Why military response to Westgate attack was delayed

Kenyan soldiers move in formation, clearing the top floor balcony and interior of Westgate Mall on September 24, 2013 in Nairobi. FILE PHOTO |

What you need to know:

  • The order must have been given by President Uhuru Kenyatta, who was at the time relatively inexperienced, and it is not clear what advice and analysis his intelligence and military aides had provided him with.
  • In the recently-released documentary, Terror at the Mall, it is claimed that an infantry platoon from the Kenya Army moved into Nakumatt store shooting wildly and that they targeted anything that moved, possibly an exaggeration.
  • The question is whether scrambling together a military team delayed the deployment of police inside the mall and whether using military resources such as helicopters much earlier to bring police officers to the scene would not have saved more lives.

The decision to deploy the military at Westgate and give soldiers the lead role in the rescue operation ranks as one of the poorest decisions in recent memory.

The order must have been given by President Uhuru Kenyatta, who was at the time relatively inexperienced, and it is not clear what advice and analysis his intelligence and military aides had provided him with.

Whereas Kenyan soldiers are patriotic and brave, hostage situations are jobs for properly trained police officers, or specialised units of the military, such as special forces, and not the average infantry soldier.

Every inch of the 350,000-square-foot mall was covered by more than 100 CCTV cameras which could be accessed from a location in Hurlingham, according to a New York Police Department (NYPD) report released just weeks after the September 21 attack.

It is safe to assume then that the military went into Westgate with real-time information on who the attackers were, where they were and what weapons they had.

TERROR AT THE MALL DOCUMENTARY

In the recently-released documentary, Terror at the Mall, it is claimed that an infantry platoon from the Kenya Army moved into Nakumatt store shooting wildly and that they targeted anything that moved, possibly an exaggeration.

The soldiers were exposed to a high-risk situation for which they were probably neither trained nor well prepared. Police officers deployed inside the mall were not in uniform and did not have clearly identifiable marks. There were also civilians with guns as well as shoppers hiding in the mall.

The military said there was a PKM – a Soviet-era machine gun, a relative of the AK-47 rifle - deployed in the mall. What appears more likely is that there was a good marksman, or marksmen, which could  account for the military’s relatively high casualties.

At any rate, the military took them down, and large parts of the mall, with anti-tank rounds.

In many countries, if not all organised countries, special forces work with police tactical units in fighting terrorists. But this requires prior training together, as many experts have pointed out.

The question is whether scrambling together a military team delayed the deployment of police inside the mall and whether using military resources such as helicopters much earlier to bring police officers to the scene would not have saved more lives.

The point has previously been made that the deployment of KDF per se was not wrong. The soldiers could have helped the police maintain a secure perimeter and prevent the fighting from spreading into the neighbouring estates.