Why radicals find fertile ground in moderate Kenya

"They are all aware of the new divide, and what side of it they are on," says Hassouna.

"We were asleep, and then we awoke," says Mr. Kimani, who has, in the past year, joined a protest march against the war in Afghanistan, written two letters to the local paper demanding that diplomatic ties be cut with Israel, and made a contribution to a fund for children in Iraq. He is unemployed, he says, and his five children lack school fees and usually go without dinner.

Desperation and poverty, say observers, play a part in the radicalization process. The road to transforming the "us against them" mentality into a willingness to do battle with "them" is not a very long one, some say, especially in a country where more than 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

"If a bomber came to my house and asked to stay, I would say, 'A salaam aleikum' [peace be on you], my brother," says another Eastleigh resident, Salim Angoma. "Especially if it might help us out, financially speaking."

"Osama bin Laden is hardly a pauper, the Sept. 11 hijackers were generally middle-class, and it is often and properly observed that poverty is not what drives Al Qaeda's main players," says Jonathan Stevenson, senior fellow for counterterrorism at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "But the radicalized poor in a given locale could still be hospitable to Al Qaeda and therefore operationally useful." As Kenya's economic woes persist, says Mr. Stevenson, "its Muslim population probably will become more susceptible to radicalization."

Most experts say that the final factor in Kenya's Muslim radicalization is influence from neighbors, primarily Somalia.

A harsh country lacking both government and law, Somalia is awash with weapons and, some say, Al Qaeda training camps. A local Somali Muslim group - Al Ittihad al-Islamiya - which was involved in a series of terror attacks in Ethiopia in the late 1980s, is on the US list of terror groups, and has been watched closely since Sept. 11. This week, they have been mentioned in connection with the bombing.

Somalis, with their vast regional diaspora, have good communications and transport routes, and are said to be East Africa's best black-market merchants, not only in cars and spare parts, but also in drugs, ivory, and arms. There are more than 250,000 Somali refugees in Kenya alone, many in refugee camps along the border. "Somalis are everywhere," says Hassouna. "If they wanted to set up a network, they could."

Sudan, a country in which bin Laden lived for four years, and which is today ruled by the National Islamic Front (NIF), is thought to be another exporter of radicalism in the region.

"The NIF provided arms and logistics support to fundamentalist groups in Ethiopia and Eritrea as well as groups outside the region, and facilitated their ability to penetrate vulnerable segments of the Islamic communities in several Horn of Africa countries," says Theodoros Dagne, a specialist on African affairs at the Congressional Research Service in Washington. "Al Qaeda was [conceived] and born in the Sudan," he says.

Evening has arrived in Eastleigh, and the Muezzin is calling the faithful to prayer. "It was not I who bombed the hotel," says Angoma. "I don't want to die, and I don't even have explosives or a car."

"But," he says, as he walks away, "maybe another time."

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