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Kenya: 246 schools close, 917 non-Muslim teachers flee because of jihad attacks

May 4, 2018 9:38 am By Christine Douglass-Williams

Now the 12-year-old’s dream to become a doctor is threatened. Attacks by the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab against non-Muslims have forced the transfer of hundreds of teachers from the border area with Somalia, where the extremist group is based. Schools have closed and thousands of children are affected.

The human rights abuses caused by jihadis in Kenya cause little concern in the West. Yet as the number of victims rises ever higher, instead of taking action to make sure the same things don’t happen in Europe and North America, the West has flung open its doors and allowed Muslims with ties to al Qaeda, the Islamic State and Muslim Brotherhood and al-Shabaab itself to operate in the West.

In this latest situation, al-Shabab could say to the potential recruits: ‘Look, your government cannot even provide you with a modicum of security, come and join us.’

How long will it be before they’re saying that in the West?

“Teachers flee, schools close in Kenya with al-Shabab attacks,” by Tom Odula, Associated Press, May 3, 2018:

NAIROBI, Kenya – Every school day, Abdirizack Hussein Bashir rises at dawn for an eight-kilometre (five-mile) trek through a dangerous forest where he sometimes faces harassment by Kenyan army patrols hunting down extremists.

Now the 12-year-old’s dream to become a doctor is threatened. Attacks by the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab against non-Muslims have forced the transfer of hundreds of teachers from the border area with Somalia, where the extremist group is based. Schools have closed and thousands of children are affected.

At least 224 primary schools and 42 secondary schools in Wajir County can no longer function after non-local teachers fled. The exodus was caused by the Feb. 16 al-Shabab attack on a primary school in which two non-Muslim teachers were killed. Kenya’s Teachers Service Commission transferred 329 teachers elsewhere for their safety. Many others left on their own. In all, 917 non-Muslim primary school teachers have left the region.

It is the largest-ever mass exodus of teachers from the region, observers say.

Analysts say the extremist group threatens gains in education in a region that until recently was the most marginalized in Kenya and has been described as a hotbed for recruitment for extremist groups, which oppose Western education. Children out of school become easy targets.

For al-Shabab the closure of schools will be seen as “a success,” said Abdullahi Boru Halakhe, an expert in countering violent extremism.

“Schools and education is one of the antidotes against the narratives of the (extremist) group. Thus, if you close the school, how else can you build a counter-narrative?” he asked.

Al-Shabab has carried out a wave of attacks in Kenya since 2011, calling it retribution for Kenya sending troops to Somalia to fight the extremists. Attacks include the April 2015 raid on Garissa University that left 147 people dead. Teachers near the Somali border have been targeted, including in a November 2014 attack on a bus in neighbouring Mandera County.

Some 120 non-Muslim teachers have left their posts in Mandera County due to the latest insecurity. The teachers have been sleeping in the Kenya National Union of Teachers boardroom for nearly two months and spend their days camped out at the offices of their employer, the Teachers Service Commission. Police routinely use tear gas on them as they protest and demand better protection from the extremist threat.

“We have asked the government to transfer teachers where they feel safe,” said the union’s secretary-general, Wilson Sossion.

The threat of attack is not the only problem non-Muslim teachers face in the predominantly ethnic Somali region, said Peter Amunga, an education activist. Discrimination by the local community and radicalized students are other challenges. Non-Muslims make up 90 per cent of the teachers in the border areas as marginalization and nomadic culture have limited the number of local ones, he said.

Wangechi Nderitu, one of the teachers camping out at the Teachers Service Commission offices, said one student at a neighbouring school who was punished by teachers went to train with al-Shabab in Somalia for two years then returned in late 2015, took his father’s gun and went after the teachers. Luckily they had been transferred, he said.

Despite teachers’ concerns the government has forced them to stay in the region without providing additional security, Nderitu said. He said his bank accounts had been frozen and that the Teachers Service Commission says they won’t be released until he and his colleague go back to work.

“This is blackmail,” Nderitu said. “That’s why we are stranded here. The Teacher Service Commission did not respond to a request for comment.

The government’s response has been sub-optimal, said Halakhe, the expert in countering extremism.

“While there is an acknowledgement that there are no easy answers to what is obviously a complex and complicated problem, the government has failed even to do even the basic like, for instance, stationing security officers at some of the schools,” he said.

Al-Shabab has exploited the region’s history of marginalization for recruiting and propaganda, he added. The region’s attempt to secede and join Somalia in the 1960s was quashed with military force and successive governments neglected the area until Kenya’s new constitution in 2010 ensured that all regions received resources for development.

“In this latest situation, al-Shabab could say to the potential recruits: ‘Look, your government cannot even provide you with a modicum of security, come and join us,’” Halakhe said…..

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Filed Under: Al-Shabaab, Kenya Tagged With: Nairobi, Wajir County


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    May 4, 2018 at 9:42 am

    A genocide by black Muslims against black Christians… that is what this is.

    • Estee Tabernac says

      May 4, 2018 at 3:02 pm

      …. and that is a good thing! Let them kill each other until they are all dead.

      • gravenimage says

        May 4, 2018 at 3:49 pm

        The claim that Christians are killing Muslims there is just calumny.

      • balafama says

        May 6, 2018 at 4:34 am

        im not sure how that brings total peace to your evil racist life .

  2. gravenimage says

    May 4, 2018 at 10:44 am

    Kenya: 246 schools close, 917 non-Muslim teachers flee because of jihad attacks
    …………………….

    Horrible. Things have overall been increasingly hopeful in Kenya, one of the relative bright spots on a generally chaotic and corrupt continent.

    But, as in so many places, that hope could be completely crushed with the rising Jihad slopping over from Somalia there.

  3. Salah says

    May 4, 2018 at 12:05 pm

    ‘Look, your government cannot even provide you with a modicum of security…”

    The solution is obvious. Every single person has the God-given right to protect himself and his loved ones: arm yourselves to the teeth and fight back. Don’t count on governments, most of them are spineless, if not complicit.

  4. Infidel says

    May 4, 2018 at 12:46 pm

    And this same situation is happening even as I type this in Kashmir India, where just the other day Muslims stoned a school bus and many children suffered horrible injuries to their heads…

    • Estee Tabernac says

      May 4, 2018 at 3:15 pm

      Well, that’s why Indians always wrap their heads in towels. I suppose the children were bare headed. There are too many children in India anyway. They are completely disposable people. They reproduce like rats. A school bus in India is a wheelbarrow painted yellow.

      • gravenimage says

        May 4, 2018 at 4:03 pm

        Estee Tabernac wrote:

        Well, that’s why Indians always wrap their heads in towels. I suppose the children were bare headed. There are too many children in India anyway. They are completely disposable people. They reproduce like rats. A school bus in India is a wheelbarrow painted yellow.
        ……………………………

        The repulsive “Estee Tabernac” is now gloating over Muslims *attacking children*.

        I first ran into this poster on the thread about Muslims slaughtering Christians in Nigeria:

        https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/05/nigerias-muslim-president-downplays-jihad-attacks-on-christians#comment-1892145

        The post ends with; “The Boko Haram are doing us a favor by killing all these crazy Niggerians.”

        This poster is presenting as a racist, and it is quite notable that in both cases she is also cheering on Muslims butchering Infidels. *Ugh*.

  5. somehistory says

    May 4, 2018 at 2:05 pm

    The moslims are attempting genocide of the Christians. The government would care more if ivory was being collected more than they care about this. But islam is more important than what is right.

  6. Estee Tabernac says

    May 4, 2018 at 3:07 pm

    The photo is of the teachers taking a nap during school hours.
    Donald Trump said that “these are sh*t hole countries and we don’t need them.”
    They are all a bunch of lazy porch monkeys. There are no Christians in Africa. It’s all fake!

    • gravenimage says

      May 4, 2018 at 4:17 pm

      Estee Tabernac certainly is not an example of Christianity.

    • boakai ngombu says

      May 4, 2018 at 5:37 pm

      my, my … you are having a bad hairday. (and you apparently have little compassion for another’s plight, unlike most human beings).

  7. gravenimage says

    May 4, 2018 at 10:08 pm

    I found a bizarre post by the egregious Estee Tabernac, where she accuses Anti-Jihadists of “racism” for opposing the horrors of Jihad and Shari’ah–even though she is here ranting about “porch monkeys” and Indian children being “completely disposable people”.

    https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/04/hugh-fitzgerald-in-defense-of-tariq-ramadan-hatem-bazian-tries-to-write-english#comment-1889734

    I think her agenda is clearer now–it is all about enabling Jihad.

  8. Matthieu Baudin says

    May 4, 2018 at 11:57 pm

    “… Al-Shabab has carried out a wave of attacks in Kenya since 2011, calling it retribution for Kenya sending troops to Somalia to fight the extremists…”

    The Kenyan government may yet decide to return to Somalia to drive away Al-Shabab, which through it’s frequent border raids and violent proselytising, has in effect declared war against the Kenyan State and it’s people. A hundred kilometre deep buffer zone extending along the southern Somali border could be occupied indefinitely by the Kenyan military enabling much greater stability in both northern Kenya and the occupied Somali zone. The relentless jihad pushing down from the islamized north of Africa needs to be arrested and Kenya is in a far better position than most southern African nations to begin the process.

  9. UNCLE VLADDI says

    May 5, 2018 at 12:07 pm

    Isn’t that pResident Barak Hussein Obsama’s homeland?

    “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!”

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