The enduring lesson of last year’s Shabaab attack on mall

One year ago, Kenya faced its worst terrorist attack whose after-effects reveal a country deeply steeped in what Pope Francis recently fretted as a “Third World War”, which is already here, and taking its toll.

The September 21, 2013 siege of Nairobi’s classy Westgate Shopping Mall by gunmen from the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al-Shabaab militia in Somalia carried the footprints of a new “world war” that the Head of the Catholic Church says is now being fought piecemeal, with a mélange of crimes, massacres, terror and destruction.

The attack left 67 people dead, 175 others reportedly wounded, thousands suffering multiple losses and trauma, and property worth billions of shillings destroyed.

The Westgate horror is already the focus of an harrowing hour-long documentary, Terror at the Mall, by British filmmaker Dan Reed, airing on world theatres from September 15. (Not to be confused with the 1998 television movie, Terror in the Mall, by American film director Norberto Barba).

But editorialists, analysts and filmmakers obsessing over the Westgate horror as a stand alone episode are obscuring the larger dramatic canvas of a country caught up in a web of global conflicts from Ukraine to Iraq, Syria to Gaza and parts of Africa — that the Pope posits “may amount to a Third World War”.

A glimpse of Kenya’s encounter with terrorism before and after the Westgate attack depicts a country that has steadily moved from the fringes of terrorism to its epicentre.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Prior to Westgate, terrorists had hit Kenya four times. the December 1980 Norfolk Hotel bombing; August 1998 bombing of the American Embassy; the November 2002 bombing of Paradise Hotel; and a simultaneous missile attack on an Israeli plane taking off from Moi Airport, Mombasa.

Obviously, Kenya was not the actual target, but simply collateral damage. The Westgate attack also seemed to follow this pattern.

It targeted a mall said to be partly owned by an Israeli and with many businesses there operated by Israelis such as the ArtCaffe that was reportedly owned by Alex Traitenberg.

However, Westgate was the first direct hit on Kenya, billed by the attackers as a revenge for Kenya’s invasion of Somalia in October 2011.

A string of Al-Shabaab abductions and killings of tourists and aid workers at the Coast and North-Eastern Kenya forced the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) to launch “Operation Linda Nchi” — the equivalent of America’s “Pearl Harbour Attack” by Japan in 1941 which forced the United States to join World War II.

Kenya’s entry into Somalia was a game changer, but it thrust the country into the eye of a stormy global terrorism.

In 2011/2012, Kenya experienced 20 attacks where 48 people were killed and 200 others injured. Westgate marked the peak of this wave of Al-Shabaab attacks.

In the post-Westgate moment, local radicalisation, land-related populism and politically-instigated violence have, perhaps inadvertently, aided terrorism.

The détente between Kenyan extremists and external terrorists reached its apogee during Kenya’s winter of political populism between April and July 7, 2014. Terrorism during this period calls for a special inquiry to ascertain its true pedigree.

Seven major incidents left at least 74 people dead and 100 others injured, including the 48 killed in Mpeketoni town in Lamu County. But the situation would have been worse: Kenyan security forces foiled at least 33 planned attacks.

In Parliament, the opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord) was forced on the back foot, accused of championing Al-Shabaab’s call for KDF’s withdrawal from Somalia and halt of its security operation in Lamu.

Critics charged that this was intended to pave the way for Al-Shabaab to take over in Somalia, North Eastern Kenya and possibly the Coast.

All the same, by August 2014, the London-based Tony Blair Faith Foundation ranked Kenya in the league of countries experiencing the largest increase in terrorist attacks of recent years, with China, Libya and Egypt.

JUSTICE

On September 1, justice came to the victims of Westgate, and Al-Shabaab edged closer to a tipping-point.

This followed the killing in US air strikes in southern Somalia of Ahmed Abdi Godane, the group’s leader, military strategist and spiritual head under whose direction the militants forged an alliance with the Al Qaeda network, and who masterminded the Westgate siege.

“You cannot withstand a war of attrition inside your own country. So withdraw all your forces, or be prepared for an abundance of blood that will be spilt in your country,” Godane warned in an audio message posted online last year.

But Godane’s and Shabaab’s dream of an East African Caliphate will continue to haunt Kenya’s security for decades to come.

Currently, the world is rivetted by the “caliphate” of Abu al-Bagdadi, the jihadist who declared the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), almost completely oblivious of the parallel dreams of “an African Caliphate”.

In West Africa, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau is pushing for “an African Caliphate” with ISIS reportedly giving its blessings.

In East Africa, Al-Shabaab and its local backers in Kenya are seeking to re-establish an “Islamic Caliphate” in Eastern Africa, spawning the entire Indian Ocean seaboard down to River Ruvuma in Tanzania and linked to the Middle-East. Westgate thrust Kenya into the eye of this “clash of civilisations”.

The media have editorialised on “glaring security failures”, “official bungling”, “turf wars” and “bureaucratic impasse” as factors that “allowed a band of terrorists to hold out on a bloody siege on the Mall for 49 hours” (DN, 19/9/14: 12).

True, Westgate exposed the soft under-belly of Kenya’s security orthodoxy and drew attention to the nation’s vulnerability to terrorism and the need to be eternally vigilant.

In the age of extremism, Kenya must prioritise intelligence and technology to detect and deter terrorists before they strike.

Prof Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute.