Somali Terrorist Group Attacks Non-Muslim Students at Kenyan College

Some events cannot go without comment. For the sake of not ruining anyone’s Easter, however, I am breaking with my usual Sunday schedule.

Paramedics assist an injured student in Garissa. (Source: america.aljazeera.com)

On Thursday of this past week, four members of the Somali jihadist group al-Shabaab (“The Youth”, linked to al-Qaeda) launched an hours-long assault on Garissa University College in Kenya. The group began by attacking a Christian morning prayer service, then continued to target non-Muslims around the campus. The gunmen killed 147 students in total before Kenyan troops’ bullets struck the explosive belts which the gunmen were wearing.

This attack follows earlier attacks in November and December, where al-Shabaab militants also crossed the relatively unguarded Somali-Kenyan border to attack a bus (in the first case) and a mine (in the second). In both cases the militants sorted out and executed all non-Muslims. Both attacks were framed as punitive responses to Kenyan government raids on mosques which were believed to be hubs of extremist activity. More generally, they are responses to Kenya’s decision to send troops into the unstable territory of Somalia in 2011 to target al-Shabaab there.

Soldiers of al-Shabaab. (Source: nbcnews.com)

Much like ISIS, al-Shabaab has been attempting to establish a fundamentalist Muslim state in Somalia, which had no stable government between 1991 and 2012. They exact taxes from the regions they control, recruit fighters from the West using rather well-produced propaganda videos, and actually teamed up with a group of sharia courts called the Islamic Courts Union to take control of Mogadishu, the Somalian capital, in 2006, until Ethiopian troops dislodged them.

I must say I’m not entirely sure how to comment on this. The appearance, once again, of Islamist paramilitaries attempting to create a new state in a Third World power vacuum is becoming a depressingly common theme.

The part I find most interesting, however, is the decision of the Kenyan government to intercede in the (only theoretically concluded) Somalian Civil War against al-Shabaab, and to raid Kenyan mosques for possible terrorist cells (having, admittedly, found explosives in one of them). For reference, only 11.1% of Kenyans are Muslim, while the majority (82.5%) are Christian. According to the US State Department, Kenyan Muslim leaders occasionally charge the government with hostility towards Muslims, and complain of being treated like second-class citizens. Controversial religious issues have included Muslim requests to have special Islamic courts to judge cases between Muslims, a government attempt to pass an anti-terrorism bill (received exactly as such legislation is received in the West), and government attempts to improve primary education by working with Islamic schools (attacked as an attempt to alter the teachings of Islam).

Bashar al-Assad, together with officers of the Syrian Arab Army. (Source: businessinsider.com)

In other words, Kenya is responding to the Islamist threat on its doorstep in a manner very similar to that of Western countries, which have historically had a pretty poor track record in responding to the Islamist threat. As I’ve mentioned before, the states with the greatest success in controlling Islamists, by their own citizens’ standards, tend to be heavily authoritarian. Authoritarianism, however, seems to bring special attention from Western governments, desirous of supporting pro-democratic regime change. For the result, again, see the link above: Middle Easterners, it seems, are continually forced to choose between secular and Islamist dictators.

How, then, should Kenya (and the governments of Africa as a whole) respond? By insisting, a la al-Assad, that the “equal status” and “freedom” of Kenyan Muslims take second place to the demands of Kenya’s national security? By somehow altering the Western interventionist strategy so that it actually works? Is there a third option?

We can only hope and pray that Africa can think outside our boxes, and succeed in establishing peace and order where we have failed.