Mwathethe also compared the impact of just one of the VBIEDs to the Jazeera Palace Hotel bombing in which 15 were killed and dozens others injured.
If that wasn’t enough, Mwathethe said, the attackers were also armed with Rocket Propelled Grenades and came in trucks loaded with suicide bombers.
Despite the odds, he said, his men held their own. Particularly considering, he sought to impress, that they were ‘new’ to the camp given their predecessors rotated out just days earlier.
The “magnitude” of the attack, Mwathethe said, could be explained by the entry of ISIS into the Somalia.
READ: Police urge Kenyans to be extra vigilant against split Al Shabaab
He said there was however no “specific intelligence” that such an attack was in the offing or that there were those captured by the enemy.
Kenya got hers two days later when she attacked the enemy camp and killed one Maalim Janow, the man behind Friday’s attack and leader of the Abu Zubeir leaving her with the task of picking up the pieces.
In that effort, Mwathethe has constituted a Board of Enquiry to better piece together Friday’s events and make recommendations on how the KDF should respond to an evolved enemy.
He said the KDF was also in the process of collecting DNA samples to help identify “the VIPs” who gave up their lives for their country.
But as for just how many ‘VIPs’ are there? Read between the lines.
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