Kenya's Somali Adventure turning into a nightmare

Kenya's first foreign war, which began triumphantly in October with embedded reporters sending breathless reports from the front, is coming off the rails. "The military operation is going nowhere," says Rashid Abdi, a Somalia analyst with the International Crisis Group. "I'm not sure it has really damaged the Shabaab."

He says that the Kenyan-TFG forces have moved no more than 70km into the country and only control the main roads. Kenya has had to admit that it cannot afford to fight on its terms. The war is costing an estimated £140m a month, which the country can ill afford amid soaring inflation and public sector strikes. Last week it was forced to ask the African Union to take over its operation in the hope that the international community would pick up the bill, as it does for the African peacekeepers guarding Mogadishu.

The consequences of the misadventure have already blown back across the border, where previously an uneasy peace reigned between the Islamists and their southern neighbours. Kenyan towns are coming under increasing attack from al-Shabaab assassination squads and roadside bombs.

The Kenyan defence forces, unprepared to fight a counter-insurgency, have in many cases turned on their own population. In Mandera, across the border from Beled-Hawo, another Kenyan soldier was killed by a roadside bomb last Sunday and four more were injured. Each time a bomb has gone off the army has gone house to house in the area doling out punishment beatings to local Kenyan-Somalis.

Abdi, who cannot give his real name for fear of reprisals, was among those beaten after an explosion in Mandera this year. He suffered serious head injuries, including a fractured eye socket, when soldiers smashed their way into his home and beat him in front of his wife. He spent two months in hospital.

"To them, Somalis are Somalis. It doesn't matter that we're citizens," he says. "They can beat us when they like."

An eight-year-old boy had his arms broken and a pregnant woman miscarried in similar assaults more recently.

Abdi worries that the beatings, in a town where the population is overwhelmingly Kenyan-Somali, will push some people into supporting al-Shabaab. Many in Mandera don't know who to be more scared of, the Kenyan soldiers or al-Shabaab insurgents. Death squads have carried out targeted killings and one community elder known to be critical of the militants was shot six times at close range as he left the mosque last month.

As the human and financial costs of the war mount it has started to fade from Kenyan television sets. A local journalist who photographed wounded Kenyan and TFG soldiers in the northern town of Garissa last week – after a battle which authorities had denied happened – was arrested and had his images deleted. That desperate attempt at damage limitation points to a war that had been forced down the throats of unsuspecting Kenyan taxpayers in the midst of the financial trouble the country is going through, a war whose stated goals are not being met, a war that should not have been.

Adapted from The Independent.

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