Al-Shabab terror shock

Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta fired his interior minister and police chief on Tuesday. The move came just hours after a fresh massacre by al-Shabab terrorists left 36 people dead near the northern Kenyan town of Mandera. "Kenyatta had to do something", Emmanuel Kisiangani, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Nairobi, told DW.

Pressure on Kenyatta has been mounting with demonstrators protesting against the apparent failure of the security apparatus to protect them from terrorism. This was the 25th time that al-Shabab terrorists from Somalia had attacked Kenya this year.

"It is a systemic problem within all the security institutions here", Kisiangani said."If you look at the kind of troops that they have, their pay, their equipment, it is all dilapidated." Kenya is just not in control of the border with Somalia, he adds. "And that is why these guys can just walk in."

Prayers and gunshots

Pictures from the quarry on the outskirts of Mandera, near the Kenyan-Somali border, had shocked Kenyans on Tuesday morning. They showed rows of bodies on the rocky ground, sparsely covered with cloth. The 36 quarry workers were murdered right next to the red ridge tents where they had been sleeping. Somali militants from the al-Shabab group attacked the men in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

An eyewitness told the AP news agency that about 50 armed men had entered the quarry. While he managed to hide in a trench, he heard that his colleagues were asked to recite the Islamic creed declaring the Oneness of God. Then gunshots were fired. It seemed that the attackers had singled out all non-Muslims and shot them in the back of the head.

Al-Shabab spokesman Sheikh Rage claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement he said that it "was part of a series of attacks" by the Islamist group. He added that the killing served "as a response to Kenya's occupation of Muslim lands and their ongoing atrocities therein".

Bring the troops home?

Some opposition parties in Nairobi have called for the withdrawal of Kenyan troops participating in an African peacekeeping mission in Somalia. President Kenyatta, however, rejected the suggestion on Tuesday, warning al-Shabab that his country would "intensify the war on terrorism".

Kisiangani agrees that troop withdrawal isn't the answer: "Pulling out wouldn't address the issues why we went in", he says. "Kenya sent troops to Somalia because of these attacks in the first place, and also to protect large infrastructure projects such as planned pipelines for oil from South Sudan."

Matters are further complicated by the ethnic makeup of northern Kenya. It was not hard for al-Shabab to recruit help in this region as it is home to many ethnic Somalis, said ethnologist Markus Höhne from Leipzig University. "Al-Shabab can easily find supporters in this region who will say to them: you can teach the central government a lesson. They have kept neglecting us since independence in 1963."

The situation is similar in the coastal area between Lamu and Mombasa which has been also been the target of al-Shabab in recent years. "They prey on existing conflicts there", Höhnee said. "In this whole coastal area, there already exists tension between the local population and the central government in Nairobi. Most people there are Muslims and they claim that their region has been marginalized by the central government," he added.

Höhne said there are yearnings for the creation of of a separate state. "And al-Shabab taps into that, further escalating the existing conflict."

How to resolve the conflict

In spite of numerous blows al-Shabab has suffered at the hands of African peacekeeping troops in Somalia, Höhne is convinced that the terrorist group and its ideology cannot be defeated by military means alone. "What we currently observe is the transformation of this group. It is turning itself into a small terrorist cell which is widening out its violent operations, while at the same time keeping up a political program as an underground organization."

Höhne believes the only remedy for this growing problem for the whole Horn of Africa would be to try and establish a reconciliation process inside southern Somalia. "A process that is controlled not by the United Nations, the European Union, the US, or the African Union, but by Somalis", Höhne said. "Then I think you would have a good chance of getting rid of the problem of al-Shabab over the next few years." However, at the moment it does not seem very likely that such a dialogue will be possible any time soon.