On April 2, gunmen from the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab attacked Garrisa University College in Garissa, Kenya, killing some 150 students. They warned that new attacks would be coming, and that Kenyan cities “will run red with blood.”
The alleged mastermind of the terrorist attack is a Kenyan national, Mohamed Mohamud aka Dulyadeyn, believed to be a close friend of al-Shabaab’s leader, Ahmed Omar Abu Ubeyd. Another gunman was Abdirahim Mohammed Abdullahi, the son of a government chief.
This was the most deadly terror attack in Kenya since the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy in Nairobi by Al-Qaeda.
The most notorious Islamist terrorist groups in Africa are found in two very different countries, at opposite ends of the continent.
In Somalia, Al-Shabaab is a product of the very collapse of the state, while in Nigeria, Boko Haram wishes to impose an extreme version of Islam in the Muslim north of a country torn by corruption and ethnic and religious conflict.
Somalia is that rarity in Africa, an ethnically and religiously homogenous country. Virtually all Somalis are Sunnis and speak Somali. Yet Somalia itself has been without an effective government since 1991, when the last dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, fled the country.
The reason: fierce rivalry among the major clans into which Somalis are divided. So the country has been governed, or more accurately misgoverned, by a collection of clan-based “warlords,” who have looted and murdered their way through the country ever since.
As a reaction to the political vacuum created by this Hobbesian lawlessness, a system of Islamic courts became the main governmental body in much of the country. United into the Islamic Courts Union by 2006, they were eliminated by other Somalis, backed by the Ethiopian military, in a brutal war. But a militant offshoot morphed into Al-Shabaab.
Ethiopia and Kenya, neither of them Muslim-majority states, have periodically crossed into Somalia ever since then to battle the terrorists. In 2011 their troops entered Somalia in a coordinated attack, known as Operation Linda Nchi, against the Al-Shabaab insurgents in southern Somalia.
As well, in November of 2012, Kenyan forces launched a military attack on the Garissa district of their own North Eastern Province, inciting violence, raping women and shooting at students. A mass exodus of Somali residents followed.
In return, Al-Shabaab has carried out attacks on Ethiopian and Kenyan troops in Somalia, but also against those countries as well. We learned the full extent of their retaliation when they wreaked havoc on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in September 2013, which resulted in at least 67 deaths; claimed responsibility for two attacks on the Kenyan coast which killed more than 60 in June 2014; and now with the bloody massacre in Garissa.
In addition to its call for Kenya to withdraw its troops from African Union peacekeeping forces in Somalia itself, the militants also tried to justify the latest attack by saying that this part of Kenya was “a Muslim land” — it is populated mostly by ethnic Somalis and was in the past claimed by Somali governments.
Al-Shabaab has been recruiting among poor young Muslims in north-eastern Kenya, warning them that the school was part of Kenya’s “plan to spread their Christianity and infidelity.”
Boko Haram has been a reaction to the extreme corruption and religious volatility found in Africa’s most populous country. While fabulously wealthy, Nigeria’s government and elite shares very little with the masses, especially those in the Muslim northeast, traditionally the poorest and least influential part of the country.
Since the country’s independence in 1960, about $600 billion (U.S.) in oil revenue has flowed into the government’s coffers, yet an estimated $400 billion has been diverted, misspent or simply stolen.
During President Goodluck Jonathan’s tenure, 2010-2015, the corruption scandals of government ministers were quietly ignored. Parliamentary reports detailing these scandals were hushed up. High civil servants who exposed them were fired. In 2013, central bank governor Lamido Sanusi identified $20 billion in “leakages” from government oil accounts.
Boko Haram regards the Nigerian state as being run by non-believers, even when the country has had a Muslim president.
Since its formation in 2002, the extreme Islamist group has killed some 16,000 people and taken over swathes of the northeastern states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe. It has lately even extended its military campaign by targeting neighboring countries Cameroon and Chad.
In August 2014, Abubakar Muhammad Shekau, its leader, declared a caliphate in areas under Boko Haram’s control, and praised Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
President Jonathan, a southern Christian, seemed impassive in the face of this growing threat — perhaps the reason he lost the recent presidential election to a former dictator, Muhammadu Buhari. He was the military ruler of Nigeria between 1983 and 1985, waging a “war against indiscipline” that prescribed humiliating punishment for tardy civil servants. He is seen as selfless, disciplined and incorruptible.
Perhaps Nigerians feel that only someone like Buhari, himself a Muslim from the north, can “fight fire with fire.”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
