African securityKenya, Somalia to create joint anti-terrorism task force

Al-Shabaab’s attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi last month has prompted security officials in Kenya and Somalia to consider the creation of a joint task force which will share intelligence, monitor activity, and track finances relating to terrorist groups operating in East Africa.

Sabahi reports that al-Shabaab has proven it is capable of conducting attacks outside Somali borders, and that intelligence officials in Kenya and Somalia have concluded that they must now invest in the technology and personnel needed to counter the advancements in al-Shabaab’s tactics. “The terrorism problem has ballooned into a regional crisis and it calls for a sustained synergy among various security agencies,” said Jaw Kitiku, a retired Kenyan army colonel and the executive director of Security Research and Information Centre in Nairobi. He told Sabahi that “Time has come for the Kenyan and Somali governments to throw suspicion to the wind and develop a common watertight anti-terror strategy which, among other things, sets up an intelligence sharing network as one way of collaboration.”

Such collaboration will broaden information gathering and increase the speed of data processing and analysis resulting in more proactive actions against terrorism in the region.

The increasing use of social media by al-Shabaab to recruit, spread propaganda, train members, and plan operations means East Africa’s intelligence officials must advance their social media capabilities to track and monitor terror traffic on the Internet. “The cyber unit would basically do daily virtual patrols on the net. The selected officers would be the best in social media skills,” Kitiku said. “They would scout for threat indicators based on the language and tone of extremists’ posts and determine the origin and destination of terror messages.”

Terrorist organizations are financing their operations, with minimal government tracking and oversight, through banks and wire services and by informal methods through mobile and online services. Kenya’s National Treasury Economic Secretary Geodfrey Mwau insists that Kenya is at the forefront of tracking the finance of terror groups within its borders. “All financial institutions in Kenya report suspicious transactions by suspected terror groups. I would recommend the Somali Central Bank and the parliament to emulate Kenya on this front,” Mwau said. “There is a need for the Somali government to initiate legislation that enables the police, especially [through] an economic crimes unit, to identify money launderers, trace their assets and subsequently freeze or confiscate them,” Mwau added. “This is the best way to starve a terror organization of funds that finance terror activities.”

The Somali ambassador to Kenya, Mohammed Ali Nur, has proposed a regional terrorism databank which is accessible to agents within Kenya’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) and Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA). “Such a databank would have names of suspected terrorists, their updated pictures, location and recent movement, associates and their communication logs and source of funding,” Nur told Sabahi.

To complement the collaboration of intelligence between Kenya and Somalia, last year the Kenyan government conducted a three-month training program for officers in the Somali police force. “We trained over 200 Somali police men and women on advanced skills for protecting very important persons, guarding and securing public facilities, and general law enforcement strategies,” Kenyan police spokesperson Zipporah Gatiria Mboroki told SabahiThe training included police trainers from Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. “Obviously, with terrorism stalking both Kenya and Somalia there are other covert security operations conducted by both the Kenya Anti-Terror Unit and its Somali counterpart,” Mboroki said. “I do not want to go into details, but there is framework for joint investigations, information gathering, target surveillance and terror threat assessment.”