Somalis Fear Scapegoating After Kenya University Attack

NAIROBI — When the Somalia-based terror group al-Shabaab slaughtered 148 people, including 142 students, in the Kenyan city of Garissa earlier this month, it resurrected bad memories for Ahmed Ali, a 35-year-old Somali who was born in Garissa.

“Once again, like last year, we’re going to be punished by the police,” he says. “In fact, it’s already started. Here in Eastleigh [a suburb of Nairobi], we’re scapegoats. Whenever the al-Shabaab attack Kenya, we end up being blamed for it.”

The rain is threatening to break on this April afternoon, exactly one week after the attack. Like any other day, a dense crowd is rushing inside the Sunshine shopping mall, a maze of stores and stands offering inexpensive fabric, clothes, bags and shoes.

Ali, who sells shirts here, has been living a stone’s throw from the mall for the past ten years. Indeed, most of the 250,000 residents in this neighborhood, called Eastleigh, are Somalis, living amidst skyscrapers of glass and steel that stand alongside decrepit buildings on streets that you recognize for the pervasive stench.

In Nairobi — Photo: Christopher Michel

What Ali fears the most is that the police will launch something similar to the March 2014 “Operation Usalama Watch.” Six months after the al-Shabaab attack on Nairobi's Westgate mall, which was followed by several attacks along the coast, security forces descended on Eastleigh. Officially, “Usalama Watch” targeted a neighborhood that United Nations groups in Somalia and Eritrea had described in a report as being an “al-Shabaab recruiting and financing center.”

In the end, most human rights organizations...