, far from being a new front for jihadists, the current jihadist violence in Somalia, the eastern DRC, and Mozambique is the latest (if perhaps most violent and expansive) effort within a longer history of attempts to establish a foothold in East Africa. In many of these attempts, either Rogo was directly involved or his students and adherents, taking inspiration from his words, carried out his calls for jihad.
While African jihadists continue to revere and follow some of the most prominent global jihadist figures, such as Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Anwar al-Awlaki, or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Rogo is one of the few jihadist ideologues, and arguably the only African, who unites all jihadists on the eastern half of the continent regardless of their organizational or ideological splits. More worrying still, even in death, he continues to facilitate the recruitment and radicalization of new jihadists through his prolific online presence.