Somali militants threaten revenge attacks after Kenyan incursion
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REPORTING FROM JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA -- Somali militants fighting their homeland’s Western-backed government Monday threatened suicide attacks against neighboring Kenya, whose forces entered Somalia over the weekend.
Kenyan forces pursued Somali militants into southern Somalia after the kidnapping of two Spanish aid workers last week from a refugee camp in Kenya. It was the third kidnapping of foreigners in Kenya by Somali gangs since early September.
Kenyan officials blamed the Al Shabab militia, which controls much of famine-hit southern Somalia, for the attacks.
‘Our territorial integrity is threatened with serious security threats of terrorism. We cannot allow this to happen at all,’ George Saitoti, Kenya’s internal security minister, told a news conference Saturday. ‘It means we are now going to pursue the enemy, who are the Al Shabab, to wherever they will be, even in their country.’
Al Shabab called a news conference in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, on Monday to issue a chilling warning of attacks in Kenya. The group last year carried out a devastating suicide bombing in Uganda that killed 76 people -- in reprisal for the deployment of Ugandan forces in Somalia to back the transitional government there.
Al Shabab spokesman Ali Mohamed Raghe said that if Kenya did not withdraw its forces, his group would blow up skyscrapers in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and destroy the country’s fragile tourist industry, already reeling from the recent abductions of foreigners at resorts on Kenya’s northern coast.
‘The Kenyan forces have crossed about 100 kilometers deep into Somalia, and in some cases their military aircraft have bombed inside Somalia,’ Raghe said. ‘If they continue this way, they will regret and feel the consequences back home.’
Witnesses sighted several dozen Kenyan military vehicles in Somalia, news agencies reported over the weekend. Kenyan fighter jets and helicopters have been flying over Somalia, and a military helicopter involved in the operation crashed in northern Kenya late Sunday, killing five troops.
After militants abducted two Spanish aid workers serving with Doctors Without Borders on Thursday, Kenya closed its northern border with Somalia to prevent militants from entering. The border closure means that thousands of starving and malnourished Somalis seeking to flee the famine will have no escape route out of the south.
But even blocking the border may offer Kenya little protection from Al Shabab, with reports by Human Rights Watch and others that both Al Shabab and the transitional government have recruited refugees around the Dadaab refugee camp in recent years.
The Kenyan incursions into Somalia had strong support from newspaper editorials. The Daily Nation editorial described the spate of recent abductions as a ‘declaration of war’ by Al Shabab.
‘These attacks are doing incalculable harm to Kenya’s reputation as an oasis of peace and stability,’ it said, blaming ‘sleepers’ in the Dadaab camp posing as refugees.
‘These attacks must be taken as a declaration of war. Such actions cannot be countered with empty words or acts of appeasement. Aggressive action is required to demonstrate to all and sundry that our national security is not to be trifled with,’ the editorial said.
It also raised fears that militants posing as refugees could launch attacks anywhere in Kenya.
‘If indeed the half a million or so refugees in Dabaab include Al Shabab adherents, then it is frightening to imagine what number of their compatriots may have left the refugee camp and made their way to big cities and towns across Kenya just waiting for the signal to strike,’ the editorial said.
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-- Robyn Dixon
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