Terror in the Tropics: Al Qaeda, the Black Widow, and the attack on the Nairobi shopping mall

By Roger Howard

On 21 September 2013, a group of fanatical, heavily armed gunmen stormed the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Within hours they had killed 67 people and wounded hundreds, spreading chaos and terror in the Kenyan capital and beyond.

Terror in the Tropics tells the story of the assault – what happened over the three-day siege, who was behind the attack and what their motives were. It looks at the attack from the perspective of other terrorist actions in Kenya, notably the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in August 1998, and developments in neighbouring Somalia that spawned the likely culprits: the Islamist movement, Al Shabaab.

Terror in The Tropics argues that Kenya and other countries in the developing world remain highly vulnerable to repeat attacks in the future, and that the Westgate attack is likely to be a harbinger of similar violence and further bloodshed.