Kenya

Bin Laden's cowardly warriors selected the softest of targets

Mutuma Mathiu
Saturday November 30, 2002
The Guardian

"God, the preachers say, does not give you more problems than you can handle. In Kenya's case, He is cutting it close.

For the second time in less than five years, Osama bin Laden, like an evil genie, has breathed the foul evil of terrorism on our country. Kenyans across the country are shocked, scared and angry. Above all, they are furious at al-Qaida's unfairness. Don't we have enough problems without a mad mullah exporting his perverted jihad to our country, they ask.

A poor country whose people have an average income of a dollar a day, which is daily losing 500 citizens to Aids, a tattered economy, bogged down by a million orphans, is not a worthy adversary for any self-respecting warrior. But the soldiers of al-Qaida are not warriors. They are cowards.

Before 1998, Kenya had no external enemies. By his unprovoked attacks and consistent attempts to play Kenya as a pawn in his game against America, Israel and the entire western hegemony, Bin Laden has made himself Kenya's enemy number one.

Bin Laden knows this part of Africa, having lived in Sudan for five years under the protection of fundamentalists such as Hassan al Tourabi. He was finally expelled and joined the Taliban in Afghanistan but is now believed to be a fugitive somewhere in central Asia.

Why Kenya? Experts say basically the country is a »soft target«, a chink in the west's armour. It is affluent enough, by African standards, to have western investments and interests but without enough money to buy world class security; sufficiently democratic – and corrupt – to allow the terrorists and their equipment to move around, and with good communications to put the terrorists' handiwork on to the big media networks.

The Americans have been convinced that there are al-Qaida sympathisers at the Kenyan coast. Added to our proximity to Somalia, where al-Qaida cells are said to exist, then it is easy to see why Kenya is one of Bin Laden's favourite targets.

His grievances are impossible to address. He most probably wants the complete destruction of Israel and the elimination of western influence around the world.

He is also understood to prefer the overthrow of democratic governments in Muslim countries, to be replaced by purist, oddball theocracies, such as that established by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The terrorist's strategy is to attack Israeli and American targets wherever they exist in the world. But they end up hurting societies which have nothing to do with their dispute.

A terrorist attack against the holiday resort of Bali in Indonesia has reduced it to a tourist ghost town. The August 8 1998 bomb blast killed more than 200 Kenyans but only 12 Americans, who were supposedly the real target.

It is expected that the coast attacks will severely affect tourism into whose recovery a lot of work has gone in the last five years. It will also undermine Kenya's attractiveness to investors and hurt the delivery of services and public investment because scarce resources will be diverted to counter terrorism."


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I'm an Indian as old
as the mountains, the sea and the sky
I sit in my teepee watching the cars
on the freeway pass me by
I knew the land when it was unspoiled
before the settlers came
I knew the land before it was polluted
by falling acid rain
I'm an Indian as old
as the streams and rivers
that flow into the sea
I walked the land without a helping hand
and knew that I was free
I watched the buffalo disappear
that once roamed the endless grassy plain
I saw tall buildings rise, highways built
and the tracks that brought the train
The factories came that created jobs
and brought in workers by the score
The forests were cut and the land was plowed
and still they wanted more
I'm an Indian as old
as the first time man walked on the moon
I sit in my casino
and hope for a return to the beginning very soon

Arkia Airlines flight IZ582 was just passing through the 500ft mark as it climbed out of Mombasa airport bound for Tel Aviv when passenger Ezra Gozlan heard a distinct boom from outside. As the plane shook, he looked up, just in time to see a small trail of smoke to the left of the Boeing 757 charter jet.
»It went about one metre above the wing. It was a bazooka or something like that,« the 62-year-old Israeli said yesterday. »I said to someone 'It's a missile', but he said 'No, maybe something got caught in the engine'.«

Other passengers were just as confused. »It felt like something fell off the wing,« said Kerry Levy.

On the flight deck, the captain, Rafi Marik, was running through the post take-off check routine when he felt a »light hit«. At first he believed a bird had hit the fuselage. Then he spotted two white vapour trails passing from the rear, not far off his port wing. His plane, with 261 passengers and 10 crew on board, was under missile attack.

The missiles were fired from shoulder-held Strela 3 launchers, Kenyan police reported later on. Eyewitness reports say they came from a white four-wheel drive vehicle parked more than a mile beyond the airport's perimeter. The launcher and missile casings were found nearby.

At least 11 Israelis and hotel workers were feared dead and dozens injured after a double terrorist attack on a tourist hotel at Kikambala near Mombasa.

One of the three suicide terrorists is identified by Israeli Army Radio as Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah  – a name that matches one of the most wanted alQaeda terrorists sought by the FBI.

The name of another of the bombers – Faed Ali Sayam, a Kenyan Muslim – also is similar to the name of a wanted alQaeda terrorist.

Both of the men were indicted in connection with the deadly 1998 twin U.S. embassy bombings in Africa that killed 224 people.