AND IT BEGINS: THE MUCH FEARED SPILLOVER OF RELIGIOUS STRIFE HAS BEGUN IN KENYA, ONE OF THE LAST RELATIVELY SAFE AFRICAN COUNTRIES

 

For a good amount of time, Kenya served as the route for refugees escaping the Somalian civil war.  The border of Kenya has become all but porous.  

Many people have raised the question of safety in Kenya due to the constant transit of Somalians from the camps to their homeland and back, knowing that soon enough, Shebab militants would infiltrate the camps and start bringing strife and conflict in the relatively safe Kenyan areas.  

Just last week, that admonition proved true.  In a brazen and deadly attack, Al Shebab stormed a populated mall and killed and bombed at leisure in one of the most chaotic attacks ever to occur.

Now the news are that the government could have some responsibility in not stopping the mall attack, since those people who had been monitoring the camps, had indeed warned officials that the attack was soon to come. 

Those who were monitoring the camps knew that it was just a matter of time before the radicalized Al Shebab terrorists would eye Kenya as their next place to spread mayhem.  Because that is the goal of all Al Qaeda affiliated groups: to sow as much mayhem as possible, to divide Christians from Muslim and create both internecine and sectarian conflict. 

And on the heels of the mall massacre, retaliation followed with the killing of a Muslim cleric who was supposed to replace a fiery imam who had been monitored for his possible affiliation to Al Shebab in the past and who also had been gunned down a year ago.

In retaliation for that attack, Muslim citizens then torched a Christian church in Mombasa, where the shooting of the cleric had taken place. 

Muslim faithful insist that both clerics have been killed by the police, to rid themselves of imams or clerics who they saw as inflammatory or possibly affiliated with Al Shehab.  

Riots also caused tyre fires to be set outside the Masjid Musa mosque, in Mombasa, where the police tried to regain control of the situation only to be pelted with stones. 

Islamists of course are already calling for mayhem and killings if Kenya does not withdraw its troops from Somalia, which is also seen as the motivation for the mall killings of last week. 

Source : France 24 / 10.4.13

 

Riots had been sparked after the drive by shooting of the cleric yesterday.