Hundreds of Kenyan youths have been recruited by Somalia's beleaguered government to cross the border and fight Islamist rebels, according to authorities in eastern Kenya.
Residents of Garissa, home to many ethnic Somalis, said the Kenyan army was facilitating the enlistment. Reports in the local media said that young men aged between 18 and 30 were being offered salaries of at least £250 a month to join President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed's forces.
"The recruitment is not a secret," Mohamed Gabow, the mayor of Garissa, told Reuters. "Those involved are not worried. They are going around all the villages to announce the exercise".
He said more than 170 Kenyan Somalis, some with military experience, had been transported at night to an army camp in Mombasa. Local human rights activists said as many as 300 men had been recruited, with some already deployed to Somalia. Local leaders, as well as the Council of Imans and Preachers of Kenya, have demanded an explanation from the Kenyan government.
Kenya is a key ally of Ahmed's Transitional Federal Government (TFG), and has watched with increasing concern as Islamist groups such as al-Shabab have taken control of southern and central Somalia and launched brazen kidnapping raids across the border.
Bogita Ongeri, a spokesman for the defence department in Nairobi, said he had received reports that the rebel militias had been recruiting Somali youths in refugee camps in Kenya, but denied the army was involved in enlisting Kenyans on behalf of the TFG.
"We are not involved in any such recruitment and training of youth to go and fight in Somalia. That is absolute propaganda. Why would we do that?" he told the Daily Nation newspaper.
Somalia's information minister, Dahir Mohamud Gelle, also denied that Kenyans were being signed up to fight for the TFG.
At a meeting in April, donors pledged £135m to help Ahmed establish a 5,000-member security force and 10,000-strong police service in Somalia. While the US has since sent weapons to the TFG, less than a third of the donor money has been received.
The Islamist militias would have overrun the government long ago had it not been for the presence of African Union peacekeepers in Mogadishu.
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