Al Qaeda continues to distabilise East Africa, continent

By NYAMBEGA GISESA

East Africa was the first to be attacked by Al Qaeda, an organisation that Al Shabaab, the masterminds of the cowardly terror attacks at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, is affiliated to.

However, the hostage situation is so far East Africa’s worst act of terror after the 1998 Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings and then the July 2010 Kampala bombings. In the August 7 bombings of 1998 at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, at least 252 died and more than 5,000 were injured.

The 1998 bombings and the current situation that our country is engulfed in are the culminaton of a terror build up that we have taken for granted for decades.

It all begun in Somalia in the year 1991, when the Said Barre regime, one of the most militarily powerful regimes in the Horn of Africa, fell to the guns that for years had been its strength.

For nearly a decade, the world would forget Somalia until the 1998 terror attacks, orchestrated by Al Qaeda under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi national, whose enmity focused on a nation he called ‘The Great Satan’ - the US.

His accomplice in this region was Mohammed Abdullah Fazul — born in the Comoros Island and married to a Kenyan from Malindi. Fazul is believed to have procured the instruments of death used to carry out the 1998 terror attacks from two nations, Yemen and Somalia.

Fazul’s death

After the 1998 attacks, Fazul was also said to have planned the Paradise hotel attack in Kikambala.

After the Twin Towers attack, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks (the 9/11 Commission) identified six primary regions that serve or could serve as terrorist sanctuaries. In Africa the regions included the Horn of Africa, including Somalia and extended southwest into Kenya and West Africa, including Nigeria and Mali. The report identified Kenya as the “ only country in sub-Saharan Africa with  a current known Al Qaeda presence.”

In November 2002, Kenya was attacked again, with Fazul said to be behind the attacks. He was later killed at a roadblock in Somalia.