A youth recruited while watching football. A Catholic school graduate. Girls des...
ISIOLO, Kenya - A youth recruited while watching football. A Catholic school graduate. Girls desperate for cash and jobs.
The attack’s leader, Ali Salim Gichunge, nicknamed Farouk, was a 26-year-old Kenyan who attended a Catholic school and whose largely Christian Meru ethnic group has no ties to Somalia. He led four other assailants, including at least one non-Somali used as a suicide bomber, Kenyan security officials said. All died in the attack.
“In the past, the security forces concentrated their efforts in parts of the country that are Muslim majority, Muslim-dominated,” said Murithi Mutiga, a project director for the International Crisis Group think-tank. “Now it’s much harder because al Shabaab has shown its adaptability by recruiting from outside the traditional areas.”
Many in Isiolo were reluctant to discuss him, fearing police attention. But some said al Shabaab recruiters had been targeting young, unemployed men from outside the ethnic Somali community there for years. His father keeps him at home now, forbidding him to use the phone. Bidu refused to allow Reuters to speak to his son, fearing a backlash.
But a USAID-funded study in 2018, quoted in a local government strategy document, estimated the group had recruited about 200 young men in the county to which Isiolo belongs since 2013. As al Shabaab morphed from a nationalist insurgency into an al Qaeda franchise, it increased its messaging to other nationalities.
“Religious ideology ... is entirely absent,” the report said. “It seeks to relate to educated, non-Muslim audiences.”Reuters attended one meeting organized by a grassroots peace group two weeks after the January attack. Fifteen parents who feared their sons had been recruited met at Isiolo’s dilapidated main police station. Organizers asked not to be named.
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