April 7, 2015 | Morning Headlines.

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Somali President Meets AU Envoy

06 April – Source: Goobjoog News- 144 Words

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud received the Special Representative of the Chairperson of the African Union Commission (SRCC) for Somalia and head of AMISOM, Ambassador Maman S. Sidikou at his office in Villa Somalia on Monday. The President and Amb. Sidikou discussed a wide range of issues including how the Federal Government of Somalia can implement federalism in the country which is crucial for achieving Vision 2016 goals. President Hassan underlined that the parliament, other government departments, as well as civil society, are taking on initiatives that will steer the nation to Vision 2016. Sidikou welcomed the progress on political stability and noted the key victories made by the Somali National Army backed AMISOM troops.“The international community will support Somali government to rebuild the nation,” Sidikou said.

Key Headlines

Somali Court Sentences Alleged Al Shabaab Members To Death (Goobjoog News)
Somalia President Lashes Out At North Eastern Kenyan leaders (Somali Current)
Somali MP Hussein Bantu Dies In Mogadishu (Wacaal Media)
Somali President Meets AU Envoy (Goobjoog News)
Gunmen Kill Two In Galgudud Region (Radio RBC)
President Uhuru Kenyatta’s IGAD Envoy On Somalia Asks The World To Help Kenya ‘Crush Al Shabaab’(Standard Media)
Leaders Want Refugee Camps Closed Down (Daily Nation)
Kenya to compile list of suspected al Shabaab members: government source (Reuters)
Stench Of Death Permeates Kenya Massacre University’s Halls (AFP/Yahoo News)
Somali Journalists Arrested Over Garissa Massacre Coverage (RFI)
Not Enough Police In Garissa Because It’s A ‘Punishment Zone’: Analyst (RFI)
Garissa Attack: How Kenyan Media Covers Terrorist Attacks (Sahan Journal)
Are The Terrorists Of Al-Shabaab About To Tear Kenya In Two? (The Guardian)
Al Shabaab Using Attacks To Earn Al Qaeda ISIS Recognition Say Experts (The East African)

SOMALI MEDIA

Somali Court Sentences Alleged Al Shabaab Members To Death

06 April – Source: Goobjoog News- 87 Words

A Somali military court on Monday handed down death sentences to two alleged Al Shabaab members accused of working with militants, and carrying out assassinations on several Somali lawmakers. The two- Shucayb Ibrahim Mahdi, 27, and Farah Ali Abdi, 30, received death sentences for the assassinations of Sado Ali Warsame, Mohamed Mahamud Hayd, Adan Mohamed Ali alias Sheikh Adan Madeer, and security officer Ahmed Odawaa.The Somali military court’s chairman, Hassan Ali Shuute announced the court’s verdict to execute the two men by firing squad.

Somalia President Lashes Out At North Eastern Kenyan leaders

06 April – Source: Somali Current – 205 Words

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud lashed out following the call by Somali leaders in northern Kenya to shut down the refugees camps and repatriate Somali refugees. Leaders in sections of northern Kenya accused the refugees camps of hosting terrorists, and have demanded the closure of the refugees camps in Dadaab. Dadaab is the world’s largest refugee camp, located in an arid portion of northeastern Kenya near the Somali border, with over half a million Somali refugees living in the camp. While addressing the media, the president said the refugees camps have nothing to do with terrorism, adding the camps have no relationship with terrorism. Mr. Hassan also said Al Shabaab’s main mission is to divide people along religious lines, and called on people not to allow that to happen. The call to close refugees camps has intensified, after Al Shabaab militants stormed Garissa College University, killing more than 147 people and injuring 79 others in a siege that lasted more than 12 hours. The Kenyan government has repeatedly said that refugees camps pose a threat to its security, and that they are not willing to continue to hosting Somali refugees. Early this year, UNHCR started a voluntary repatriation process with several Somali families returning home with their help.

Somali MP Hussein Bantu Dies In Mogadishu

06 April – Source:Wacaal Media – 152 Words

Somali Member of Parliament, Mr. Hussein Mohamud Muse alias Bantu, died in Mogadishu following a prolonged illness. The late Bantu was born in 1950 and served the country in different capacities in former Transitional Federal Governments. He at one time served as an assistant minister. He will also be remembered for championing the rights of the minority Bantu community in the country. The MP is expected to be buried in Mogadishu today. Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid sent his condolences to the family, friends and relatives of the late MP, and eulogized the late lawmaker as a hardworking and able leader who served his country with diligence. Information Minister Mr. Mohamed Abdi Hayir also sent his condolences. He added that the late MP was a patriot who always put the interest of his community and the country at large before that of his own.

Gunmen Kill Two In Galgudud Region

06 April – Source: Radio RBC – 148 Words

Unknown gunmen killed at least two and wounded one more after opening fire on civilians in Gadon village in Galgudud, a region in central Somalia, Raxanreeb Online Reports. The gunmen reportedly opened fire on civilians in the village, and escaped the scene immediately after. Somali Federal Police in the area reached the scene of the killing shortly after the perpetrators, whose identity remains unknown, fled the scene. The motive of the killing remains unknown but expected to be disclosed as the government forces pursue and capture the assailants. Galgudud, a region that is currently part of an ongoing state formation process, has been witnessing serious clashes between government and Al-Shabaab forces, clan affiliated militias and other clashes since the Somalia’s central government was ousted over two decades ago.

REGIONAL MEDIA

President Uhuru Kenyatta’s IGAD Envoy On Somalia Asks The World To Help Kenya ‘Crush Al Shabaab’

06 April – Source: Standard Media – 195 Words

Kenya’s special envoy to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, Mr Mohammed Affey, has said the bloody terror strike at the Garissa University College was a signal for the world to crush the al Qaeda-linked militants who have been spreading terror in the Horn of Africa.

Speaking to The Standard, Affey said death of the 147 people will jolt the international community to fight the Somalia-based militants. “What the attack has shown us is that al Shabaab is not just a Somalia menace, but an international menace. We hope that the international community will redouble the efforts to rid the region of these criminal elements,” said Affey.

He added: “Al Shabaab is a criminal gang that must be eliminated”. Affey, who is President Uhuru Kenyatta’s special envoy to IGAD on all issues to do with Somalia said Kenya should not withdraw its troops from Somalia just to yield to the demands that the militants’ four-year faceless war with Kenyan authorities. “We are in a war situation. Our troops are in Somalia on the forefront of fighting this war. We need more support for the troops until such a time that we vanquish the enemy,” said Affey

Leaders Want Refugee Camps Closed Down

06 April – Source: Daily Nation – 135 Words

Leaders from the northeastern region say they want the Dadaab refugee camp shut down as part of efforts to tame the Al-Shabaab menace.The leaders, led by Garissa Township MP and National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale on Monday said the camps were being used to plan attacks against Kenya.
“The camps have been the centres where the training, coordination and the assembly of terror networks is done. We want the refugees to be relocated, across the border. “They come from Somalia and the people of Kenya need to be protected. They can go across the border. UNHCR can still facilitate. “They have been with us for the last 20 years. I think time has come when the national security of our people becomes paramount than the international obligations that we have.” said Mr Duale.

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA

Kenya To Compile List Of Suspected Al Shabaab Members: Government Source

06 April – Source: Reuters – 90 Words

Kenya is compiling a list of people suspected to have joined Somali militant group al Shabaab or been radicalized by Islamists, a government source said on Monday. “They are compiling a list of all those youths who are missing and suspected of having joined al Shabaab,” said the source, who is involved in the response to last week’s attack by al Shabaab on a university in Garissa, in which 148 people died. Regional governors, members of parliament and security officials are expected to help draw up the list, he said.

Stench Of Death Permeates Kenya Massacre University’s Halls

06 April – Source: AFP/Yahoo News- 528 Words

Scattered books and dark blood stains on the floor: the bodies have been collected but an abbatoir-like stench permeates the Kenyan university where Islamist gunmen massacred 148 people last week. In the now quiet grounds, police and soldiers stand under the shade of trees, where students once sat studying or chatting with friends.

Papers and pens lie in the dust, apparently dropped by students as they fled when gunmen from Somalia’s Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab launched their killing spree, hurling grenades and firing automatic rifles. The massacre in Garissa, Kenya’s deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, claimed the lives of 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers.

On Monday, four days since the day-long violence spree, journalists were briefly allowed for the first time into the campus. The bullet-scarred buildings remained closed, but peering through the doors and windows, a sense of the carnage and the fury of the violence was clear. Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) soldiers arrive at a hospital to escort the bodies of the attackers to be At the three-storey Elgon A hostel, where the worst killings took place, shards of glass from the doors smashed by bullets cover the entrance.

Somali Journalists Arrested Over Garissa Massacre Coverage

05 April – Source: RFI – 208 Words

Somali press freedom advocates lashed out at Somalia government officials on Saturday after news 25 staff members at two radio stations were arrested over their coverage of the Garissa, Kenya, massacre on Thursday. “The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) in Mogadishu “expressed alarm” regarding the media arrests in statement that was issued on Saturday. The journalists and two staff members were arrested by the National Security and Intelligence Agency after they reportedly broadcast a statement by Al-Shebab leader Ali Dere claiming that the movement carried out the Garissa attack. The government feels otherwise, according to Mohamed Yusuf, a spokesperson for Somalia’s security ministry.

“The people of Mogadishu don’t need to hear” this, Yusuf told RFI. “It’s terror. Always they send a wrong message.” Yusuf said that Radio Shabelle and SkyFM were requested, along with the 40 other local radio stations, not to broadcast threats or speeches by Al-Shebab leaders. He added that Radio Shabelle are most likely “sympathisers” of the group because they address Shebab leaders as “His Excellency”. “This is another heavy-handed assault on media freedom. It is part of a trend by security authorities to silence independent media,” said Abdirisak Omar Ismail, the president of NUSOJ Supreme Council.

Not Enough Police In Garissa Because It’s A ‘Punishment Zone’: Analyst

05 April – Source: RFI – 763 Words

The Kenyan government was hit by accusations from mainstream media after the Daily Nation newspaper revealed that the security detail in Nairobi did not arrive in Garissa until some 11 hours after the university siege. Al-Shebab, the Islamic Somali militia, claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack that security officials say killed 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers, and injured 79. Four of the attackers were also killed. The lapse in security and the time lag between the alert and deployment puts into question President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Thursday statement which called for calm throughout the country. “I also assure the nation that my government has undertaken appropriate deployment to the affected area, and is fully seized of the situation,” he said.

Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka reportedly defended the security forces, saying that their response was “not as bad as Westgate.” The public is visibly frustrated, says Adam Hussein Adam, an independent analyst in Nairobi who spoke to RFI via telephone. However, moving from the capital to the outer edges of north-eastern Kenya takes a lot of planning, he said. “To deploy anyone from Nairobi to that area requires a lot of logistical thinking and planning, because Garissa is not a place where you just go,” says Adam. “Although there is a road from Nairobi all the way to Garissa … it is not even safe to go by road.” The perception of north-eastern Kenya also hampers any swift deployment there. “This is something that has been there since independence, and we continue to view that place [Garissa] as an outlier, and therefore we do not deploy enough state authorities until we have a problem like now we have,” he adds.

SOCIAL MEDIA

CULTURE / OPINION / EDITORIAL / ANALYSIS / BLOGS/ DISCUSSION BOARDS

“The media received huge criticism in what was termed as “playing to the terrorists hand,” in their quest to cover the story. Analysts said that the media focused on the drama, the actions and the heroes of the day, and forgot to invest in reporting about the victims who went through physical and mental trauma.”

Garissa Attack: How Kenyan Media Covers Terrorist Attacks

05 April – Source: Sahan Journal – 1258 Words

On Thursday April 2, four gunmen made their way into Garissa’s pioneer institution of higher education – Garissa University College – and, starting the early hours of the morning, killed 148 students at dawn. The attack, labelled as the second worst attack on Kenyan soil since the 1998 U.S. embassy bombing in Nairobi, caught the nation by surprise. Even though there were previous intelligence reports that attacks were imminent in specific places across the country, the onslaught also took media agencies unawares.Given the fast nature of social media, the news of the attack spread on Twitter and Facebook before they were picked by mainstream media outlets in Kenya. In fact, most of the TV and dip perdio stations were on their daily routine of broadcasting infotainment content in their morning shows, with some only providing the brief update of an attack “being reported” in Garissa.
The news was first broken on Facebook by Abdikadir Barre Musa, a lecturer at a nearby teacher’s training college. His short post read, “We are under attack. Pray for us.”Facebook users, mainly Garissa residents, picked up from there and started spreading the news. Abdikadir went silent for the following 30-plus hours. Majority of his friends thought that he died in the process.

On Friday, April 3 at 14:57, Abdikadir put up another status stating that he is alive, safe and sound. He described the experience as “a horrendous ordeal,” promising his friends that he will send more updates soon. Majority of Kenyans on social media thought that this was a small attack and that the security apparatus in Garissa would take care of the situation. But this was not the case. Bloggers, who seemed to have sources inside the university, started sharing exclusive reports detailing how ruthless the gunmen were. Hours into the attack, the #GarissaAttack hashtag was trending across Kenya. International media houses including Al Jazeera and the BBC started highlighting the news. These media organizations used freelance journalists based in Garissa to get a view of how the situation was unfolding. At this juncture, Kenyan media houses seemed to still have been in a self-assessing state, before expounding on the breaking news. Anti-terror laws passed in mid-December last year appeared to be the guiding principle behind the cautious approach Kenyan media used to report on the terrorist attacks in Garissa.

“And no part of the country is poorer than the vast, arid land next to the Somalian border, where al-Shabaab has seemed to enjoy free rein in recent years. In a statement on Friday explaining the rationale for the college massacre, the Somalia-based militants made a claim on this territory, saying non-Muslims should vacate what they described as “colonised land”. It is easy to see why al-Shabaab has enjoyed relative success in obtaining recruits and receiving undoubted logistical support from some within the population in the north-east of the country. The economic disparities between Nairobi and the well-watered highlands near the capital on the one hand and the marginalised and long-neglected north are staggering.”

Are The Terrorists Of Al-Shabaab About To Tear Kenya In Two?

04 April – Source: The Guardian – 1,596 Words

Mixed in among the grief-stricken parents who thronged the Chiromo mortuary parlour in Nairobi, seeking word on the fate of their children, on Friday afternoon were student leaders who had come to make a political point. “We have one simple demand to relay to the government: we want the mass withdrawal of non-Muslims from the whole of the north-eastern region,” Titus Matata, 22, an industrial chemistry student at the University of Nairobi, told theObserver. “We are not wanted there, and the government must facilitate the evacuation of all non-Muslim students at once.” The attack on Thursday, which took place in a town about 100 miles from the border with Somalia, in which gunmen smashed into a university in the half-light of dawn and massacred 142 students and six security officers, has rattled Kenya. Across the country from Friday morning, relatives began the grim task of identifying the bodies of the victims and burying their dead.

But analysts also turned to the question of the broader impact of the astonishing attack and its implications for the future of Kenya. The main fear is that the Islamist al-Shabaab militants could gradually widen the religious divisions within this east African country that was once seen as an anchor of stability and progress in a turbulent region, with the ultimate aim of imitating the success of the Boko Haram militia, which has taken over swaths of territory in Nigeria and imposed sharia law. “This is a very serious situation,” says Tom Wolf, a political scientist who works at a polling firm that tracks public attitudes to the security situation in the region. “There have been media reports of collaboration in terms of training and exchanging ideas between Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, but it is essential to study the Shabaab’s aims in greater detail to see what their goals are. “If they move more explicitly in the direction of fighting western education and seek to advance these goals consistently in north-eastern Kenya – as Boko Haram have done in Nigeria – that will obviously be very worrisome.”

“An increasing number of conventional weapons and trained jihadist fighters will now be able to transit through Yemen and cross into Somaliland, into northern Somalia,” Mr Franklin said. “These are the fighters Al Shabaab is craving and they will bring with them experience, knowledge and a morale boost for the militants.” Al Shabaab is said to be divided into sections, with some pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group while another is keen on maintaining their Al Qaeda links.”

Al Shabaab Using Attacks To Earn Al Qaeda, ISIS Recognition, Say Experts

04 April – Source: The East African – 1,229 Words

East African countries are under great threats from Somalia-based militants Al Shabaab, who are spilling into the region and forming sleeper cells after being ejected from their stronghold. Security reports indicate that the militants have divided themselves into three groups to carry out attacks in Mogadishu and other regions in Somalia, as well as the East African region. A few of the militants are seeking to join in the national dialogue in the Horn of Africa nation. The attack on Thursday at the Moi University-affiliated college in Kenya’s Garissa County — in which at least 147 people were killed and 79 others injured — could indicate that the group tasked with attacking countries in the region is now active. According to Abdirahman Omar Osman Yarisow, a politician and former senior strategic communications advisor to the federal government of Somalia, the more Al Shabaab loses territory the more the insurgents pull off high-profile attacks on civilians. This is aimed at showing their global backers Al Qaeda that they are still active.

Another reason for their attacks is the presence of the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom) in the country. The more their leaders are killed by a combination of Amisom, the Somali National Army (SNA) and US drone attacks, the more lethal they become in their revenge attacks. Amisom’s recent capture of Kudha Island, a key Al Shabaab logistical and operational base situated in Lower Juba region and around 70km southwest of the port city of Kismayu, dealt a major blow to the militants and has strengthened their resolve to look beyond Somalia for revenge. These developments saw Britain issue fresh travel advisories against Kenya while the United States had warned of an imminent attack in Kampala, forcing the government to put the military on high alert. Eloi Yao, the Amisom senior public information officer and spokesperson, told The EastAfrican that, as the presence of Al Shabaab continues shrinking in Somalia, the group’s numbers are rising in the neighbouring countries such as Kenya, where they have fled to in good numbers, lying in wait to attack. Mr Yao added that Al Shabaab’s capabilities have been significantly depleted as a fighting force in Somalia because the key areas they used for resupply are being recovered from them. However, Al Shabaab still remains a threat because its members mingle with residents, waiting to strike another day.