Garissa University College Attack

Before Sunrise: The Town, the School, the Unseen Threat

It’s still dark in Garissa—an outpost town in northeastern Kenya, not far from the border with Somalia—when the quiet of early morning is broken by the distant call to prayer. Most students at Garissa University College are still asleep. Those who are awake are gathering in the predawn gloom for morning devotion or final cramming before exams.

By all accounts, campus life here feels remote from Nairobi’s bustle, caught between the hope of higher education and the constant, uneasy edge of frontier living. Garissa University College, opened just a few years before in 2011, was meant as a promise: an investment in a region shaped by Somali heritage, overlooked for decades. The college campus, with its white dorms and low-slung lecture halls, is both a symbol of Kenya’s commitment to education and a target painted by geography and politics.

The threat of violence hangs like invisible threads. For weeks, intelligence officers had warned of possible al-Shabaab plots, especially in places where the border feels more like a suggestion than a line. Most warnings swirl vaguely; their targets are hard to pinpoint. What’s known, by now, is that Garissa has seen too many headlines for its own comfort—bus attacks on Christian teachers, raids on police stations, bomb threats. And still, like every other morning, the routine resumes: students yawning through breakfast, dorm doors banging open and shut, books beneath arms.

What happens next feels, in hindsight, both unthinkable and horribly predictable.

The Attack: “They’re Here, Shootings, Come Help Us, Please”

Around 5:30 in the morning, Friday, April 2, the quiet is shattered. A group of heavily armed men approach the campus perimeter. They aren’t here for dialogue. Dressed in dark clothing, carrying AK-47s and explosives, they head for the main gate.

The guards barely stand a chance. Within seconds, gunfire explodes across the dawn. Witnesses later say the attackers shoot indiscriminately, blowing open the entrance and scattering anyone who gets in their way. Students—tired, groggy, some already dressed for class—are jolted awake by a sound that doesn’t belong on any campus.

Reports later reveal that the four assailants, all linked to Somalia’s al-Shabaab militant group, have come with purpose. They know what they’re looking for. Moving quickly, they maneuver through dormitories, sometimes asking students to recite Islamic prayers. Muslim students, once identified, are permitted to leave. Christian students are not.

“All I heard was shooting and then I saw men with guns,” one survivor, Faith Ikunda, later tells a reporter. “They asked if we were Muslims or Christians.”

Fear spreads ahead of the gunfire. Some students run for cover—under beds, inside closets, into bushes. Some squeeze out panicked text messages—“Keep praying for us. They are killing us one by one.” Some try to break for the perimeter; others freeze, whispering prayers as doors are battered open.

By sunrise, the attackers have established control over several dorms and lecture halls. Reports filter in: hostages. Executions. Shots echoing against block walls. Across social media and WhatsApp, desperate pleas pulse outward.

A Deadly Standoff: Hour by Hour

Garissa is not Nairobi. The roads are long, the response slow. The nearest police posts are understaffed, ill-equipped to face men in body armor and balaclavas. By mid-morning, the siege is raging, and video footage from the outskirts shows students crawling on their bellies, some in bloodstained uniforms, toward safety.

The town’s hospital is quickly overwhelmed. A local doctor later describes the scene: “We just kept bringing in stretchers. Some students were alive but wounded. Some were already gone.” Family members begin to gather outside campus, their faces pale with fear and uncertainty.

At around 10:00 AM, security forces from Nairobi, including elite Kenyan paramilitary units, finally arrive. News helicopters circle overhead. Gunfire rattles from the inside—then, chillingly, is replaced by silence.

Inside, the attackers move between rooms, executing captives, holding dozens more as shields. Negotiations stall. For hostages, hours stretch into eternity. Some, hidden under piles of clothes or wedged silently behind water tanks, keep phones pressed to their lips to avoid making a sound. “I could hear them praying, then gunshots,” another student recalls. “It was like waiting to die.”

The government deploys soldiers to cordon off the campus—careful, at first, not to incite more killing. Periodically, groups of terrified students are rounded up and moved under heavy guard to safety. Buses and ambulances line the sandy road outside, doors flung wide, ready.

Nightfall: Bloody Reckoning

The violence persists all afternoon. By evening, it’s clear: this is not a negotiation. It is an execution.

Just after 6:30 PM, with dusk bleeding out over the Garissa plains, security forces storm the final building. Explosions and a final burst of heavy gunfire. When the shooting stops, all four attackers are dead.

The deadliest terror attack on Kenyan soil since the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing is over. Fourteen and a half hours after it began.

The numbers are almost impossible to process: 148 dead, nearly all students save for three police guards and three university staff. At least 79 wounded. The campus, once a monument to hopeful possibility, is now quiet but for the sound of distant sirens and the shuffling of broken glass. Shoes, books, backpacks—personal treasures—are scattered across lawns and hallways.

Later, investigators will navigate what is left behind: rooms riddled with bullet holes, walls scorched by grenade flashes, and, in the corners, numbers and names scrawled hastily by first responders identifying the fallen.

The Toll: In Silence and in Grief

After dawn, Kenya wakes to horror and heartbreak. Garissa becomes a symbol—not for hope, this time, but for the frailty of peace.

The government quickly announces three days of national mourning. Flags are lowered. Radios play somber hymns. In Nairobi, families line up outside mortuaries to identify the bodies of loved ones whose last days were spent in pursuit of a future snatched away in minutes.

Outside the university, a crowd grows. Some are family, some friends, some simply trying to make sense of the senseless. “He only wanted to be a teacher,” one mother says, folding her son’s transcript tightly in her hands. “He died for nothing.” Others, numb and shell-shocked, can say nothing at all.

The school itself closes, unable to reopen even after the last cordon is lifted. More than 600 students are displaced, scattering to safer regions or back to Nairobi, their ambitions collapsed along with the cracked concrete of their dorm rooms.

A Nation Responds: Fear and Resolve

In the days and weeks that follow, the attack’s impact ripples far beyond Garissa. Kenya’s government moves quickly, deploying more troops and police to guard schools and universities across the country. New checkpoints sprout at campus gates from Kisumu to Mombasa. Bulletproof vests and sandbag fortifications become, overnight, as common as notebooks and blue examination booklets.

The nation’s fragile tourism industry—already battered by years of instability—craters even further. Foreign embassies issue travel warnings. Schools across the northeast experience a quiet exodus as teachers, especially those from other regions or faiths, pack up and leave.

One immediate focus falls on the border. Kenya accelerates work on a security wall between itself and Somalia—a project as symbolic as it is tangible, designed to keep out, or at least slow, the next attack.

Within weeks, police arrest several men suspected of helping coordinate the massacre. Among them are alleged logistics providers—those who shuttled weapons, housed gunmen, supplied intelligence. Mohamed Mohamud, known as “Dulyadin,” is quickly identified by authorities as the lead planner, a figure whose personal journey from Kenyan schoolboy to al-Shabaab commander stirs debate about radicalization, justice, and lost opportunity.

Meanwhile, survivors and families struggle to compose new routines, haunted by memory. Psychological support services, previously rare on campuses, are established almost overnight. Group therapy, trauma workshops, and private counseling now stand alongside exam prep as fixtures of university life.

Policy Shifts, Lessons, and Lasting Uncertainty

The Garissa attack forces a reckoning not just for security but for the country’s soul. National leaders, under pressure, order a sweeping review of crisis communication, police coordination, and intelligence-sharing procedures. Critics point to missed warnings, to the slow arrival of elite forces, to the chronic lack of resources in rural outposts.

Community engagement and counter-radicalization efforts, once bureaucratic footnotes, become urgent priorities. Law enforcement and local leaders are tasked with bridging old suspicions, convincing ethnic Somali and Muslim communities that the line between protection and marginalization need not become a chasm.

Long after bullet holes are patched and blood is scrubbed from the floors, there is no forgetting. Students and teachers in Garissa and across Kenya hold annual remembrances. Songs are sung, prayers offered—sometimes in silence, sometimes aloud—for the lost.

Security has improved; another university attack of this scale has not happened since. But the region remains tense, its border battered both by violence and by the memory of what violence can take away. Al-Shabaab still threatens, and warnings come and go, each one echoing faintly of that violent morning.

In the Quiet That Follows

The shoes abandoned outside the dorms, the handwritten notes to parents, dreams interrupted on an ordinary morning—these linger in the collective memory, more than any statement or statistic.

This, then, is the true cost: young lives lost in pursuit of education, a town reshaped by fear, and a nation still trying to square the ideals of openness and security, of hope and history.

Years later, Garissa University College is remembered not just for tragedy but for the resilience of those who survived, rebuilt, and refused to let violence have the last word.

The wound remains. So, too, does the resolve.