NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenyan fighter jets bombed two training camps of theShabab militant group in Somalia, defense officials said on Monday, the first military response to the attack on a university last week that killed nearly 150 students.
Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, had vowed to respond “in the severest way possible” to the massacre at the university.
Military officials said it was difficult to assess the damage because of heavy cloud cover. Kenya has carried out bombing raids in Somalia after terrorist assaults in the past, and the Shabab militants, knowing what was coming, have often abandoned their camps after major attacks.
The Kenyan public has been deeply unnerved by the assault on Garissa University College, in which Shabab gunmen moved from dorm to dorm, luring students to come out of their rooms and then shooting them in the head. Many students were found clumped together, face down.
It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the country since the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy in the capital, Nairobi.
The pressure on the government to hit back has been rising, with many Kenyans angry that it took more than eight hours to send commandos to the school. The delay was attributed to logistical issues, but the slow response raised questions about whether more lives could have been saved.
Over the weekend, students at other universities threatened to stage large protests unless security at their schools was significantly improved. Others have complained that the Kenyan government had intelligence that such an attack was in the works and did little to prevent it.
The Shabab has struck Kenya many times, killing hundreds of civilians, and last week the militants vowed to make Kenyan cities run “red with blood” until Kenya withdrew military forces from Somalia. Kenya sent forces into Somalia in 2011 to protect its borders and economic interests along the Indian Ocean coast.
The Shabab attacks have only intensified since then. People have been killed on country buses, in churches, in remote coastal towns and even inside one of Kenya’s fanciest malls during a devastating siege in 2013 that left 67 people dead and rattled the country’s prized image as a cornerstone of stability in this part of Africa.
Shabab Attacks in Kenya
Since 2012, more than 600 people have been killed in Kenya by the Shabab, an extremist group based in Somalia and affiliated with Al Qaeda. The group claimed responsibility for an April 2 attack on Garissa University College that killed 147 people.
Mandera
Wajir
KENYA
Attacks by the Shabab that resulted in one or more deaths
100 deaths
30
Garissa
5
Nairobi
In 2013, the Shabab mounted an attack on a Nairobi shopping mall that left at least 67 people dead.
Sources: Preliminary data from Global Terrorism Database, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism; Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project
Lamu
Mombasa
The Kenyan government is so desperate to stop the Shabab, one of the most violent franchises of Al Qaeda, that some officials have proposed building a 424-mile wall across the entire Somali border.
But Kenya’s struggles with extremism are internal as well. On Sunday, the Kenyan authorities said that one of the gunmen who attacked the university was the son of a local government official — and once a promising student himself — who had recently broken off contact with his family and disappeared.
It immediately rekindled fears that chaos in neighboring Somalia was not the only factor driving terrorist attacks in Kenya and that the problem here may be more homegrown.
Outside of Somalia, Kenya sends more fighters to the Shabab than does any other country. Analysts say that many young Kenyan men have drawn payments of up to $1,000 to cross the border and hit the battlefield.
But ever since the Kenyan military stormed into southern Somalia in 2011, ousting the Shabab from some of their last strongholds, some Kenyan fighters may have drifted back. The fear is that Kenya, which has struggled with ordinary crime for decades, is now home to a growing network of trained jihadists.
On Saturday, in a televised address to the nation, Mr. Kenyatta said, “The planners and financiers of this brutality are deeply embedded in our communities.”
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