Masacre en Kenia: Ataque islamista a universidad deja 147 estudiantes muertos

Argument
Al-Shabab Crosses the Rubicon

With its horrific attack on a Kenyan university, the Somali militant group has given up all pretense of governing — and has joined the depths of global jihadi depravity.

By Bronwyn Bruton
April 3, 2015
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Al-Shabab Crosses the Rubicon

Early on the morning of April 2, gunmen from the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab attacked Garissa University College in northeastern Kenya. After launching several hand grenades, gunmen moved door to door inside the campus dorms, separating Christians and Muslims. Reportedly, Christians were shot on the spot, and some victims were beheaded. Hostages were taken, and Kenyan authorities report that at least 147 people, including four attackers, have been killed. Many others are injured or still missing.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta quickly condemned the attack, and the government put out a bounty of 20 million shillings ($215,000) for information on the incident’s alleged mastermind, Mohamed Mohamud (known as “Dulyadin”).

The violence in Garissa marks the bloodiest terrorist attack on Kenyan soil since the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and is al-Shabab’s most high-profile violence in the country since the 2013 attack on the Westgate mall. It also represents a final point in al Shabab’s long evolution from a populist resistance movement into a full-blown, international terrorist organization. The execution of students has special significance for al-Shabab: The high-profile bombing of a graduation ceremony for newly minted doctors in Mogadishu in 2009 was one of the group’s most embarrassing political blunders, and it has largely refrained from direct attacks on students since then. Its willingness to claim this latest incident marks a visible shift in strategy.

More worryingly, the attack on a secular school, the hunt for Christian students, and the effort to take hostages are all hallmarks of Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group infamous for its kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in 2014. Assuming that the evocation of Boko Haram is deliberate, the Garissa assault could signal an intention to realign al-Shabab, long linked to al Qaeda, with the Islamic State. (Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in March.) If so, al-Shabab should be expected to use ever more flamboyantly violent tactics in the future, as it seeks to compete with other Islamic State affiliates for notoriety and for relevance in the global jihad.

* * *

Created more than a decade ago, al-Shabab has struggled throughout its existence to manage two competing impulses: the desire to govern Somalia and the desire to draw the attention and support of al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups. The aspiration to govern has essentially been an angel sitting on al-Shabab’s right shoulder: It produced goals of maintaining control of territory, coexisting with Somalia’s clans, and cooperating with humanitarian relief efforts — all in order to achieve a significant degree of political legitimacy. At the same time, there has always been a devil on al-Shabab’s left shoulder, encouraging it to nurture a hunger for the money, technical skills, and infamy offered by participation in the global jihad. This has inclined al-Shabab not only to accept parasitic foreign fighters, but also to esteem them over Somali ones.

Al-Shabab’s early ambitions were limited to overthrowing an unpopular, Western-backed Somali government and kicking peacekeepers out of Somalia. The harsh brand of Islam that it imposed repelled most Somalis, but it was widely tolerated because where al-Shabab gained control, the group brought law and order to crime-ridden communities. Even Western aid workers considered al-Shabab a less corrupt and more capable partner than its government rival, which was infamous for its theft of development and humanitarian funds. The government was also brutal: From 2007 until 2011 — admittedly due to al-Shabab’s goading — government and African Union peacekeepers killed thousands of innocent civilians by indiscriminately launching mortars into marketplaces and residential neighborhoods. This, in turn, gave life and strength to al-Shabab’s insurgency.

Al-Shabab alternated between populist and terrorist tendencies during this period, but populism often won out. Even when the group committed violence, al-Shabab sometimes wavered in claiming it. This was true in the aftermath of the December 2009 suicide bombing of the medical school graduation ceremony, when there was enormous public backlash against al-Shabab. Several villages took down the group’s black flag, and hundreds of students took to the streets of Mogadishu. The demonstrations were the first known protests against al-Shabab and were one of the very few times that the Somali public ever spoke out against the group’s rule.

But by 2011, al-Shabab was losing ground. Strategic and ideological disputes within its ranks were coming to a head. It was forced to abandon Mogadishu that July. The same month, the worst famine in decades struck Somalia, and al-Shabab — which had deforested much of the country through its charcoal trade — was rightly blamed for the hundreds of thousands of deaths that followed. By the time the famine ended, al-Shabab was universally reviled. Politically, it was dead.

Kenya’s invasion of Somalia in October 2011 might have provided al-Shabab with a chance to revive itself as a governing force. Analysts even feared that Kenya’s capture of a key port city, Kismayo, in September 2012, and its subsequent creation of a puppet government there would allow al-Shabab to rally Somalis to the populist cause of defeating the Kenyan “invaders.” But al-Shabab’s emir, Ahmed Godane, chose a different path, narrowing the group’s members to extremists and rooting its vision firmly in terrorism.

In June 2013, Godane conducted a violent purge. Vital clan allies, including Mukhtar Robow and Hassan Dahir Aweys, fled for their lives, and several foreign fighters who had objected to Godane’s use of violence against fellow Muslims were also killed. This left al-Shabab — what remained of it — unencumbered by administrative or populist concerns.

Three months later, the attack on the Westgate mall occurred. It killed 67 people, including some foreigners, and footage of the carnage shocked the world. The event also shocked many Somalia experts, who had believed that the likely political backlash would prevent al-Shabab from launching a signature terrorist strike on Nairobi, a vital business hub for the Somali diaspora and a key source of remittances. Circumstances, clearly, had changed.

* * *

If the Westgate attack proved that Godane — who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in September 2014 — was willing to burn bridges in Somalia, the attack on Garissa University College signals that al-Shabab’s new leader, Ahmad Umar, is willing to build them with emerging powers in the global jihad. Over the past several months, the group has hit multiple targets in northern Kenya. In November 2014, attackers boarded a bus and executed those who could not recite the Muslim profession of faith. In December, the group executed 36 mostly Christian quarry workers in Mandera County. The Garissa attack is the largest assault to date, and it seems rife with symbolism: namely, the targeting of secular students in a manner that is unmistakably evocative of Boko Haram.

Al-Shabab’s likely future trajectory is grim. For starters, it can expect to benefit from the brutal response of government forces, as it has in the past. Following the Westgate attack, for example, police launched a crackdown on Kenya’s Somali population, imprisoning thousands of people in illegal dragnets. On Kenya’s Muslim-majority coast, efforts by military, intelligence, and police officers have been even severer, leaving local communities terrified of sharing information with the authorities and local leaders complaining that law enforcement is actively reinforcing al-Shabab recruiters’ radical message: that Kenya and its Western backers are only interested in abusing and marginalizing Muslims. And indeed, al-Shabab excels at exploiting poorly disciplined security forces, as well as the anger and alienation of Muslim communities, especially their young men.

However, as it pivots toward the tactics of Boko Haram and, ultimately, the ideology and guidance of the Islamic State, al-Shabab is likely to prey more and more on local populations, engaging in robberies, kidnappings, and other criminal enterprises. Its objective will be to provoke terror, not to win the loyalty or support of Muslim allies.

But it may do more still. In contrast to Boko Haram, al-Shabab could prove a powerful international asset to the Islamic State. While Boko Haram has unleashed violence across parts of northern Nigeria and across a couple of the country’s porous northern borders, it has not yet signaled the ability to attack a neighboring capital. Al-Shabab, however, has already planned or executed attacks in Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and, of course, Kenya. (It is suspected of maintaining sleeper cells as far afield as South Africa.) If it takes on the Islamic State’s mantle, there will likely be few limits on what al-Shabab might dare to do next.

The attack on Garissa University College is a clear signal of just how far al-Shabab’s terrible evolution has gone. This transformation has been mostly hurried (and certainly not hindered) by the misguided efforts of Western and regional governments to counter Somalia’s militants. Repairing the damage done will require a complete overhaul of Kenyan security forces and a willingness on the part of political leaders to engage in good faith on areas of Muslim, Somali, and youth concern.

Policymakers everywhere — not just in Kenya, but in Europe and the United States as well — should see the Garissa massacre as an announcement from al-Shabab that it is willing to join the race to the very bottom depths of the global jihad’s depravity. The longer it takes to implement reform, the more likely it is that even more horrible events will follow.

Argument
‘Playing Straight into the Hands of al-Shabab’

Kenya's counterterrorism approach following the Westgate Mall attack is crude -- and may actually be spawning more violence.

By Jacob Kushner
May 28, 2014
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‘Playing Straight into the Hands of al-Shabab’

NAIROBI, Kenya — At around 7:30 p.m. on March 31, three blasts went off in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighborhood. The explosions, which police say were caused by grenades, killed six and injured around a dozen civilians congregating at two local cafes in the suburban area, which is dominated by ethnic Somalis.

The bombings were only the latest in a spat of terror attacks following the September 2013 siege of Westgate Mall by Somali gunmen, which left 67 people dead. In December, a grenade blast killed four people in Eastleigh. In late March, unidentified gunmen entered a church near the coastal city of Mombasa, killing six. In all, nearly a dozen attacks that bear the marks of al-Shabab, a jihadist group based in Somalia that was responsible for the Westgate attack, have rattled Kenya since last fall.

Police are taking a high-profile approach as they respond to these attacks, detaining thousands of Somalis and Kenyan citizens of Somali heritage. But stops and arrests are not based on intelligence. Rather, police officers simply scour ethnic-Somali neighborhoods, sweeping up civilians from the streets.

Terrorism analysts say this sort of policing may actually be making Kenya less safe. As indiscriminate profiling becomes the fabric of security procedures, hundreds of thousands of Kenyan-Somali Muslims — a group from which al-Shabab affiliates are actively attempting to recruit — have something to be angry about. The government’s ethnic-focused, and often brutal, anti-terror tactics thus may be fueling the very attacks they are meant to suppress.

In response to the March grenade attacks, police indiscriminately picked up thousands of people off the streets of Eastleigh and locked them in a stadium for several days, out of reach of human rights attorneys and the press. An unknown number still remain inside. Such arbitrary detentions are ongoing, according to human rights groups, and they are the most visible incarnation of Kenya’s official response to terrorism post-Westgate. "The Kenyan police want to appear as if they’re doing something," says Stig Hansen, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences who researches terrorism in the Horn of Africa. "To collect a lot of Somalis appears like doing something."

Kenya’s police chief, David Kimaiyo, proclaimed last month that the "war against terrorism is still on, and we are not relenting." But he also has insisted that no profiling, bribery, or unprofessionalism has taken place.

Countless Eastleigh residents have stories to tell of being stopped or taken captive by police, only to have to buy their freedom. The consequences of nighttime police raids on Eastleigh homes can be even more severe: One woman fell, or was pushed, from a fifth-floor balcony when police entered her home one night. In a separate raid, police took a woman away from her six-month-old baby, who died in her absence. Hundreds of Somalis — including some with legal status as refugees — have been deported altogether.

Across Nairobi, police killings have reportedly become routine, raising doubts as to the ability or will of authorities to uphold the rule of law, even as they ostensibly go about enforcing it. Security forces have also failed to carry out even the most basic of investigative procedures. On May 4, grenades exploded on two crowded buses in Nairobi, killing three and injuring 62. At a loss to explain the source of the blasts, police responded by criminally charging the bus operators for "failing to prevent a felony."

"Imagine if the FBI’s response to 9/11 was to prosecute the security guards at the World Trade Center," one Somali-Kenyan said to me.

Authorities have done very little to reassure Somali Muslims that their grievances matter. Police in Mombasa have yet to name any suspects in the assassinations of two outspoken, hard-line Muslim clerics. Many Muslims suspect police themselves may be responsible for the killings, which occurred in March and last October, respectively.

Mombasa has long been the country’s hotbed of religious tension between Muslims and Christians. Occasionally that has escalated into violence, and police have often managed to aggravate such episodes. When a gang of Mombasa youth rioted and burned a church following the killing of the first cleric, Kenyan police responded by storming a nearby mosque during prayer time, dragging out worshipers, and beating them with batons.

Collective anger over such incidents may be radicalizing certain individuals here, not only in Mombasa but across the country. Those within Kenya’s ethnic Somali communities say some young Muslims seem increasingly ready to act upon that anger.

"If they feel more pressure than they can take, anything can happen," said Somali-Kenyan journalist and Eastleigh resident Said Hassan Anteno, who interviews victims of police harassment. "When you punch someone, what do you expect? They punch back."

Indeed, several recent terror attacks seem to have specifically targeted the police: In April, a bomb exploded outside a police station, killing two officers. And just last week, gunmen near Kenya’s northern border with Somalia killed three police officers, in addition to nine civilians, in an attack that al-Shabab claimed to have carried out.

This cycle of ill-disciplined policing accelerating anti-state violence isn’t new. When the Islamic Party of Kenya was founded in the 1990s, Kenya’s then-president, Daniel arap Moi, immediately accused the party of "promoting Islamic fundamentalism." Although relatively benign, "the gathering of these Muslims created an almost irrational fear by the government and over the course of the early 1990s, led to numerous violent clashes with police… [and] arguably spread the ideology of extremist views amongst Muslims in Kenya," explains Samuel L. Aronson in a recent paper on Kenya’s failing security.

The spark that ignited Kenya’s current fight with terrorism was Kenya’s 2011 invasion of Somalia in reaction to the kidnapping of two Spanish aid workers from northern Kenya. Months after the unilateral incursion, Kenyan troops integrated with the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia and advanced as al-Shabab’s leadership abandoned their former stronghold in the town of Kismayo, a strategic port city in southern Somalia.

But these missions did little to eradicate al-Shabab. As Kenyan soldiers fought a war in Somalia, their enemies came to Kenya. "Al-Shabab is telling Kenya that there’s a price to pay to be involved in Somalia," Hansen said. "It’s not only telling Kenya this through the Westgate attack, but through the over 70 attacks that have taken place since 2011."

The accelerating pace of attacks highlights just how little Kenya’s leaders have done to address some of the nation’s tangible, even obvious, vulnerabilities. For instance, the four Somali gunmen who sieged Westgate are believed to have entered Kenya at the same unsecured border crossing through which illegal weapons used to attack an Israeli-owned hotel and airplane in 2002 were smuggled.

U.S. agencies are trying to strengthen Kenya’s counterterrorism capabilities. The FBI has trained some 800 Kenyan security personnel over the past several years, according to the bureau’s legal attaché in Nairobi, Dennis Brady. During the Westgate attack, the FBI deployed more than 80 officers in Nairobi and has since continued to assist Kenyan authorities in their investigation.

And yet embarrassments on the part of security forces emerged even before the mall was cleared: Security footage shows ­­­­Kenyan commandos looting the mall while Kenya’s government claimed that the gunmen were still at large. Reporters surveying the carnage found safes whose locks had been shot at and bars whose alcohol had been ransacked.

For their part, Kenya’s lawmakers haven’t really addressed the myriad accusations of security forces’ unprofessionalism. A 2013 parliamentary report largely whitewashed, despite overwhelming evidence, accusations of looting in Westgate. In March, the Associated Press revealed that Kenya’s anti-terror police unit in Nairobi was operating on a budget of only $735 per month. In comparison, parliamentary salaries and allowances total about $15,000 per month — per representative.

In a popular political stance, lawmakers are demanding the closure of the Dadaab refugee camp, which houses some 400,000 Somali refugees in northern Kenya. Calling the camp "a nursery for terrorists," the head of Kenya’s Parliamentary Committee on National Security, Asman Kamama, said in September 2013 that "the U.N. must now understand the security of Kenyans comes first. Even if it is about human rights, it should not be at our expense."

The sentiment plays well among ordinary Kenyans. More concerning to the broader population than illegal detentions and other human rights abuses of ethnic Somalis is the fact that these police tactics have failed to quell the violence.

But no one in Kenya has more cause for concern than Somali-Muslims themselves: It is the refugee camps, border communities, and urban Somali neighborhoods that, in fact, have been the targets of most terrorist attacks here. "A week and a half ago there was an explosion, and Eastleigh was turned upside down [by police]," said Ahmed Mohamed, an assistant to a parliamentary representative from Eastleigh and a well-known figure here, on May 14. "[A police] operation has been going on for six weeks. And then yet another explosion happens. It’s not working."

Earlier this month two bombs killed at least 10 and injured more than 70 in a crowded market in downtown Nairobi. At that same time, just a short walk away, a cleric in Nairobi’s Jamia Mosque delivered a lecture before hundreds of worshipers, most of them ethnic Somalis. Sheik Mohamoud Shakul urged the crowd to separate religion from politics and to avoid associating with those who might lead them astray from a peaceful interpretation of Islam. "In some communities, ethnic profiling has taken place," he said. "We all know that is happening. I want us to go back to the basics this time."

Sitting in his Eastleigh office a few days earlier, Shakul had warned me that the "actions of the police can radicalize the youth of Kenya against the government." He and other Muslim leaders say they are trying to keep the peace. But their task is being made increasingly difficult by the counterterrorism activities sanctioned by Kenya’s leaders.

"The Kenyan police are playing straight into the hands of al-Shabab," said Hansen. "By inflicting collective punishment, they are again reviving the Muslim sentiment against them."

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How the United States is Trying to stop al-Shabab

By David Francis
April 2, 2015 - 12:15 pm
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@davidcfrancis
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How the United States is Trying to stop al-Shabab

Just days after President Barack Obama announced a summer trip to Kenya, al-Shabab, the Islamist group that’s been terrorizing East Africa for years, provided a grim reminder that it remains a dangerous force and that U.S. efforts to dismantle it have fallen short.

Early Thursday morning, militants stormed a university in Garissa, a city about 230 miles east of Nairobi. At least 147 are dead while 65 are behind held hostage, separated by their Muslim or Christian religions. Reports indicate Muslim students are being released. Some 500 are still unaccounted for. The Kenyan interior ministry says two of the militants have been killed.

For years, the United States has waged a stealthy campaign against the group. The best known encounter — and the one al-Shabab takes great pride in — came in 2013, when militants turned back Seal Team 6 in Barawe, Somalia, an costal al-Shabab stronghold in Somalia. The failed U.S. raid followed al-Shabab’s siege in September 2013 of the upscale Westgate mall in Nairobi, which left 67 dead. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports since 2007 the United States has conducted between seven and 11 similar covert raids in Somalia, leaving between 23 and 105 militants dead.

The Pentagon also has launched a number of drone strikes in Somalia to take out the group’s leadership. Last month, a U.S. strike targeted Adan Garar, who is believed to have planned the violence at Westgate, and two other senior al-Shabab members. Garar was killed in the strike.

This followed a February 2015 strike against Abdi Nur Mahdi, the group’s chief of external operations. Last September, an American drone attack took out the group’s leader and one of the most wanted men in Africa, Ahmed Abdi Godane. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that since 2007, the Defense Department has conducted between nine and 13 drone strikes in Somalia that have killed between 40 and 141 al-Shabab members.

The Treasury Department is also attempting to financially starve al-Shabab through a series of sanctions against Somalia, the group’s home. Private financial institutions are also cutting off money transfers from the U.S. to Somalia. The Merchants Bank of California, responsible for 60 to 80 percent of the remittances sent to Somalia from the United States and the last big bank still transferring money to Somalia, announced in January it would no longer send money from Somali immigrants back home in an effort to stop American money from ending up in the hands of the group.

But as Thursday’s university attack proves, the group is resilient and killing its leadership has done little to deter it. Last week, al-Shabab militants laid siege to an upscale hotel in Mogadishu, killing at least nine. According to BBC World Service Africa editor Mary Harper, drone strikes could embolden the militants.

Drone attacks give al-Shabab “almost a legitimacy in terms of the kind of group that they are claiming to be,” Harper said in a recent podcast. U.S. strategy makes the group like “a global force to be reckoned with, even though they are in fact just a group of people running around in the Somali bush.”