By ISMA’IL KUSHKUSHAPRIL

MANDERA, Kenya — As the border gate opened early in the morning, minibuses dropped off passengers, donkey-led carts trotted through and pedestrians began to cross freely on foot, heading in both directions.

The Kenyan guards standing beside the empty border offices casually watched the stream of humanity coming in and out of the country. The many family, economic and educational ties straddling both sides of the border are just too entrenched to make any real dividing line practical, many local residents say.

But the recent attacks by the Shabab, the extremist Somali group that has killed hundreds of people in Kenya in the past two years, have given rise to an ambitious national proposal that is supposed to begin right here: an enormous barrier along the 424-mile border with Somalia.

“All the problems come from that side,” said Abdi Billow, 60, a Kenyan of ethnic Somali descent from this town.

This distant northern corner of Kenya has suffered the brunt of some of the violence, including attacks on a bus of teachers over Christmas and on workers at a quarry last year, where Christians were separated from Muslims and shot.

One of the attackers in the assault on a university in eastern Kenya this month, which left almost 150 people dead, also came from here.

“A wall will go a long way in instituting some control of movement,” said Alex Nkoyo, the Mandera County district commissioner.

Kenyan officials say that construction equipment has arrived in Mandera to build what is often called a border wall but is actually envisioned as a barrier of fences, ditches and observation posts that extend from here all the way to the Indian Ocean.

“It’s not like the Great Wall of China,” said Mwende Njoka, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior. “That would be too expensive.”

The project has stirred intense debate here in Mandera, where the two sides of the border are highly interconnected.

Bula Hawa is Mandera’s sister city, willingly or not, right across the border on the Somali side — a border that does not mean much to many residents.

Read more: Kenya Envisions a Border Wall That Keeps Shabab Violence out

Source: NYTIMES