Growing Threat Of Extremism
Over the last two years, Kenya has suffered numerous attacks by al-Shabaab militants. The most brutal came in September 2013 when four gunmen took control of a Nairobi shopping mall, killing some 70 people and injuring more than 200 others.
Al-Shabaab says the attacks are retaliation for the Kenyan military’s ongoing intervention in southern Somalia, where its troops have been fighting the militants since 2011.
In May this year the group announced that it was taking the fight inside Kenya and called on all Muslims to sign up. In June, an attack on the town of Mpeketoni and nearby Mporomooko on the eastern coast killed 60 people. Smaller attacks have taken place in Nairobi, around the border with Somalia, and in the northeastern city of Garissa.
In February this year, dozens of young people and children as young as 12 were arrested in a police raid on the Musa mosque in Mombasa. The mosque is under investigation for hosting radical preachers.
Police spokesperson Zipporah Mboroki told IWPR that radicalisation of schoolchildren at mosques and in schools appeared to be on the rise.
“We have identified several schools in Nairobi, Mombasa and Garissa where radicalisation activities have been reported and investigations are ongoing,” she told IWPR. “An increasing number of school heads have been coming to us asking us to investigate suspicious activities in their schools.”
Educationalists say the targeting of children by extremist groups poses a huge threat.
Warucu Ngethe, a clinical psychologist and education specialist told IWPR, “If they are fed with extremist ideas and are desensitised to violence and murder, they become the worst kind of killers.”
Kenya has just over four million Muslims, approximately 11 percent of its overall population. Many communities, particularly those living on the coast and in Kenya’s northeast, hold long term grievances against the Nairobi authorities. They have been economically and socially marginalised under successive governments. Muslims remain under-represented in national politics.
Experts say that al-Shabaab is able to exploit these grievances to launch attacks like the one in Mpeketoni, and also to recruit young people.
Simiyu Werunga is a former major in the Kenyan military who now heads the African Centre for Security and Strategic Studies in Nairobi, which has undertaken research into radicalisation and how to combat it.
“Al-Shabaab picked on the issue of joblessness; on the issue of marginalisation,” Werunga told IWPR, noting that this made young people a target “for anybody who comes around and tells them you can earn money by working for al-Shabaab, or we can train you so you can come back and fight for your rights,” he continued.
Experts believe the problem goes beyond religious schools, which are already viewed with suspicion by the authorities, and is now spilling over to secular schools, state-run and private.
The problem is most prevalent on the coast and in parts of Nairobi, but Werunga said it had now spread “all over the country”. He said that in some cases parents “quietly endorsed” the recruitment of their children.
Werunga said that besides targeting schools, al-Shabaab was also trying to recruit university students.
“A few accept this is a good idea, then [al-Shabaab] start using them to spread the ideology,” he said. “That is how it is spreading.”
“There are serious campaigns taking place in some of these colleges and schools to spread the ideology,” he added.
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