NAIROBI, Kenya — Somali militants burst into a university in eastern Kenya on Thursday and killed nearly 150 students in the worst terrorist attack since the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy here, laying bare the nation’s continuing vulnerability after years of battling Islamist extremism.

A small group of militants, most likely between four and 10, roved from dorm to dorm, separating Christian from Muslim students and killing the Christians, the authorities said. Students described being awakened before dawn by the sound of gunfire and fleeing for their lives as masked attackers closed in.

Officials said that by the time Kenyan commandos cornered and killed the attackers on an upper floor, 147 people lay dead.

Despite new security laws, significant Western help and a heightened state of vigilance that has already put police officers on almost every major street corner in the capital, Nairobi, Kenya remains squarely in the cross hairs of the Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that immediately claimed responsibility for the attack on Thursday.

The Shabab has killed hundreds of Kenyans — on country buses, in churches, in remote coastal towns and inside one of Kenya’s fanciest malls during a devastating siege in 2013 that left 67 people dead and rattled Kenya’s prized image as a cornerstone of stability in this part of Africa. The Kenyan government is so desperate to stop the Shabab, one of the most violent franchises of Al Qaeda, that some officials have even proposed building a 424-mile wall across the entire Somali border.

Kenya’s tourist industry, one of the pillars of its economy, has been badly damaged by the terrorist attacks, and the bloodshed on Thursday is sure to make things worse. There are also fears that the Shabab’s relentless emphasis on singling out Christians could inflame religious strife in a country already wrestling with tensions between a Muslim minority, which has complained about government persecution, and a Christian majority that increasingly feels under attack.

The violence Thursday came just days after President Obama announced that he would visit Kenya in July, his first trip to his father’s homeland since taking office. Mr. Obama had stayed away until now, at least in part out of concerns about Kenya’s public safety.

The White House issued a statement condemning the attack and vowing to continue assisting Kenya in fighting the Shabab — in recent months, the American military has killed the group’s leader and other operatives — but it offered no indication of whether the university siege would change Mr. Obama’s travel plans.

The Kenyan authorities said that around dawn, the attackers stormed Garissa University College in the town of Garissa, about 90 miles from the Somali border. Though the college is in a predominantly ethnic Somali area of Kenya, it attracts students from across the country, many of them non-Muslim.

In a statement early on Thursday, the Shabab said that its fighters had attacked the university early in the morning, separating Muslims from non-Muslims in an “operation against the infidels.”

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In an audio message soon after, a Shabab spokesman, Ali Mohamoud Raghe, said the attack had been carried out because “the Christian government of Kenya has invaded our country,” a reference to the Kenyan military’s 2011 incursion into Somalia to oust the Shabab from its strongholds.

He said the university had been targeted because it was educating many Christian students in “a Muslim land under colony,” a reference to the large Somali population in a part of Kenya that Somalia once tried to claim. He called the university part of Kenya’s “plan to spread their Christianity and infidelity.”

President Uhuru Kenyatta vowed to crack down on terrorists, and on Thursday, he abruptly ordered 10,000 police recruits to report to duty despite a court order saying the recruits may have been selected through corrupt practices. Human rights observers have said that Mr. Kenyatta is trying to consolidate control and using the fear of terrorism to quash civil rights.

On Thursday, panicked students streamed out of the besieged university with chilling stories of witnessing their classmates’ being killed. Augustine Alanga, 21, an economics student, said he had been asleep in his dormitory when the shooting began. He said he bolted from his room without stopping to put on his shoes, cutting his feet as he sprinted barefoot across the campus and into a nearby forest.

“When I looked back, I saw them,” Mr. Alanga recalled. “There were five or six of them. They were masked. And they were shooting live rounds.”
Police officers nearby “heard the gunshots and responded swiftly, and engaged the gunmen in a fierce shootout; however, the attackers retreated and gained entry into the hostels,” a police statement said. “Security agencies arrived and are currently engaged in an elaborate process of flushing out the gunmen.”

The police surrounded and sealed off the campus, and by 11 a.m., three of the college’s four student dormitories had been evacuated, while “the attackers have been cornered in one hostel,” the Interior Ministry said on Twitter. It was unclear whether any bystanders had been killed by the security forces

Kenya’s struggles with the Shabab have been going on for years. In late 2011, citing a string of attacks and kidnappings, the Kenyan military charged across the border into Somalia, sending troops, tanks and aircraft to fight the Shabab.

The military later acknowledged that the invasion had been planned well in advance, part of an effort to protect Kenya’s borders from the violence in Somalia and to safeguard Kenya’s economic interests, including a huge port to be built just 60 miles south of Somalia.

The incursion managed to dislodge the Shabab from vital positions, but instead of pushing the Shabab threat farther from Kenya, it did the opposite: It brought more Shabab in.

 Bromsy wrote:
If only we could get a really catchy hashtag trending with some celebrity support, it ought to clear this up posthaste.

 cincydooley wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:
If only we could get a really catchy hashtag trending with some celebrity support, it ought to clear this up posthaste.

That's sorta why I was curious if other media outlets were covering it. We have a school shooting in the U.S. it's front page news. We have some people shoot up a newspaper it's all over the media. This thing was a page 3 story in the newspaper I happened to read it in (USA today).

 cincydooley wrote:
That's sorta why I was curious if other media outlets were covering it. We have a school shooting in the U.S. it's front page news. We have some people shoot up a newspaper it's all over the media. This thing was a page 3 story in the newspaper I happened to read it in (USA today).

 Ouze wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:
That's sorta why I was curious if other media outlets were covering it. We have a school shooting in the U.S. it's front page news. We have some people shoot up a newspaper it's all over the media. This thing was a page 3 story in the newspaper I happened to read it in (USA today).

Well, you know - TIA.


edit: thanks, Tumblr!

 Scrabb wrote:
Crazy that Bin Laden didn't want to be associated with these Al-Shabab characters on account of them frequently killing Muslims in their operations.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Scrabb wrote:
Crazy that Bin Laden didn't want to be associated with these Al-Shabab characters on account of them frequently killing Muslims in their operations.

Not really crazy. Bin Laden had standards, they just weren't the sort of standards we approve of.

Islamic state is also unpopular with many militants because of the killing of aid workers, and have been criticised by other groups which are quite happy to spill the blood of the correct sort of infidel.