Fifth Anniversary of Westgate Mall Attack: Fighting Al-Shabaab in Africa
September 21, 2013, started out like any other day at the Westgate mall.
Shoppers in search of deals strolled unaware that their lives would
soon be changed forever. At midday, heavily armed militants lobbing
grenades and firing indiscriminately turned the upscale shopping center
in Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi, into a war zone. Security forces,
caught off guard and woefully unprepared, struggled to rescue hundreds
of shoppers and hunt down the assailants. By the end of a four-day
siege—the worst attack on Kenyan soil since the 1998 US Embassy bombing
by al Qaeda—sixty-seven people were dead and more than two hundred
wounded. Al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based terrorist group that has pledged
allegiance to al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the attack.
Comments