Just hours after Somalia’s new prime minister named his first cabinet at the presidential compound in Mogadishu Tuesday, a massive explosion occurred just a few hundred yards away. Footage of the aftermath of the blast shared on social media showed several burnt-out vehicles and a crater-like dent in the ground where the explosion occurred outside Somalia’s national theater. Somali police said that at least 10 people were killed in the blast, which happened when a suicide attacker rammed a car bomb into a security checkpoint. On Wednesday, a familiar foe claimed responsibility for the attack: Al-Shabab, an extremist militant group affiliated to al-Qaeda, which is waging war on the Western-backed federal government. The assault is the latest obstacle to meaningful engagement between the new Somali government and Al-Shabab, at a time when analysts and diplomats have said it is most needed: the current drought in Somalia, which is at risk of escalating into famine, is part of what a senior U.N. official recently called the “worst humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations” in 1945. Internally displaced Somali families rest as they flee from drought-stricken parts of the Lower Shabelle region before entering makeshift camps in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu on March 17. Many Somalis suffering from the drought are living under al-Shabab, which controls many rural parts of southern Somalia. Somalia’s government is barely a month old: The new president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, was only inaugurated on February 22, and the cabinet ministers appointed Tuesday have not yet been approved by Parliament. And yet the challenge facing it is huge. Not even six years after a famine that claimed the lives of more than a quarter of a million people, Somalia is again at risk of human disaster on an enormous scale. Some 6.2 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, and the United Nations is appealing for $825 million to avert a catastrophe in the Horn of Africa country. There are increasing reports of Somalis across the country starving to death, along with pictures of skeletal livestock, left to perish without pasture. As clean water becomes more scarce, Somalis are turning to unsafe water sources, resulting in cholera outbreaks. The new government has formed a National Drought Response Committee and has urged Somalis in the diaspora to donate; the committee’s chairman tells Newsweek that around $2 million has already been raised, and a further $3 million in donations has been pledged. Aid has started to come from the international community, and the United Nations has also been active in opening drought relief centers in some of the worst-affected areas. But any national response in Somalia is being hampered by the fact that the government does not control all its territory—Al-Shabab still controls significant portions of Somalia, particularly in the South and in rural areas. Former Somali president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud told Newsweek in September 2016 that the militants held around 10 percent of territory in the country. Analysts say that, even in areas that Al-Shabab does not fully control, the militant group still exerts a semi-territorial presence that can deter government or…