On January 5, a seemingly ragtag band of Al-Shabaab militants, armed with old guns secured together by rubber bands and sticks, carried out a brazen but foolish attack on an American military installation in Manda Bay, Lamu.
The outpost tucked strategically off the Kenyan coast is no ordinary camp. It’s a highly-guarded installation that American special forces use for some of their most discreet and lethal assignments. It’s said that not even the Kenyan military knows the number of men deployed at the American base or the kind of weaponry kept there.
After hours of fighting, however, a combined force of Kenyan and American soldiers managed to neutralise the threat, killing some of the attackers.
But how they managed to breach security protocols on this facility that boasts multibillion-dollar equipment and is constantly teeming with highly-trained personnel would become the most embarrassing and surprising event in the security history of Manda Bay.
“It would require hours to evacuate one of the wounded to a military hospital in Djibouti, roughly 1,500 miles away,” The New York Times reported.
So embarrassed and alarmed at this brazen assault was the Pentagon that something had to be done at their most secure outpost near Somalia.
In order to fortify the base, The New York Times further reported, the US “sent about 100 troops from the 101st Airborne Division … Army Green Berets from Germany were also shuttled to Djibouti, the Pentagon’s major hub in Africa, in case the entire base was in danger of being taken by Shabaab.”
It is now known that the militants in threadbare combat fatigues left a trail of devastation that both the Kenyan troops and their American counterparts squabbled over for days.
By the time the guns went silent, one US serviceperson and two US military contractors had been killed and six aircraft destroyed, including a rare spy plane. The Shabaab fighters also destroyed an adjacent fuel storage depot. The entire damage was estimated at millions of dollars.
The key question, even to the Pentagon, was: how could this happen?
Several months after the attack, the Nation has established that the materials found in the pockets of the killed fighters could provide a clue to the troubling question on who exactly the attackers were.
Insiders in the military have told us that the fighters killed during the Manda Bay attack belonged to one of the militia’s most lethal fighter wings known as Jaysh Ayman. Also referred to as Jeysh Ayman, Jaysh Ayman, Jaysh Ayman al-Shabaab, Jaysh la Imani or Jaysh Ayman Majmo Ayman, this Al-Shabaab wing is the deadliest.
Today, we can also report that Jaysh Ayman has been behind the string of terror attacks that Kenya has faced over the past decade. It is impossible to tell the exact death toll attributed to this group but, from a compilation of news reports, the number adds up to more than 500 civilians.
In one incident, which has never been reported before, Kenya lost more than 20 security personnel in a single attack sometime in 2019 at a place known as Sankuli, a few kilometres from Kiunga border town.
The attack was so severe that it took the military more than a year to retrieve badly damaged vehicles from the scene. To date, the KDF has blocked access to the area for both civilians and uniformed or disciplined forces.
What we now know is that most of these fighters came from a village known as Bongwe, located in Msambweni in Kwale.
Bongwe has a special place in history: it is a village full of life, secrets and murder stories.
The unique story of Bongwe is aptly captured in the Old Testament, in the book of Exodus 21:24, which advocates an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. In Bongwe, Jaysh Ayman members and Kenyan security agents play an endless tit-for-tat game. For every man that the Jaysh Ayman kill, individuals strongly believed to be Kenyan security agents hunt down one or two more in retaliation.
In one of the most recent incidents, which took place early this year, two elderly men were beheaded in Bongwe for allegedly informing government officials about the members and activities of Jaysh Ayman.
Weeks later, individuals suspected to be Kenyan security agents raided the area and abducted eight individuals.
Days later, family members found bodies of four of them – Juma Said Sarai, Khalfan Suleiman Linuku, Abdalla Nassir Gatana and Usama Nassir – at the Makindu Sub-County Hospital mortuary , hundreds of kilometres from where they had been abducted.
The bodies, which were collected from the Tsavo West National Park at different times, had strangulation marks, some had their hands tied and all had their eyes gouged out of their sockets. Burnt polythene still stuck on the bodies and particularly on the legs, private parts, necks and hands.
Tsavo West National Park.
Photo credit: Kevin Odit | Nation Media Group
By the time the families positively identified the four, there were 30 other unclaimed bodies lying at the mortuary with almost similar characteristics.
When the Nation’s investigations desk visited Bongwe village, where the eight came from, we were told that talking to journalists or security agents about Jaysh Ayman was as good as inviting a death sentence.
Informers, working for either the Anti-Terror Police Unit (ATPU) or for extremist groups, scrutinise every car, every new face and anyone asking questions, to find out what their mission in the village is. Dozens of people, including village elders, have died over the past few years for just talking to strangers.
Mohammed Hassan, who was a friend of Sarai, said the latter was picked up by three armed men from his home in Kibundani.
“One of them produced a police badge to identify himself. The other two, who were heavily built, bundled him into the car and they sped off towards Ukunda,” recalled Mr Hassan.
Sarai’s wife Biasha Tsuma said she was doing house chores when neighbours informed her that her husband had been picked up by unknown men.
“Sarai was relaxing on the verandah drinking tea. That was the last time I saw him,” she said.
To get to Bongwe from Mombasa Island, you have to cross the Likoni channel and then drive for about an hour, after which you branch off from the main road towards Ukunda town.
Then you drive for about seven minutes on a gravel road to Bongwe, a village dotted with houses made from coral rocks and iron sheets.
Down the road you get to Bongwe Primary School, the institution Jaysh Ayman commander and recruiter known as Ramadhan Kufungwa went to, before enrolling for religious studies at Ijtihaad Madrassa and Maganyakulo Madrasatul Tawheed Islaamiya.
Ramadhan Kufungwa, who is currently a mid-level commander within the Jaysh Ayman Brigade of Al-Shabaab, is the village’s most infamous son.
He is also believed to be a key recruiter of youths from the coast region for Al-Shabaab through his Kufungwa Recruitment Network.
Security sources believe Kufungwa travelled to Somalia in 2011 after attending religious studies at Ijtihaad Madrassa and Maganyakulo Madrasatul Tawheed Islaamiya in Kwale.
He later returned to become a fanatical adherent and follower of the late Muslim clerics Aboud Rogo and Abubakar Shariff aka Makaburi. After Rogo and Makaburi were assassinated, Kufungwa, who had returned to Kenya, sneaked back to Somalia where he now leads a recruitment cell whose stream of recruits is so vast that it has a foothold in Tanzania.
In Bongwe, no one, including the area chief and the sub-county assistant commissioner, were willing to show the Nation the location of Kufungwa’s house or where he was born.
According to those who agreed to speak to us, all those who have tried to out members of the Jaysh Ayman squad and their accomplices have either been beheaded or shot dead.
The same fate has befallen those who have tried to convince their sons not to join Al-Shabaab and those who welcome former returnees from Somalia and tried to help the latter reintegrate to the society.
In one of the most notorious cases, on January 19, 2016, three village elders namely Hassan Mwasanite, Mohamed Mwanguze and Juma Mwanyota were shot dead by unknown assailants at different locations in Bongwe.
Residents told the Nation that the clan elders were killed because they had taken a part in reintegration of former Al-Shabaab recruits into society.
Months later, on May 23, 2016, police shot dead a suspect identified as Ali Salim, alleging that he was linked to the killing of the three village elders.
“Most of those who have been hunted down and killed by Jaysh Ayman members are old men, mostly village elders who tried to deal with radicalisation of youths in the area,” a village elder who requested not to be named, told us.
According to our investigations, Ramadhan Kufungwa recruited hundreds of men from his and six neighbouring villages in Msambweni to join Jeysh Ayman, Al-Shabaab’s Kenyan fighter unit.
“So many people joined al-Shabaab that it’s not possible to pinpoint a homestead without a relative who has either fought for al-Shabaab, spied for or benefited from them,” an official from Human Development Agenda, a community-based organisation in Kwale, told us.
