We present a recently developed theory for the inclusive breakup of three-fragment projectiles within a four-body spectator model cite{CarPLB2017}, for the treatment of the elastic and inclusive non-elastic break up reactions involving weakly bound three-cluster nuclei in $A,(a,b),X$ / $a = x_1 + x_2 + b$ collisions. The four-body theory is an extension of the three-body approaches developed in the 80s by Ichimura, Autern and Vincent (IAV) cite{IAV1985}, Udagawa and Tamura (UT) cite{UT1981} and Hussein and McVoy (HM) cite{HM1985}. We expect that experimentalists shall be encouraged to search for more information about the $x_{1} + x_{2}$ system in the elastic breakup cross section and that also further developments and extensions of the surrogate method will be pursued, based on the inclusive non-elastic breakup part of the $b$ spectrum.