“I do not belong to the same religion as those evil people,” Kenya's Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed told Al-Jazeera in an interview on Monday. Mohamed is a Muslim like some 20 per cent of Kenya's 40 million people, and she dismissed the terrorist attack in the now infamous Nairobi shopping mall as “the last kicks of a dying horse”. Somali Shebab fighters stormed the crowded mall at midday on Saturday, tossing grenades, firing automatic weapons and sending panicked shoppers fleeing. According to the Red Cross, at least 62 shoppers and staff were killed and close to 200 wounded in the siege, but concerns are high that the toll may rise, with the Shebab group boasting of the “countless number of dead bodies still scattered inside the mall”. The fate of 63 people listed as missing remains unclear, but those known to have been killed include six Britons including a British-Australian, two French women, two Canadians, including a diplomat, a Chinese woman, two Indians, a South Korean, a South African and a Dutch woman, according to statements by the individuals' governments. Also killed was Ghanaian poet and former UN envoy Kofi Awoonor. “The people who did this are vigilantes and animals,” British businessman Louis Bawa, whose eight-year-old daughter and wife were killed, told the UK Daily Telegraph. Since the weekend, Kenyan forces have been working round the clock to defuse explosive devices set up by the militants inside the mall, where extremists were still claiming to be holding hostages on Tuesday. “We are doing clean-up of the explosives that have been set up by the terrorists,” the Kenyan police said in a message on Twitter. Three Kenyan soldiers wounded in fierce gun battles with the militants had died on Tuesday, the army said. “Eleven Kenya Defence Force [KDF] soldiers sustained injuries... regrettably, three of them succumbed to their injuries,” army spokesman Cyrus Oguna said. As Al-Ahram Weekly went to the press, the Kenyan ordeal appeared to be coming to an end. But to ignore the still combustible situation in Kenya smacks of fiddling while Rome burns. The shootout in the Westgate shopping mall was as savage as the bomb blast that rocked the Ugandan capital Kampala in 2010, also orchestrated by the Somali-based Shebab jihadist movement, which has an axe to grind against both Kenya and Uganda for their deploying troops in Somalia. Kenyan and Ugandan troops form the bulk of the African Union (AU) peacekeeping force in Somalia that pushed the Al-Qaeda-affiliated group out of Somalia's capital in 2011. In a Twitter feed established on Tuesday after previous ones were cut, Shebab said that the attack that began on Saturday was “far greater than how the Kenyans perceive it”. On Tuesday, the group tweeted that “you could have avoided all this and lived your lives with relative safety. Remove your forces from our country and peace will come.” The UN special representative for Somalia, Nicholas Kay, on Tuesday called for a redoubling of efforts to battle the Shebab in Somalia. “The UN approach and my approach to Shebab in Somalia is that we need to intensify our campaigns,” Kay, who was appointed UN envoy in April, told reporters in Geneva. “It must be military, but also political and practical... On all three, we need to redouble our efforts.” Kenya has often been held up to debunk the theory that a multi-religious, multi-racial, multi-ethnic nation cannot thrive in Africa. Even though the country has been suffering from worsening corruption and a failure to provide the public with adequate social welfare, Kenya is very far from being a failed state like its neighbour Somalia, and, indeed, it is now the economic powerhouse of East Africa. Yet, the 700km border between Kenya and Somalia is a porous one, and Kenya has a large and economically vital ethnic Somali community that contributes greatly to the fast-growing Kenyan economy. Ethnic Somalis in Kenya are fully-fledged Kenyan citizens, yet the troubles in their country threaten to vitiate the very real successes of the Kenyan nation. Mohamed stressed in her interview with Al-Jazeera that she did not believe that the Shebab had acted alone, but rather that it had worked in tandem with Al-Qaeda and a number of Middle Eastern, North African and West African Islamist terrorist organisations. The Kenyan authorities disclosed that three of the attackers on the Westgate shopping centre were United States citizens, and that another two held British passports. There is growing media speculation about the role of wanted British extremist Samantha Lewthwaite, the daughter of a British soldier and widow of suicide bomber Germaine Lindsay, who blew himself up on a London underground train on July 7, 2005, killing 26 people. Lewthwaite is wanted in Kenya and is accused of having links to the Shebab. In her interview with Al-Jazeera, Mohamed said that the Westgate incident had been internationally coordinated, and she added that the first country that had come to Kenya's rescue had been Israel. Israeli security experts had been the first to arrive at the Westgate. A host of other countries have also offered help, including Britain, which has resident MI6 officers in Kenya and special forces training their counterparts in the country. Israel's involvement in dealing with the terrorists in the Westgate has highlighted the collaboration that Kenya and several other African nations south of the Sahara engage in with the country. Israeli officials kept a public silence about possible involvement in the mall standoff. However, a Defence Ministry official told the UK Guardian newspaper that a team from Israel's elite counter-terrorism unit had assisted the Kenyan authorities in handling the hostage crisis. An Israeli border police unit known as Yamam is also specially trained in civilian hostage rescue operations. For her part, Mohamed emphasised that just as terrorists coordinate activities with other terrorist organisations, so Kenya and other African nations subject to terrorist attacks coordinate with other countries at an intelligence level. Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, facing political difficulties since he is wanted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, lost a nephew in the Westgate tragedy. He pledged that Kenya would ruthlessly punish the terrorists responsible, adding that Kenyan troops would remain in Somalia to ensure law and order and secure the border between the two countries. More surprising perhaps is the contention that the terrorists adopted their tactics not necessarily for their own strategic and political ends in Somalia. The Westgate may not be the last terrorist attack in Kenya or in Africa, but it has certainly been a wake-up call for all concerned.
