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Mombasa — A Kenyan police crackdown on Islamists is fuelling Muslim resentment and moderate preachers say it undermines their efforts to counter recruiting by al-Qaeda militants with links across the border in Somalia. Smashing Islamist recruitment networks among its Muslim minority has become a priority for Kenya, however, as it tries to end attacks by Somali militants bent on punishing it for sending troops over the frontier to fight al Shabaab rebels.
The cost of failure was laid bare in September when al-Shabaab gunmen, one of whom police say is a Kenyan from the port of Mombasa, raided the Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. At least 67 people were killed.
Police say their tough approach, taken before Westgate but stepped up since, has limited the flow of would-be jihadists in and out of Somalia, citing a drop in the number of suspected militants they have tracked and arrested in the past year.
But Islamists, former militant sympathisers, independent security experts and diplomats, some of whom acknowledge short-term benefits from the police actions, say sweeping detentions and perceptions police are carrying out extra-judicial killings have fuelled Muslim resentment in the mostly Christian nation.
Police deny accusations of running anti-Muslim hit squads. Moderate imams, particularly along the coast where most Kenyan Muslims live, have been attacked by Islamist radicals and some say they have been cowed into silence as a result.
Police tactics “are benefiting al-Shabaab more than they are benefiting the government”, said Akullah Khamis, a 33-year-old Muslim in Mombasa, Kenya’s second city. He works with young people and non-governmental agencies and says he himself fended off a bid by al Shabaab to enlist his support three years ago.
Kenya’s battle against militancy is seen as vital to the stability of east Africa’s biggest economy, the gateway for regional trade and with a long coastline that has become a transit route for would-be jihadists trained in Somalia.
The US, Britain and Israel, which fret about the reach of Africa’s al-Qaeda-aligned Islamists, have trained and equipped Kenya’s anti-terror police and intelligence forces.
Mombasa county police commander Robert Kitur dismissed suggestions the force was being heavy handed or targeting the wider Muslim community: “We have never been brutal,” he told Reuters. “People shouldn’t generalise this is about Muslims.”
Online Reporter