The Bush Administration viewed the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) a terrorist group and sent in troops to crush the Islamic Courts in 2006. One of its founders, Aden Hashi Farah “Eyrow”, trained with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
However, President Obama gave his blessing to ICU leader Sheik Sharif Ahmed‘s appointment as President of Somalia earlier this year. 
President Sharif Ahmed of Somalia was leader of the Islamic Courts Union. The Obama Administration views Ahmed as a moderate. (Interet-General)
After the fall of the Islamic Courts Union in 2006 radical Islamists from the terror group formed the Al-Shabaab organization:
Al Shabaab is a group of Somali Islamists, primarily acting in Somalia. The group developed in the wake of the loss of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) at the hands of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and its backers, primarily the military of Ethiopia, in the War in Somalia. An estimated 3,000 or so members of the ICU went underground to form an insurgency and armed cells across Mogadishu and elsewhere in Somalia, and are conducting attacks against the government and the allied Ethiopian forces.
Today al-Shabaab members fired on US Representative Donald Payne as he left the African country.
Reuters reported:
Somalia’s militant Islamist rebel group al Shabaab said Monday it fired mortars at a plane carrying a U.S. lawmaker, a day after U.S. snipers killed three Somali pirates and freed the American ship captain they had been holding hostage.
An al Shabaab spokesman said his group fired at the plane carrying Representative Donald Payne as he left the anarchic Horn of Africa country following a rare one-day visit by a U.S. official. Payne’s plane took off safely and no-one was hurt.
It looks like Al-Shabaab is not so moderate after all.
