Shabab luring educated Kenyans
One of the attackers in the Somali group’s university massacre was a well-connected law scholar.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya’s air force launched airstrikes Monday on two Shabab camps in the Gedo region of Somalia, the country’s Defense Forces announced, as parents searched morgues for students missing since the Islamist militant group attacked a university last week, killing 148.
The only killer identified thus far in the massacre has raised fear of a new breed of recruit to the Al Qaedalinked Somali group: young, bright, well-educated, privileged and Kenyan.
Mohammed Abdirahim Abdullahi was the son of a chief, an appointed government representative, in Mandera, in northern Kenya, and had studied law at the University of Nairobi. Abdullahi, who died in the attack after Kenyan forces responded, had gone missing about a year ago.
Students have said the assailants at Garissa University College spoke Kiswahili, one of Kenya’s languages, to students and one another during Thursday’s attack.
Authorities have identified the mastermind as an ethnic Somali Kenyan, Mohammed Mohamud, who goes by several names, including Dulyadin and Gamadhere.
As Shabab has lost ground in Somalia, it has deepened its roots in neighboring Kenya, analysts have warned.
Shabab has often targeted poor, jobless young men in Kenya, offering them money and a cellphone for joining. But Abdullahi’s role suggests the group has become more sophisticated in its recruitment of Kenyans, appealing to well-educated, less-impoverished young Somali Kenyans.
“Now we are seeing more sophisticated recruitment: We see a generation of welleducated young people being recruited,” Hassan ole Naado, deputy secretary general of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, said in an interview Monday. “If you have a well-educated young person going to informal camps, imagine what a powerful recruitment tool that is, because they say, ‘Look at me, I don’t need to be here, but I believe we belong here.’”
Naado said the council was planning to have religious scholars analyze Koranic texts and develop counter-narratives to Shabab’s recruitment propaganda, to help to protect vulnerable young people from being radicalized.
Abdullahi has been described as a well-dressed young man who enjoyed playing pool with friends and who ran a business in the Somali neighborhood of Eastleigh in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, while he was a student. Friends said he showed no outward signs of radicalization at high school or the university, according to Kenyan news media.
“His arguments were very rational. Even in class, he was very rational,” a former friend, Dedan Wachira, told Kenya’s Nation newspaper. “That’s why I’m surprised he could have been radicalized.”
Kenyan blogger Yassin Juma reported Sunday that Abdullahi and two other classmates from Wamy High School, a prominent Islamic secondary school in Nairobi, had been radicalized after leaving school. One, he said, joined Islamic State, and the other joined Shabab with Abdullahi.
After Thursday’s attack, photographs on Facebook showed Abdullahi on the ground, shot in the head.
“I taught this kid. If I did not see his picture, I would never have believed it was him,” Alibash Mohamed wrote on Facebook. Mohamed said on Twitter that he taught Abdullahi for two years “and there was nothing like radicalization.”
In another post on Facebook, the teacher said, “I still cannot believe he did it,” adding that Abdullahi was an A student. Others who knew him wrote on Facebook that he was among Kenya’s top 100 high school graduates in 2007.
Analysts called on Kenya’s government to do more to counteract Shabab’s propaganda, but also to ensure that police sweeps in Eastleigh didn’t feed the group’s claims that Somalis aren’t welcome in Kenya.
Kenyan police were strongly criticized for mass roundups of Somali Kenyans last year, which saw more than 1,000 people arrested and held in Kasarani stadium, dubbed a “concentration camp” by Somali Kenyans.
Naado, of the Muslim council, said Shabab, like other militant groups, was selectively twisting aspects of the Koran to justify killing.
“The government has no choice but to find a way of engaging the community in counter-narratives [to Shabab’s propaganda] and addressing the socioeconomic issues,” Naado said.
“We have returnee excombatants in Kenya, young people returning from Al Shabab. Now they’re in hiding. They can’t move freely about because they fear arrest. There’s a need to re-integrate them and reform them. I see them as a very powerful resource, because they form a strong counternarrative.
“They give the counternarrative to Al Shabab a face, because they can say, ‘I’ve been there and I’ve come back and this is why I came back.’”
Eastleigh businessman Ahmed Mohammed, a Somali Kenyan, said Shabab was trying to drive a wedge between Kenya’s Christian and Muslim communities by attacking Christians. Mohammed organized a march of Somali Kenyans on Friday to express grief and solidarity over the university attack.
He warned against mass arrests amid a backlash on social media and among Kenyan politicians over the presence of Somali refugees in Kenya.
“What we normally see is blanket condemnation,” he said. “It’s very counterproductive. This is a community you want to get information from. If you knock on the door of a Somali family at 2 o’clock in the morning and turn their lives upside down, you don’t expect them to give you information,” he said, referring to last year’s arrests.
“We ask the government to make sure police operations are intelligence-led. If they suspect there are terrorist cells, they get in there, do their business and get out.”