generalspeaking

Saturday, April 04, 2015

The "Operation Against The Infidels"

"All I could hear were footsteps and gunshots. Nobody was screaming because they thought this would lead the gunmen to know where they are."
"The gunmen were saying, 'Sisi ni Al Shabab' -- Swahili for 'We are Al Shabab'."
"If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot. With each blast of the gun, I thought I was going to die."
"The next thing, we saw people in military uniform through the window of the back of our rooms who identified themselves as the Kenyan military."
Collins Wetangula, student, Garissa University, , Garissa, Kenya

"I am saddened to inform the nation that early today, terrorists attacked Garissa University College, killed and wounded several people, and have taken others hostage."
Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta

A Kenya Defense Force soldier runs for cover near the perimeter wall where attackers are holding up at a campus in Garissa

Actually, 147 people were shot dead on Thursday on the Al Shabab attack on the university, mostly students, but as well two security guards, a policeman and a soldier. Another 79 people were wounded. The campus is located 145 kilometres from the border with Somalia. There are six dorms on the campus, holding about 887 students.

The attack began at 5:30 a.m. when morning prayers at the university mosque had begun, and there, at the mosque no worshippers were threatened, let alone attacked. Three dorms had been evacuated, where the gunmen, masked, strapped with explosives and armed with AK-47s, carefully sought non-Muslim students at the college, gunned them down, while those who could ran for their lives.

The dozens of hostages that the gunmen took with them in a fourth dorm must have felt they were in a terrifying journey to hell as the terrorists exchanged fire with troops and police, the deadly standoff ending only after thirteen hours of violence. Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery described the terrorists exploding "like bombs" when gunfire from security forces struck them.

A $220,000 bounty has been posted by Kenyan authorities for Mohammed Mohamud, felt to have been the leader masterminding this attack. He had been a teacher at an Islamic religious school, a Wahhabi madrassa. One of the attackers appears to have survived and has been taken into custody. An audio message surfaced soon enough with Ali Mohamoud Raghe, an al-Shabab spokesman claiming the attack resulted because "the Christian government of Kenya has invaded our country".

Kenya had dispatched its military in a 2011 incursion into Somalia in an attempt to drive the terrorist group from its strongholds. The university had been chosen as a venue for attack in response to its educating Christian students in "a Muslim land under colony", referring to the large Somali population in an area of Kenya that Somalis had once claimed. The university, he went on, was partner in Kenya's "plan to spread their Christianity and infidelity".

"When I looked back, I saw them. There were five or six of them. They were masked. And they were shooting live rounds", said Augustine Alanga, 21, an economics student, who had been asleep when the shooting started. He left his room on the run, shoeless, sprinting across the campus and into a nearby forest.