AFP/Nairobi
Kenyan troops have crossed the border into war-torn Somalia to attack Islamist Shebaab rebels they accuse of being behind several recent kidnappings of foreigners, Kenyan officials said Sunday. “We have crossed into Somalia in pursuit of the Shebaab, who are responsible for the kidnappings and attacks on our country,” said government spokesman Alfred Matua. An AFP reporter close to the border witnessed large numbers of troops, as well as military planes and helicopters overhead. Several witnesses reported heavy troop movement in Kenya’s border regions, with truckloads of soldiers heading towards the frontier. The assault comes a day after Kenya’s Internal Security Minister George Saitoti branded Somalia’s Al Qaeda-inspired Shebaab rebels “the enemy” and vowed to attack them “wherever they will be”. “Kenya is providing logistical and moral support,” said Abdirahman Omar Osman, a spokesman for Somalia’s Western-backed government, which controls the capital Mogadishu with the help of over 9,000 African Union troops. However, he said it was Somali forces in the south of the country that were “battling the Shebaab on the ground”. In just over a month, a British woman and a French woman have been abducted from beach resorts in two separate incidents, dealing a major blow to Kenya’s tourism industry. On Thursday, two female Spanish aid workers were seized by gunmen from Kenya’s crowded Dadaab refugee camp, the world’s largest with some 450,000 mainly Somali refugees. Several tanks and military trucks crossed the border alongside “quite a number” of troops, a Kenyan internal security ministry official said, asking for anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to media. “There are those who entered Somalia today and many more troops will be following them afterwards,” the official said. On Saturday, Somali government troops and allied militia wrested control of the Shebaab-held town of Qoqani in the Lower Juba region, which borders Kenya, backed by heavy bombing by military aircraft. “Several aircraft dropped bombs on the jungle area of Qoqani causing heavy explosions, and the Shebaab withdrew from the town without face-to-face fighting,” said Sugule Ali, an elder in a nearby village. “The shelling was very heavy and we could hear the planes flying over the jungle as big bombs were dropped,” said another witness Nuradin Haji Hassan. “We don’t know which country these planes belonged to but they have carried out several rounds of aerial bombardment in the Qoqani area,” he added. Mutua said Kenya’s air force was not involved in those attacks. The US military has carried out a number of attacks in recent years against Al Qaeda militants believed to be hiding in Somalia, including using unmanned drones. “If you are attacked by an enemy, you are allowed to pursue that enemy until where you get him,” Kenyan Defence Minister Yusuf Mohamed Haji said on Saturday. “We will force them far away from our border.” Kenya already backs anti-Shebaab and pro-government militia groups in Somali border regions as efforts to create a buffer zone from hostile rebels. Kenyan authorities have on several occasions expressed fears Islamist extremists would infiltrate the Dadaab camps from Somalia, as the border lies barely 100km away. Tens of thousands of Somalis have arrived in Dadaab this year fleeing drought, famine and conflict in their home nation. But while Kenya has blamed the abductions on the Islamist Shebaab, experts say the kidnappings could also be the work of pirates, bandits or opportunistic criminal gangs. Analysts say the Shebaab have been pushed onto the backfoot after the majority pulled out of battle positions in Mogadishu in August, but they still control large areas of south and central Somalia. The Shebaab however have said they have shifted to guerrilla tactics, and recent bomb attacks in Mogadishu have demonstrated they are still able to wreak havoc deep inside the city. Somalia has had no effective government ever since it plunged into repeated rounds of civil wars beginning in 1991, allowing a flourishing of militia armies, extremist rebels and piracy.