ICC Note: Now that Garissa University is open for classes in northeast Kenya, security moving forward has become the primary concern in the region. On the surface, the region and campus appear much more secure than nine months ago when Islamist al-Shabaab militants murdered 148 people in April,, separating Christians and Muslims and specifically killing Christians. However, dozens of Somali Muslims have disappeared from the northeast, having been suspected of ties to al-Shabaab. The following Foreign Policy report explores the tensions between security and peace in a region so often marked by tension between Muslims and Christians.

By Ariel Zirulnick

1/20/16 Mandera and Garissa, Kenya (FP) — Teaching finally resumed last week at Garissa University, the northeast Kenyan college where al-Shabab killed 148 people last April.

The attack by the al Qaeda-linked group, which over the last five years has morphed from a Somali insurgency into a regional terrorist threat, was the largest on Kenyan soil since the U.S. Embassy bombing in 1998, and it reinforced the deep and widening rift between Kenya’s marginalized northeast and the rest of the country: The students and teachers who fled Garissa after the attack were just the latest in a long line of educated or professional Kenyans who have abandoned this isolated, conflict-torn region.

But the reopening of the university — which ends nine months of uncertainty about its fate and puts to rest rumors that it might be shuttered or turned into a security installation — reflects the cautious optimism, at least among locals, that the northeast has been brought back from the brink.

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