Less than two weeks have passed since an Al-Shabaab attack
on Garissa University in Kenya claimed 148 lives, largely students of the
university, and already Kenya has faded from the headlines faster than you can
say “Je Suis Garissa.” The attack raised fears of further strikes in Kenya,
however, and a power transformer explosion
mistaken for a terrorist attack at the University of Nairobi over the weekend
caused a stampede that killed one and injured more than 100.
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| Kenyans mourn the victims of the Garissa attack. |
This is the second major Al-Shabaab attack in the
last two years, and the worst since the Westgate Mall attack in 2013 claimed
67 lives. A smaller Al-Shabaab attack on a quarry near the border last December
also killed at least 36 people. Al-Shabaab is an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group
operating out of Somalia that grew out of the Islamic Courts Union, a
relatively stable central government that was kicked out of Mogadishu by an
international intervention in 2011. Al-Shabaab has been targeting Kenya ever
since the country joined the African Union peacekeeping
force in 2011, and transformed from a governing body into a terrorist group.
