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Al-Shabab, the Somali group that has claimed responsibility for the attack on a Nairobi mall, began as a group fighting inside its homeland. But it has evolved into an al-Qaida affiliate that draws members from other countries and views Somalia as a front in the war against the West.

Here are some key things to know about the group:

Who Are Al-Shabab?

Al-Shabab, or the Youth, is a Somali Islamist group that the U.S. regards as a terrorist organization.

The group grew out of the two decades of turmoil in Somalia following the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1991. By 2006, the Somali Council of Islamic Courts, the group to which al-Shabab was allied, controlled much of the southern portion of the country.

The council then set its sights on Somalia's weak transitional government. This deeply concerned Ethiopia, which backed the transitional government. Ethiopia sent in troops, defeated the council and took control of Mogadishu.

This was a turning point for al-Shabab.

"The only military force willing to resist the Ethiopians following the collapse of the ... [council], al Shabab was able to play on deep-seated Somali antipathy toward Ethiopia to recruit thousands of nationalist volunteers," wrote Rob Wise of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The National Counterterrorism Center notes the group continued its violent tactics in southern and central Somalia, where it held large swaths of territory.

But, it said, its "insurgency has been challenged over the past year by in-fighting and military pressure that has liberated key towns from al-Shabaab."

That military pressure comes in the form of a U.N.-backed African Union force that includes troops from Kenya and Uganda.

Nonetheless, said Mary Harper, the BBC's Africa editor and author of Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State, al-Shabab "still has the capacity to strike not just in Somalia, which it does regularly, but also across Somalia's borders."

What Does The Group Want?

The BBC's Harper told NPR's Tell Me More that the group's ideology has evolved since it "basically imploded" a few months ago. One faction wanted to keep the fighting inside Somalia; the other had global ambitions.

The latter faction is now dominant, Harper says, and therefore she was not surprised that its first major attack was outside Somalia.

The National Counterterrorism Center noted that the group isn't "centralized or monolithic" in its agenda or goals.

"Most of its fighters are predominantly interested in the nationalistic battle against the [transitional government] and not supportive of global jihad," it said.

Why Attack Kenya?

Kenyan troops entered Somalia in 2011, resulting in a loss of key territory for al-Shabab. The group had warned that it would target Kenya.

"The attack at Westgate Mall is just a very tiny fraction of what Muslims in Somalia experience at the hands of Kenyan invaders," al-Shabab said on Twitter.

In 2010, al-Shabab also took credit for two bombings in Uganda — which has also contributed to the AU force — killing more than 70 people.

As NPR's Frank Langfitt noted in his series from Somalia in 2010, al-Shabab's ideology was gaining ground among Somali refugees in the Nairobi neighborhood of Eastleigh, which is known as Little Mogadishu.

"The intelligence we have, we know there are elements sympathetic to al-Shabab," George Saitoti, head of Kenyan Internal Security, told Frank at the time. "And there may be some of them [al-Shabab operatives] around here."

U.S. Links

NPR's Dina Temple-Raston has reported on a "jihadi pipeline" for recruiting and sending Somali-Americans to the battlefields of Somalia. The head of Britain's MI-5 also warned of Britons training in al-Shabab camps.

The potential reach of the group was underscored by Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who told NPR this in an interview Sunday: "They don't have borders. Somalia might be where they have training centers or bomb-making factories or things like that, but, you know, the top leadership of Shabab, including those who have been killed recently ... was American citizens, British citizens who are the leading figures in the leadership of al-Shabab."

There are unconfirmed reports that some of the militants involved in the Westlake Mall siege were foreign nationals.

Further Reading

Dina's series The Somali-Minneapolis Terrorist Axis

Frank's series Containing Chaos: Somalia Today

Global Post on Al-Qaida In Africa

Sales of its new iPhone 5s and 5c models have surpassed other iPhone releases and exceeded initial supply, Apple says. The company says it has sold 9 million of the phones since their launch on Friday and that "many online orders" will ship in coming weeks.

"This is our best iPhone launch yetmore than nine million new iPhones solda new record for first weekend sales," Apple CEO Tim Cook says, in a news release Monday. He adds that "while we've sold out of our initial supply of iPhone 5s, stores continue to receive new iPhone shipments regularly."

As Apple notes, the phones went on sale Friday in the United States as well as in many parts of Europe and Asia, including China. That was a departure from previous releases, in which American consumers were able to buy their smartphones weeks or even months ahead of the international market.

The news led Apple to brighten its own predictions for sales in the current financial quarter, which ends this month.

As Reuters reports:

"Apple tweaked its financial forecast to reflect the higher sales, an unusual move for the company. It said revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter would be near the high end of its previous forecast of $34 billion to $37 billion."

For those old enough to remember, the government shutdown skirmishing now underway in Washington brings back some not-so-fond memories of late 1995 and early 1996.

That's the last time a divided government, unable to settle its differences before the money from previous years' spending bills ran out, forced dozens of agencies to close. Some 800,000 federal workers were told to stay home and millions of Americans were shut out of everything from their national parks to small-business loans.

In fact, in 1995 and '96 there were two government shutdowns. The first lasted six days in mid-November 1995, the second from mid-December 1995 to early January 1996. For those 26 days, in addition to the national parks, the Smithsonian museums in Washington were also closed. Veterans' health and welfare services were curtailed, passport applications didn't get processed, new clinical research patients were not accepted at the National Institutes of Health, and federal contractors had to furlough employees.

According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office, the costs of the 1995 shutdowns totaled some $1.4 billion.

While a government shutdown this year would be due to an impasse over a new program — the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare — the shutdowns in 1995 were largely over cuts to existing programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid.

Republicans had won a majority in Congress for the first time in 40 years the previous November. Led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, they demanded sharp cuts in government spending in discretionary programs, such as welfare, and so-called entitlements, like Medicaid and Medicare.

When President Clinton vetoed the spending cuts, round one of the shutdown was underway. The White House and Congress quickly agreed to extend spending on a temporary basis, under the condition that the president agree to a plan to balance the federal budget.

But those talks proved fruitless, and round two of the shutdown followed.

The two sides continued talking throughout the holiday season and in the end reached agreement on a deal similar to what was on the table before the shutdown, with cuts to federal spending (though smaller than Republicans had originally demanded) and a path to a balanced budget

According to polls, Republicans quickly bore the blame for shutting the government down. Their hand was weakened when Gingrich told reporters he had forced a shutdown in part because the president made him exit Air Force One by the back door after returning from the funeral of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In his State of the Union address that January, Clinton was able to declare the "the era of big government is over." In November, he easily won re-election over one of the (reluctant) leaders of the shutdown, Republican Sen. Bob Dole.

Having learned some hard lessons in 1995-96, many Republicans seem to realize that a shutdown this year would hurt them more than Democrats. But the political blame may be a bit more muddled: While Republicans control the House, Democrats are in the majority in the Senate and may not escape a share of the responsibility for a shutdown.

And while as many federal programs and employees would be idled in a shutdown as before, large swaths of the government would be deemed essential, and exempt from closing.

Border Patrol agents, air traffic controllers and TSA officers would remain at work. Social Security and other benefits checks would still go out. But with the government relying more on contractors than in 1995, the economic impact from a prolonged shutdown may be bigger this time around.

It's time for the weekly roundup of what happened here on All Tech and on our airwaves, and a look back at the big conversations in technology.

ICYMI

This week featured the much anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto V, which raked in $800 million on its first day out. Our digital culture correspondent Laura Sydell talked to the female fan base of the violent adventure game about its allure. On the phone front, the Obama administration is petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to let consumers unlock their phones without penalty. It's part of a larger debate over how much control wireless carriers should have over your devices, as Laura wrote. And on our All Tech segment on All Things Considered, I discussed the big business of fantasy football.

Regular readers know we're fascinated with how social media are changing us — this week we looked at the ways Twitter might be boosting our brains and how Facebook might not make us lonelier after all. Emily Siner, our digital news intern, wrote about the pitfalls of schools' monitoring for cyberbullies. Steve Henn wrote about a dare for hackers to crack the fingerprint ID system in the new iPhone 5s. And our weekly innovation pick was Robot Turtles, a tabletop board game that helps preschoolers learn the concepts of coding.

The Big Conversation

Google may stop using cookies in favor of "more sophisticated technology" to track user activity. And Apple's latest iPhones went on sale Friday, despite warnings that shipments may be low. Space Gray is expected to be the most popular color, so maybe this is your chance to go for gold? (These gold jokes never get old for me, I tell ya.) But what will affect more of us than the new hardware is the new iOS 7 design for the phone. The New Yorker explains how users will feel like the software in their phone was "squished flat." Dwight Silverman from the Houston Chronicle loves it, and BuzzFeed features the reactions of people who were blindsided by the software update.

What We're Reading

Wired: A Brilliant Anatomy App That Blurs The Line Between Learning And Play

The Human Body app is kind of like Robot Turtles, but for big kids and grown-ups.

The New Yorker: From Mars: A Young Man's Adventures In Women's Publishing

It turns out that before Bleacher Report co-founder Bryan Goldberg wrote his widely mocked debut for his new women's site, Bustle.com, The New Yorker's Lizzie Widdicombe was busy working on this profile of him. He's an interesting dude and this is an engaging read.

Grantland: Rot Your Brain

The craze over Candy Crush hasn't escaped our attention. Grantland explores what makes it so addictive.