For sometime now, Kenya has been prone to deadly attacks by Militia group Al-shabaab which has time and again taken responsibility for various attacks including the latest one at Dusit.
The DusitD2 attack is one of the high-profile raids by Al-Shabaab at the heart of Nairobi since the Westgate shopping mall attack in 2013 that left more than 70 people dead and the Garissa University College attack in 2015 where more than 200 people died.
Before that, the terror group had been targeting remote villages — the most notable being the June 2014 attack at Mpeketoni that left more than 60 dead.
Ever since, the Shabaab have been conducting blast-and-run attacks by mainly targeting soldiers in Lamu and lone civilians near the border towns. They have also been ambushing passenger vehicles and executing non-locals.
But security agents have disrupted most of the cells operating in the country through multi-agency counter-terror strategies.
The Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) went to Somalia in October 2011 under the aegis of “Operation Linda Nchi” after the terror group started targeting Kenyan installations and civilians.
The incursions started after the kidnapping of two Spanish aid workers at the Dadaab refugee camp and days after kidnapping a French woman in Lamu.
Seven years after the entry of the KDF troops in Somalia — and their later incorporation into the African Mission in Somalia — Al-Shabaab has been restricted to rural areas with occasional, but deadly, attacks in urban areas.
But the mission has been grappling with major challenges, because Western countries are not willing to put their boots on the ground, leaving only African troops to battle the terror group — which has the support of the Al-Qaeda.
While it is under-funded and remains one of the world’s largest deployment of peacekeepers (there are over 22,000 personnel), Amisom remains a deadly peace operation with six African countries on board.
But it is Kenya that has borne the brunt of the group’s frustrations in its bid to get rid of the federal government in Mogadishu and put in place its own Sharia-based government.