NAIROBI, Kenya — A joint video message from Al Qaeda's head Ayman al-Zawahri and Al Shabaab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane was posted on the web on Thursday declaring that the Somali Islamist militants are now formally part of the Al Qaeda terror network.

This should not come as a surprise. Al Shabaab pledged its allegiance to Al Qaeda in early 2009, a year after it was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organisation by the US. But the connection has always been loose.

Al Shabaab has employed Al Qaeda style tactics — roadside bombs, individual suicide bombers and coordinated suicide attacks — which indicate links in terms of training and therefore personnel. Some senior Al Shabaab commanders (including Godane) are Afghanistan veterans with personal connections to Al Qaeda leaders. And Al Shabaab has provided support to Al Qaeda operatives including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of the masterminds of the US embassy bombings in 1998 who was shot dead in Mogadishu last summer.

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In the 15-minute video message translated by the Site Intelligence Group Zawahri is quoted as saying:

"Today, I have glad tidings for the Muslim Ummah that will please the believers and disturb the disbelievers, which is the joining of the Shabaab al-Mujahideen Movement in Somalia to Qaeda al-Jihad, to support the jihadi unity against the Zio-Crusader campaign and their assistants amongst the treacherous agent rulers."

Zawahri's message was preceded by an audio recording of Godane in which he pledged allegiance:

"We will move along with you as faithful soldiers... In the name of my mujahedeen brothers, leaders and soldiers... I pledge obedience."

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There are likely to be two impacts for Al Shabaab, one weakening and one strengthening.

On the one hand Godane's declaration will exacerbate existing divisions within Al Shabaab between those with a nationalist Somali agenda and those who wish to fight a more global jihad, thus weakening the group which is already under growing regional military pressure.

At the same time becoming a fully-fledged Al Qaeda franchise might bring Al Shabaab greater resources, more fighters and greater ambition to launch attacks outside Somalia, most likely in neighboring Kenya or Ethiopia, both of which have sent troops to Somalia in recent months to fight Al Shabaab.

NAIROBI, Kenya — With nothing but its own domestic interests at heart Russia is playing an increasingly malign role in world affairs.

Last weekend Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution aimed at stopping the violence in Syria.

Of course the resolution may not have had much impact but reports from the besieged town of Homs over the last few days leave little doubt that Syria's government has increased its attacks on civilians and rebels alike in the wake of the resolution's rejection.

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Earlier this year, there was a tribal slaughter in South Sudan that the UN mission was unable to prevent partly because Russia had grounded its helicopters.

Russia was concerned about the safety of its air crews and, in a row at UN headquarters, withdrew some helicopters and refused to allow others to be used. Ban Ki-moon had to beg troop-carrying helicopters from elsewhere. In the end the peacekeepers that arrived in Pibor were too few, and too late.

And now comes a report from Amnesty International saying that Russia (and, again, China as well as that repository of Cold War weaponry and leading arms exporter Belarus) is supplying new armaments to Sudan which Khartoum is using to attack civilians in the western region of Darfur.

When the UN Security Council meets to discuss sanctions against Sudan next week there'll be no prizes for guessing where Russia and China will stand.

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NAIROBI, Kenya — A car bomb that killed perhaps 15 people outside a hotel favored by government officials in Mogadishu on Wednesday underscores, yet again, how dangerous the city is. Or does it?

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Yes, it shows that Islamist militants can still strike in the heart of the government-controlled part of the city, but this attack killed mostly civilians, hotel workers, and tea sellers. Compare that with an attack on the same hotel in 2010, when a squad of armed suicide attackers went room-to-room executing government workers. By the time they blew themselves up they'd killed 32 people, including as many as 11 lawmakers.

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In Mogadishu this is progress.

United Nations diplomats and Somali government officials will have you believe the city is 99 percent under control and is now safe and free. The foreigners who say such things tend to be wearing a flak jacket and travelling in an armored personnel carrier. But leaving aside the hyperbole, there is a calm in Mogadishu that has not been seen in nearly six years. That peace is fragile, recent, and occasionally under attack; but it is there nonetheless, despite Al Shabaab's headline-grabbing assaults.

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NAIROBI, Kenya — Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir is in Darfur today, the restive western region where he is accused of ordering militias to commit genocide, where certainly tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people have died and many more have been forced from their homes by a conflict that has lasted nearly a decade and shows few signs of ending.

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Not that Bashir would agree.

He is in El-Fasher to inaugurate the Darfur Regional Authority, a governing agency headed by the leader of one of the few rebel groups to have signed a peace deal with Khartoum. Darfur's various rebel groups are notorious splitters and it was only the Liberty and Justice Movement (LFM) that signed a treaty brokered in Doha last year. The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), for example, is one of three rebel groups that have refused to sign and continue to fight.

Bashir was on familiar form as he celebrated a peace that few believe in and which will mean little to the millions who make their homes in squalid camps: He danced, smiled and waved his swagger stick in the air while telling them all to "go home" because the war is over.

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