Terror strikes Kenya

At least 147 students were massacred when Somalia’s Shebab extremist group attacked a Kenyan university on Thursday

Student life, whether at college or school, is generally seen as a time for carefree activity. Instead, for pupils around the world it seems to be turning into a time of terror. In an attack which in so many ways mimicked the one carried out at the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar in December last year, in which at least 132 children were massacred, militants from Somalia’s al-Shabaab movement entered a university in Kenya, in the border town of Garissa located along the frontier with Somalia, taking hundreds of students — all Christian — hostage. The militants detonated a bomb at the university entrance at dawn on April 2 and stormed into the campus. As Kenyan emergency and defence forces began a rescue operation, they said that 280 of the college’s 815 students had been accounted for. Others remained trapped in four residential hostels, at least one of which had been taken over by militants. Books were replaced by guns on the campus, hospitals received scores of casualties and the number of the dead is still unknown.

But whatever that number turns out to be, it is too high, far too high. The loss of young lives is always a tragedy. And it is a far greater tragedy when it takes place in this fashion, at the hands of ruthless extremists who misuse religion and propagate twisted ideologies to try and justify the indefensible. The Kenyan authorities have put out a bounty for the man they believe masterminded this crime. The problem, however, is that there are others like him, and his organisation elsewhere in the world. We have met them at home and live in fear of further encounters. The fact that we may be seeing copy-cat attacks is frightening, too. Experts believe that those who laid siege to the APS may have studied the events in 2004 at a Beslan school, which left more than 300 dead. We now have another attack and do not know how many others will follow.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 4^th, 2015.

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