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Security forces help civilians flee the scene as cars burn behind, at a hotel complex in Nairobi, Kenya, Jan. 15, 2019.Ben Curtis/The Associated Press

At least four gunmen firing assault rifles and hurling grenades have stormed an upscale hotel complex in Nairobi, killing a reported 15 people and injuring dozens more in an attack for which an Islamist radical group has claimed responsibility.

The deadly assault on the DusitD2 hotel and a nearby restaurant and offices in the Kenyan capital is the latest demonstration that the militia group al-Shabaab still has the resources and organizational capacity to launch terrorist attacks far beyond its base in Somalia.

The attack began at about 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Two cars raced toward the hotel entrance and the gunmen detonated explosions that destroyed several cars. Nine hours later, bursts of gunfire could still be heard from the hotel, despite a claim from Kenyan authorities that police had “secured” all of the buildings in the complex. Many people were reported to be still inside the hotel as the shooting continued at midnight.

By 1 a.m., 15 bodies had arrived at Chiromo mortuary and more were expected, an attendant told Reuters. The U.S. government said on Tuesday night that an American was among the dead.

Police evacuated scores of Kenyans and foreigners from the hotel and office buildings, which included the local offices of multinational companies such as Dow Chemical and Colgate-Palmolive. At least 30 injured victims were taken to hospitals, according to local media. One of the attackers detonated a suicide bomb in the lobby of the hotel, police said.

Video from the hotel’s closed-circuit cameras showed four gunmen, wearing all-black clothing and vests with ammunition and grenades, entering the hotel and an adjacent building. In one scene, they roamed freely through a paved area in front of the hotel, walking calmly and occasionally firing their weapons.

The hotel is about two kilometres from the Westgate mall, where 67 people were killed in 2013 in a similar attack by several gunmen from al-Shabaab that turned into a lengthy siege.

Within hours of the assault on the hotel on Tuesday, al-Shabaab claimed responsibility, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors terrorist activity.

In the two years since Donald Trump became U.S. President, the Pentagon has dramatically escalated its war on al-Shabaab, launching dozens of air strikes from drones over Somalia. The Pentagon has claimed that these drone attacks have killed hundreds of Somali militants and “degraded” the power of al-Shabaab. But the attack in Nairobi on Tuesday showed that the Islamist militant group remains a lethal menace.

Al-Shabaab, which is affiliated with al-Qaeda, has launched dozens of attacks in Kenya over the past seven years in retaliation for Kenya’s deployment of thousands of troops across its northern border into Somalia.

The Kenyan government, saying that it needed a buffer zone on the Somali side of the border, ordered its troops to invade the southern region of Somalia in 2011. The intervention has become increasingly unpopular in Kenya, according to recent opinion polls.

In one of the most notorious attacks, al-Shabaab militants killed 148 people at Garissa University in northeastern Kenya in 2015.

Tuesday’s incident came on the third anniversary of one of the deadliest attacks of recent years, when hundreds of al-Shabaab jihadis overran a Kenyan base in southern Somalia. The Kenyan government has never disclosed the exact details of the attack, but as many as 200 Kenyan soldiers are reported to have been killed.

Until now, Nairobi had not had a terrorist attack in the five years since the Westgate incident, but there were clear signs that al-Shabaab was still trying to launch attacks in the Kenyan capital. Last February, Kenyan police intercepted a vehicle from Somalia that was packed with explosives and rifles for use in an intended attack in Nairobi, according to a report by the United Nations monitoring group on Somalia.

The border between Kenya and Somalia is so porous that the members of al-Shabaab can cross it easily by paying bribes of as little as US$20 to corrupt Kenyan and Somali border guards, the UN report said.

“Despite ongoing efforts by international forces to eliminate al-Shabaab’s leadership, in particular through the use of air strikes, the group’s ability to carry out complex asymmetric attacks in Somalia remains undiminished,” the monitoring group said in its report to the UN Security Council in November.

It noted that al-Shabaab killed almost 600 people in Mogadishu in October, 2017, by detonating a truck bomb with the equivalent of more than 1,200 kilograms of TNT. It was believed to be the largest explosive device that the militia had ever constructed.

To finance its activities, al-Shabaab runs a system of taxation in central and southern Somalia, the UN report said. It estimated that the Islamist group collects about US$10-million a year from one checkpoint alone in the Bay region.

“Case studies into al-Shabaab’s domestic financing revealed that the militant group generates more than enough revenue to sustain its insurgency,” the report said.

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