Kenya attacks Somalia camps in retaliation

A young girl holds a candle during an Easter service at the Catholic cathedral in Garissa on Sunday, mourning the killing of almost 150 people in an attack on a university by Somalia's Al-Shabaab Islamists that occurred on Thursday. Photo: AFP

The Kenyan air force has destroyed two Al-Shabaab camps in Somalia, it said on Monday, in the first major military response since the Islamist group massacred students at a Kenyan university last week.

Al-Shabaab denied the camps were hit, saying the air force bombs fell on farmland.

Gunmen from the al Qaeda-aligned group killed 148 people on Thursday when they stormed the Garissa University College campus, some 200 kilometers from the Somali border.

Jets pounded the camps in the Gedo region on the other side of the border on Sunday, Kenya Defense Forces spokesman David Obonyo said.

"Our aerial images show that the camps were completely destroyed," he said, though cloud cover made it difficult to estimate the death toll.

Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, Al-Shabaab's military operations spokesman, told Reuters that none of its camps were damaged in Sunday's raid, and that the fighter jets had instead struck farmland.

The mission was part of efforts to stop Al-Shabaab fighters from those camps from carrying out cross-border raids into Kenya, Obonyo said.

The militant group has killed more than 400 people on Kenyan soil in the last two years, including 67 during a siege at Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall in 2013, piling political pressure on President Uhuru Kenyatta that intensified with last week's killings.

Kenya has struggled to stop the flow of militants and weapons across its 700-kilometer border with Somalia, and the violence has also damaged the economy by scaring away tourists and investors.

Kenyatta said on Saturday the planners and financiers of Islamist attacks were "deeply embedded" within Kenyan society and urged the Muslim community to do more to root out radicalization.

The next day, Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said the son of a Kenyan official was one of four gunmen who stormed the college campus in Garissa.

He was identified as Abdirahim Abdullahi, an ethnic Somali with Kenyan nationality.

His father is a government official in the northern Mandera county bordering Somalia, the spokesman said.

"The father had reported to security agents that his son had disappeared from home... and was helping the police try to trace his son by the time the Garissa terror attack happened," Njoka told Reuters in a text message.

Pope Francis called on the world to give "tangible help" to persecuted Christians on Monday, after the Islamic gunmen from the Al-Shabaab targeted Christians for execution after storming the Garissa campus.

Addressing crowds in bright sunshine at St. Peter's Square in the Vatican after four days of special Easter services, the pontiff listed the evils inflicted on people for their faith and exhorted the international community to act.

"These are our martyrs of today, and they are many … I hope the international community does not look on, mute and inert, at such an unacceptable crime," Francis said.

Kenyan churches have responded to the attack by hiring armed guards, as the massacre resonated throughout the Catholic Church's weekend commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus.

Opposition leader Raila Odinga, who was prime minister when Kenya sent troops into Somalia in 2011 to battle Al-Shabaab, said the government should start thinking about pulling out, just as the United States withdrew troops after 18 soldiers were killed in the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu.

"The US used to have many soldiers in Somalia but it recalled them. Kenya should also remove its military officers from Somalia," Odinga said on Sunday, according to comments in Monday's edition of Kenya's Standard newspaper.

Kenya has so far shown no inclination to pull out of Somalia where its troops have wrested swathes of territory from the Islamist group.

Western diplomats, however, say this loss of territory has not weakened Al-Shabaab's capacity to carry out one-off guerilla-style attacks in Somalia or abroad.

Garissa was the most deadly attack on Kenyan soil since al Qaeda bombed the US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, killing more than 200 people and wounding thousands.