[kictanet] Radical Islamists Slip Easily Into Kenya: By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, Published: July 21, 2009

[alice]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/world/africa/22shabab.html?_r=2&hp

Is this really true? or the usual Western propaganda?


Alice



<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/jeffrey_gettleman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

Published: July 21, 2009

HULUGHO, Kenya 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/kenya/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> 
— A thin, dusty line is about the only thing separating Kenya, one of 
the Western world’s closest allies in Africa, from the Shabab 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/al-shabab/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
a radical Islamist militia that has taken over much of southern Somalia 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/somalia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>, 
beheading detractors, stoning adulterers and threatening to kill any 
Americans or Europeans who get in their way.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/world/africa/22shabab.html?_r=2&hp#secondParagraph> 


<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/22/world/20090722SHABAB_index.html>

A sandstorm in a refugee camp in Kenya, near the Somali border. The 
Shabab have penetrated such camps, according to elders, luring away 
dozens of young men with promises of paradise — and $300 each. More 
Photos » 
<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/22/world/20090722SHABAB_index.html> 


The New York Times

Beyond the village of Hulugho lies Shabab country. More Photos > 
<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/22/world/20090722SHABAB_index.html> 


Enlarge This Image 
<javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/22/world/22shabab_CA2.inlineB.ready.html', 
'22shabab_CA2_inlineB_ready', 
'width=720,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')>
<javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/22/world/22shabab_CA2.inlineB.ready.html', 
'22shabab_CA2_inlineB_ready', 
'width=720,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')>
Dominic Nahr for The New York Times

A Kenyan police officer stood along the Somali border. Some fear the 
Shabab might infiltrate Kenya and attack Westerners. More Photos > 
<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/22/world/20090722SHABAB_index.html> 


In most places this line, the official international border, is not even 
marked, let alone protected. In the village of Hulugho, there is simply 
a tattered Kenyan flag and a cinderblock schoolhouse with chicken-wire 
windows. Then a meadow of thorn trees and donkey dung. Then Shabab country.

Kenya is widely seen as a frontline state against the Islamist extremism 
smoldering across the Horn of Africa. Few expect the Shabab to make good 
on its threats to march en masse across the border. But the creeping 
fear, the one that keeps the security staffs at Western embassies awake 
at night, is that the Shabab or its foreign jihadist allies will 
infiltrate Kenya and attack some of the tens of thousands of Westerners 
living in the country, possibly in a major strike like Al Qaeda 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
did in 1998.

Last month, Western counterterrorism experts in Kenya sent out text 
messages 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/text_messaging/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> 
warning expatriates to stay away from malls in Nairobi, Kenya’s usually 
laid-back capital, because of possible suicide attacks by the Shabab. A 
few weeks later, the group threatened to destroy Nairobi’s “tall, glass 
buildings.”

The Shabab has already penetrated refugee camps inside Kenya, according 
to camp elders, luring away dozens of young men with promises of 
paradise — and $300 each. It has carried out cross-border attacks, 
kidnapping an outspoken cleric in May from a refugee camp 50 miles 
inside Kenya. Last Wednesday, in one of its boldest cross-border moves 
yet, a squad of uniformed, heavily armed Shabab fighters stormed into a 
Kenyan school in a remote town, rounding up all the children and telling 
them to quit their classes and join the jihad.

“If these guys can come in with their guns and uniforms in broad 
daylight,” said one of the teachers at the school, “they must be among us.”

Then on Saturday it happened again: Somali gunmen, widely believed to be 
with the Shabab, stormed the offices of an aid organization and 
kidnapped three aid workers from a Kenyan border town before melting 
back into Somalia.

American and British advisers are working closely with Kenyan 
counterterrorism teams, but the area along the Somali border is known to 
be a gaping hole.

“The Kenyans don’t have the skills to close the border, even if they 
wanted to,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of 
anonymity, citing diplomatic protocol. “People are very concerned. But 
on some level, we can’t defend Kenya’s border for them.”

When asked to assess the level of security at the Somali border, the 
diplomat flatly stated, “There is no security.”

The raging war in the country next door, between Somalia’s weak 
transitional government and the Shabab, is rapidly becoming a proxy war 
— with Western arms and money keeping the transitional government alive, 
while Arab and Pakistani jihadists with links to Al Qaeda fight for the 
Shabab.

Late last month, American officials acknowledged that they had shipped 
40 tons of weapons to Somalia’s transitional government, a disclosure 
that has only sharpened the Shabab’s anti-American sentiments.

Kenyan security forces are now flooding into their borderlands, marching 
along the shimmering roads and across the unforgiving landscape, their 
assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

But the 400-mile border is inevitably porous, and Somali-speaking nomads 
from both countries flow seamlessly back and forth in diaphanous shawls 
and worn-out wooden carts. And the biggest proverbial holes may be in 
the police officers’ pockets.

Just this month, Transparency International listed Kenya 
<http://www.transparency.org/news_room/latest_news/press_releases_nc/2009/2009_07_02_kenya_index> 
as the most corrupt nation in East Africa. The region’s most corrupt 
public institution? The Kenyan police.

Even though the border is officially closed, Hassan Mohamed, a refugee 
who used to build houses in Somalia but got driven out by war, explained 
how thousands of Somali refugees find their way into Kenya each month.

“It’s easy,” he said, rubbing his thumb and index finger together in the 
universal sign of a bribe. “If you pay, you can come in.”

The cracked wooden shelves in the border-town markets are heaped with 
the telltale signs of a flourishing smuggling business: sacks of 
Pakistani sugar, foreign brands of sodas and soaps, cigarettes with 
Somali labels — all illegal imports from Somalia that somehow made it 
past the dozen police checkpoints on the Kenyan side.

Abdi Dimbil Alan, an elder who lives in Alin Jugul, a town near the 
Somali border, says that nearly every night he witnesses the same Somali 
businessmen paying off the Kenyan police to allow consumer goods and 
even assault rifles to slip through the border.

“These guys are so corrupt,” Mr. Abdi said, referring to the border 
police, “that if 100 Shabab pulled up with a truckload of weapons and 
said they were coming to Kenya to kill the president, the police would 
let them through — for the right price.”

Erick Kipkorir, a district officer in Alin Jugul, said Kenyan forces 
were hard-working and honest.

“We can’t say that nothing is coming in because, as you see, the border 
is very expansive,” he said. “But as for bribes, that has never happened.”

Ever since Al Qaeda blew up the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 
in 1998, killing more than 200 people and wounding thousands, American 
counterterrorism officials have been watching East Africa warily. But in 
the areas along the Kenya-Somalia border, it seems that anti-Americanism 
is still spreading, despite the millions of dollars the American 
government has spent on a hearts-and-minds campaign.

Take an American-built well in the village of Raya. No one is using it, 
though Raya is desperately poor and dry.

“The Americans wanted to finish us,” said one villager, Ibrahim Alin, 
convinced that the American water engineers who built the well had 
poisoned it to sterilize him.

The Somali-speaking areas of Kenya have always been an uneasy fit, and 
Kenya has often responded brutally.

This area tried to secede in the 1960s and join Somalia, leading to a 
guerrilla war. In 1984, Kenyan security forces imprisoned and then 
killed thousands of ethnic Somali men at a remote airstrip, according to 
Kenyan human rights groups.

In recent weeks, Human Rights Watch 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/human_rights_watch/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
accused 
<http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/06/29/kenya-bring-prosecutions-torture-northeast> 
Kenyan security services of raping women and smashing the testicles of 
men during a crackdown in northeastern Kenya in October.