guru267 wrote:jaggernaut wrote:The alternative view is that we have local alshabab trained youth amongst us who can be contracted for specific assignments like mpeketoni. And that's why the attackers burnt the two vans they were using and strolled back home in the neighborhood l. Why would anyone burn their only means of transport after undertaking a murderous operation hundreds of km inside enemy territory? That is unless you are a suicide jihadist.
@jaggernaut it would have taken the attackers just about two and a half hours to get to a boat by foot and flee to Somalia
But the above theory is the most likely one! The cells had their graduation ceremony shown by Al Jazeera so they must have returned with military training!
If they wanted to get to the sea-shore and back to somaliya, they would have driven to the east, not escaping further inland to the west towards witu and malindi.
Also, imagine you were the commander of alshabab/alqaeda in kismayo, somalia. Yaani, you are heading an outfit that downed American helicopters in the 90s and dragged the soldiers in the streets of mogadishu. You have hijacked numerous ocean liners and gotten billions in ransom. You also hit Kenya's most prestigious mall in 2013 due to kenya's meddling in somali affairs, and this gave you worldwide publicity. And now you are tasked to find the next target. Where would your next high profile attack be?
- mitumba sellers in gikomba market?
- a githurai/mwiki bus?
- some small scale farmers in an isolated rural village called mpeketoni?
My view is that alshabab would never ever go for such 'insignificant' targets. So all the attacks that we have been having in kenya have nothing to do with alshabab, except the high profile westgate attack, but rather these are locally executed attacks with individuals hiding under the cover of the alshabab.