Daily Times

The latest incident of brutal violence was witnessed in Kenya on Thursday when al Shabaab terrorists laid siege to a university in the town of Garissa, 200 kilometres from the border with Somalia, a lawless frontier. The Garissa University College was invaded by Islamist militants in the early hours; they took hundreds hostage and shot students point blank. In a disturbing and premeditated strategy, they took students aside and demanded to know which ones were Muslims and which ones were not. The non-Muslims were killed without any flicker of remorse and the Muslim students were freed. As many as 147 students were killed and scores more injured. This is the most horrific terror attack on Kenyan soil since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in 1998, which resulted in 200 dead. It is the same al Shabaab that was responsible for the deadly 2013 assault on a shopping mall in Nairobi in which more than 67 people were killed. So, what is the beef al Shabaab, which means ‘youth’ in Arabic, have with Kenya?

Somalia, the home of al Shabaab, has been lawless for a long time with a weak central government. Al Shabaab is affiliated with al Qaeda and many of its attacks bear the hallmarks of al Qaeda strikes. There are also reports that the Somalian group is flirting with aligning itself to Islamic State (IS), the savage jihadist terror group that has literally set Iraq and Syria on fire. Al Shabaab is a very powerful force in Somalia with as many as 7-9,000 fighters in its ranks. This group is fighting against the UN-backed government in Somalia and, at the same time, Nairobi is aiding militarily any and all UN-backed action against the terror group. This is why al Shabaab has made Kenya its new hunting ground, hoping to hit soft targets in the country so brutally and so severely that an uproar is caused to halt operations by Kenya in Somalia. So far, these actions have created only disgust and a more strengthened resolve in Kenyans to eliminate the jihadists across their border.
What we are seeing in today’s world is a complete end of any honour code in warfare. With the emergence of these jihadist terror groups, we see that the first casualties are always innocent civilians, the softest of targets. The Kenyan university tragedy has triggered fresh memories of what we in Pakistan went through on December 16, 2014, when the Taliban murdered 134 of our innocent school going children in Peshawar. We of all people know what it means to lose our future generation and how important it is to scotch such monsters in our midst. *