Why only men die in Wajir inter-clan conflict

A journalist picks a Koran littered in a mosque at a deserted Gunani village after over 30 people were killed during clan clashes in Tarbaj Constituency, Wajir County. [PHOTO: PIUS CHERUIYOT]

WAJIR COUNTY: Early Sunday morning a week ago, about 100 heavily armed men arrived in a village in Wajir on a deadly mission that has revealed enmity between two clans of Kenya’s Somali community could be worse than thought.

In Gunana village on the border between Wajir and Mandera counties, a militia from the Degodia clan lay in wait, well aware of the impending attack.

Then all hell broke loose, according to a junior police officer attached to a camp within the village who witnessed the five-hour horror punctuated with mortar fire and deafening explosions.

The administration police camp was the first target for the fighters who had crossed over from Mandera County, and are believed to belong to the Dare clan.

“The first shots were fired at our camp, possibly as a warning,” recounts the young officer who has been working at Gunana camp for a year.

The 12 officers took cover in dugouts within the camp, as they took position waiting for the aggressors. But as it became apparent minutes later, the attackers had no interest in attacking the police officers but had come to eliminate the enemy’s army.

Behind the AP camp, the Degodia militia had been alerted that their enemy had brought the battle to their doorstep, literally, and were getting ready to spring into action.

DISTRESS CALL

Women and children had been evacuated days before, following flare-ups in several villages along the border of the two counties that sit on 16 per cent of Kenya’s land mass.

Police estimate the militia from the Wajir side at about 80 young men, but some did not have firearms.

Their opponents, however, arrived in at least two pick-up trucks shortly before 6am, vehicles that would later be used in evacuating the injured from the battlefront, and taking away bodies of their injured men, according to police accounts.

By 6.30am, the first fire exchanges had begun and the Degodia had been driven out of “town” by at least 150m near a water pan that would later become the actual battleground.

The commander at the AP camp immediately sent out a distress call to two police stations – one in Takaba some 50km inside Mandera and the other to Tarbaj that is 125km away but within Wajir.

And then the real action began. Too scared to lift their heads from the dugouts, the police officers watched helplessly as the two militias took on each other with one of Kenya’s heaviest bloodshed from a single incident.

A few times, either side would be pushed back before the respective commanders would reassemble troops and mount a counter-attack.

“Both sides have a fully-trained army,” two officers said during an interview.

“We think they may have fought across the border in Somalia.” The two clans straddle the Kenya-Somalia border, as well as Ethiopia.

When reinforcement arrived at around 11am, the entire village was bloodied and 20 bodies of the Degodia militia lay lifeless, our source had counted. Even more had varying degrees of injuries from bullets and explosives such as grenades.

More than 2,000 bullets had been fired, and the police had not finished collecting the spent cartridges five days after.

Some of the Dare militia, after obviously having overpowered their opponents, came back and set several houses in the village ablaze, including the local chief’s home. The village that residents call their town, had about 100 homesteads, a dozen shops, a mosque and a madrassa – the only educational institution.

The mosque was spared, but tens of damaged copies of the Qur’an were strewn all over the madrassa. Wooden planks where verses of the Qur’an are written for teaching children had also been burnt, a testimony of the vengeance the attackers had come with.

Burnt bags of cement could be seen in the rabble and ashes that was Gunana’s biggest shop.

The Gunana attack was only the last in a series of assaults from both sides as the inter-clan aggression gets deadlier with time.

Abrahaman Alaso, 62, has seen the conflict morph from an ordinary competition for supremacy between the two clans as he grew up.

“We used to fight with sticks as boys,” says Mr Alaso, who is now internally displaced and is living in a camp in Tarbaj, some 100 kilometres away from his former home.

“It was never anything serious that was confined to boys and young men,” he remembers but is worried about the latest twist in the conflict. “I am confident politicians are involved because the militia from both sides are now dangerously armed.”

Alaso says there has never been incident of livestock rustling in the Somali community, a factor that is a trigger for conflicts in other communities in Kenya.

CID boss Ndegwa Muhoro last Friday said investigations into the killings in Wajir were likely to end in the same way as those in Lamu – where Governor Issa Timamy is now accused of murder.

The CID boss said the “warlords” behind the attacks were top politicians and businessmen from two clans whose conflicts have claimed more than 80 lives this year alone.

“This conflict has everything to do with politics but we are closing in on the warlords,” Mr Muhoro said in Wajir town after meeting top officials including governor and police officers.

“We want to eliminate warlords from these two clans so the people can live in peace,” he added while discounting allegations that land ownership was the cause of the clashes.

Gunana now remains a ghost town, with former residents moving at least 50 kilometres inside Wajir County for fear of retaliatory attacks. And the situation is replicated on the Mandera side.