Kenyan mall attack came from murky waters - ABC Local

Jill Emberson from 1233 ABC Newcastle Mornings asked Wayne Reynolds from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences if he could shed some light on the factors behind the attack.

Kenya's military says it's freed most of the hostages in the mall siege, which involved armed militants from the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab and resulted in the deaths of at least 68 people including one Australian citizen.

Wayne Reynolds says he wasn't overly surprised by the attack, given the ongoing tension between Kenya and Somalia.

"The scale of it is shocking, yes, but not without precedent," he says.

He explains that Kenya is a pro-Western nation, formerly part of the British Empire and later a US ally.

Wayne says Somalia, which was aligned with Russia, collapsed in 1991 and descended into an era of warlords.

When it looked like an Islamic government was coming into power in Somalia, Wayne says Ethiopia invaded to try to prevent that, resulting in a flood of refugees over the border into Kenya.

In 2011 Kenya also began attacking Islamic forces in Somalia, and Wayne says the mall attack would be seen by the militants as a response to Kenyan interference in their affairs.

Al Shabaab is claiming three of the attackers were from the United States.

"Not only that, the mother of one of the bombers of the London subway is also involved in Al Shabaab," Wayne says.

Despite its international reach, Wayne doesn't believe Al Shabaab will the the "Al Qaeda of this century".

He says Al Qaeda was quite unique in its structure, discipline and financing.

"What I see going on here is a fairly traditional terrorist response," Wayne says.

He says it emerges from a very complex and messy situation on the Horn of Africa.

"We've ignored this area for 20 years since the end of the Cold War," he says.

"We've seen the piracy, we've seen the warlords, we saw Clinton trying to intervene and then withdraw, and by and large we've been prepared to just let it go.

"It's not just a question of the good guys and the bad guys, this is much murkier and greyer than that."