By Katrina Manson in Nairobi

In their night-time raids on parts of Nairobi, police regularly arrest dozens of Somalis at a time. One of them, Faid Ibrahim, a 26-year-old ethnic Somali, says they accuse him of being an Islamist jihadist. Then, he says, he bribes them to let him go.

“This is like a business for the police . . . we have no rights,” says Mr Ibrahim, who is unemployed and lives in Eastleigh, a dishevelled neighbourhood in the Kenyan capital filled with so many Somalis it goes by the name of “Little Mogadishu”.

Over the past several decades, Somali traders have turned Eastleigh from a quiet Asian residential district into a thriving commercial neighbourhood that supplies goods to all east Africa and is home to hundreds of thousands. But policing that is by turns lax, heavy-handed and corrupt has abandoned Eastleigh to its fate.

Last week, western officials said the four Islamist Somali terrorists who carried out a massacre in Nairobi’s premier shopping mall in September, killing at least 67 people, lived there undetected for nearly four months beforehand. They believe some worked out at the Andulus Gym in Eastleigh Mall, which bills itself as the “swankiest and fankiest shopping mall” of about 40 in the neighbourhood. Regional intelligence officials believe the four-man cell’s support team comprised 10 or so people.

The September attack heightened national attention on the large Somali presence in Kenya, highlighting both the fraught relations between Kenyans and Somalis and the difficulty of policing “Little Mogadishu”.

Deep historic suspicion between Kenyans and ethnic Somalis dates back decades. Soon after Kenya won independence 50 years ago, it fought a prolonged war against Kenyan Somalis fighting for unity with neighbouring Somalia.

More recently, hundreds of thousands more Somalis have come across the border into Kenya, fleeing war and famine at home. Many have since found their way to Eastleigh, some living for decades with false papers and running informal regional wholesalers out of shipping containers.

A Kenyan invasion of Somalia two years ago increased the risk of reprisals from al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-linked jihadists who still hold swaths of territory in neighbouring Somalia and who claimed responsibility for the Westgate shopping mall massacre.

“We need to change the way we police Eastleigh because it’s a threat to national security,” says Yusuf Hassan, the neighbourhood’s first Kenyan-Somali parliamentarian, who has raised the issues of police corruption and inadequate security several times in parliament, to no avail.

Mr Hassan is particularly familiar with the threats posed by Somali militants. Last December, a grenade was thrown when he was leaving a mosque in Eastleigh after evening prayers in an attack he believes was aimed at him. The explosion killed several people, including a young boy, and Mr Hassan narrowly avoided having to have his leg amputated.

The connection between Eastleigh and al-Shabaab is well known. Since the group came to prominence in 2009, security experts have warned that radical mosques in Eastleigh serve as recruitment and fundraising centres for the Islamist group.

“Three years ago people were fond of al-Shabaab because people thought they were bringing sanity [to Somalia] but now a lot of people hate them,” says Ahmed Mohamed, an Eastleigh businessman.

At first, al-Shabaab drew support because it emerged from the Islamic Courts Union, a group that, although hardline, brought stability to Somalia for the first time in 15 years.

“You could go to a restaurant [in Eastleigh] and people would point out: ‘that’s a Shabaab supporter, that’s a Shabaab commander of sorts’ – it was absolutely surreal,” says a western diplomat, who said that at the time Shabaab supporters and non-Shabaab worshippers attended the same mosques.

But since then al-Shabaab has lost popularity both at home and abroad as its brutal tactics and repressive rules have become evident. In Eastleigh, al-Shabaab appears to have gone underground, partly because its support is now weaker.

At the same time, the nature of Eastleigh itself is changing, becoming less close-knit. This has made the detection of terror networks ever harder. Radical teachings now take place in madrassas – Islamic schools – rather than prominent mosques, say officials familiar with Eastleigh.

Eastleigh’s flourishing trade also makes it difficult to monitor terrorist movements as transitory guests stay at its many hotels in fleeting stopovers between Somalia and the diaspora.

Tens of thousands of traders arrive every day to hawk their wares; pavements are filled with stalls selling doughnuts, handbags and spangly dresses as women in headscarves, full-length cloaks and gloves find their way through. But at night, criminal gangs of Somali youths take charge.

“There are pockets where you do not know what is happening any more. The old Eastleigh is kind of disappearing. I do not know many of the people now,” says Mr Hassan.

The history of sour community relations with the state and untargeted crackdowns has also made Eastleigh – which despite its fragility and criminality has no police post – impossible to secure.

“It’s basically open conflict [among criminals and between police and Somalis], especially at night,” says the diplomat.

Burst sewage pipes, piles of rubbish and bad roads make the state conspicuous only by its absence. Mr Hassan this year secured state funding for roads and street lights but the community is still remote and suspicious.

“Kenya needs to find ways of engagement [with the community in Eastleigh]” the diplomat said.

Source: FT