Strategic Thinking on East Africa

AFP , Sunday 7 Jun 2015 Three people have died in an attack by suspected Shebab militants in Kenya’s northeastern Wajir county that borders Somalia, officials said Sunday. Wajir county’s police commander, Samuel Mukindia, said a group of gunmen opened fire in a residential area late on Saturday, killing two men and a women before escaping. […]

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From The Brookings Institution Bradley S. Porter and Vanda Felbab-Brown | May 27, 2015 11:45am In May 2015, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry became the first person of his office ever to visit Somalia. Although it was an unannounced and very brief stop—he spent just over three hours in the country—the trip indicated that there have […]

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From Reuters NAIROBI, May 26 (Reuters) - Al Shabaab gunmen killed around 25 Kenyan police on Monday, ambushing some officers in a village in the east of the country after others died when their vehicle hit a landmine planted by the militants, their military spokesman said. The Islamist group also burnt five vehicles in the […]

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From The Washington Post People carry placards as they attend a memorial concert for the Garissa university students who were killed during an attack by gunmen, at the “Freedom Corner” in Kenya’s capital Nairobi April 14, 2015. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters) By Hussein Khalid May 1 Hussein Khalid is executive director of Haki Africa. The merciless killing of more than […]

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From by Guest Blogger for John Campbell April 30, 2015 This is a guest post by Alex Dick-Godfrey, Assistant Director, Studies administration for the Council on Foreign Relations Studies Program. In the past five years, the Somali jihadist group al-Shabaab has lost most of its senior leadership, surrendered its control of southern Somalia, and seen […]

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From The Institute of Security Studies Kenya has frequently been in the news in recent years because of deadly attacks within the country by radical Islamist group al-Shabaab, most notably the assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in September 2013, in which at least 67 people died. But is al-Shabaab the greatest threat to […]

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Kenyan Defence Forces run towards the Garissa University campus after an attack by Somalia’s Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab gunmen in Garissa, in this April 2, 2015 photo. (AFP) AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE Published — Friday 1 May 2015 NAROBI: Kenya’s interior minister on Thursday admitted that intelligence was ignored and the security response botched regarding the massacre of […]

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From The Daily Nation By KEVIN J. KELLEY NEW YORK US Secretary of State John Kerry will arrive in Nairobi on May 3 for talks on a wide range of topics with a variety of leaders, the State Department announced on Monday. A key aim of the top US diplomat’s two-day visit will be “to […]

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By William M. Bellamy Terrible as it was, al Shabaab’s murderous attack on Garissa University in Kenya was not completely a surprise. The Somali Islamist terrorist group has lost much territory in Somalia in recent years to an African Union military force. Driven from strongholds it once planned to use as the basis of its caliphate, […]

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