Skip to main content

Paramedics help a student who was injured during an attack by Somalia's Al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabab gunmen on Garissa University campus on April 2, 2015.CARL DE SOUZA/AFP / Getty Images

It was a headline that whipped around the world after the Garissa university attack in Kenya: Islamist terrorists target Christians. Some reports even emphasized that the Christian students had been killed on the eve of Good Friday.

Factually, the headlines were correct. The gunmen from al-Shabab had separated Muslims from non-Muslims, targeting Christians and reportedly shouting, "This will be a good Easter holiday for us." It was a brutal tactic that they have used several times before.

But dig deeper and the reality is this: Africa's extremist groups are equal-opportunity killers. While they might dream of igniting a religious war – since any broader war would boost their own power and bring them new recruits – the truth is that they kill as many Muslims as Christians. They are murderous thugs, not religious warriors.

Groups such as al-Shabab, based in Somalia and Kenya, and Boko Haram, based in Nigeria, are often seen as anti-Christian zealots, bent on triggering a war of civilizations. For them, it's a useful reputation to cultivate, helping them to win support from well-funded extremist groups such as the Islamic State radicals in the Middle East. Yet for most of their history they've never bothered to discriminate much at all.

Al-Shabab routinely slaughters large numbers of Muslims in its attacks in Somalia, often targeting Muslim students and schools. Last month, it killed at least 14 people in an attack on a hotel in Mogadishu. In 2011, it triggered a massive truck bomb that killed more than 70 and injured 150 in Mogadishu, including students awaiting exam results at the Ministry of Education. Two years earlier, a suicide bomber attacked the graduation ceremony of medical students in the same city, killing 19 people. Many other examples could be cited.

Even in the horrendous attack on the university in Garissa, the gunmen were shooting indiscriminately in the early stages of their assault, killing a number of Muslims. "They were clearly targeting all civilians, no matter the religion," one human rights activist in Garissa told Human Rights Watch.

Boko Haram, meanwhile, began as an explicitly anti-Western group (its name suggests Western education is "sinful") but has become increasingly willing to murder Muslims in large numbers. It has attacked mosques, Islamic leaders, local emirs and even Nigeria's most famous Muslim, the retired general Muhammadu Buhari, who won Nigeria's presidential election this week. It often kills Muslims in suicide bombings in the crowded markets of northern Nigerian towns. It even bombed the Grand Mosque in Nigeria's biggest northern city, Kano, killing about 120 people and injuring 260.

If the massacre in Garissa this week convinces some people that a religious battle is under way, it only plays into the hands of the same ruthless extremists who taunted the Kenyan Christians as they murdered them. It would be a major mistake for the West to imagine that Christians are being systematically persecuted across Africa – a mistake that would encourage policy makers to look at Africa through the false prism of religion, rather than looking for the deeper and more complex reasons for conflict.

Muslims and Christians have lived side by side for centuries in many African countries, usually with few problems. They traditionally shared a sense of moderation and pragmatism. Of course there are religious fault lines across the continent, and sectarian killings do often occur these days, from Nigeria to the Central African Republic. But the atrocities are being committed by followers of both major religions, and the victims are from both religions.

There is a danger that the Kenyan government could fall into al-Shabab's trap by retaliating against Muslims and ethnic Somali citizens of Kenya. Heavy-handed crackdowns on Muslims and Somalis in the coastal and northern regions of Kenya, and in the Eastleigh suburb of Nairobi where thousands of Somalis live, could make al-Shabab more appealing to Kenya's ethnic Somalis.

Whenever the extremists launch attacks in Kenya, the police and soldiers retaliate with mass arrests and harassment of ethnic Somalis and other Muslims, often without any evidence of wrongdoing. It only deepens the alienation and sense of victimhood among the Muslims and Somalis. And it plays into the false narrative of a religious war that the extremists are so eager to promote.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe