Al-Qaeda Terror Returns to Kenya
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by Irfan Al-Alawi • September 30, 2013 at 3:00 am
Kenyan Islam was originally moderate, contemplative, and traditional; the very title of "Al Shabaab" [The Youth] indicates, since 2001, a new generation of extremists.
The East African country of Kenya, with 44 million people, today has a Christian majority of 83% and a Muslim minority of 11%. In 1998, Kenya and its neighbor Tanzania became the first countries where al-Qaeda staged massive atrocities. The attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, and Dar es Salaam, Nairobi's counterpart in Tanzania, were almost simultaneous, but the assault in Nairobi had more victims. In Kenya, 212 were killed and about 4,000 injured; in Tanzania 11 died and 85 were wounded.
Everything that made the first decade of the 21st century an epoch of terror, as well as defenses against it, began in Nairobi: the horrors of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington; the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004; the London metro bombings of July 7, 2005; the ferocious raid on Mumbai, India, of 2008, and many additional incidents of willful carnage.
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