U.S. counterterrorism efforts include choking off the flow of cash to extremists, and urging friendly countries to help. But in Nairobi, Kenya, suspicion of Somali money — and an increase in terrorist attacks — has prompted a country-wide crackdown, with Kenyan police accused of extortion and arbitrary arrests of thousands of Somali refugees.
But how do you tell the difference between tainted money and honest cash?
Take Eastleigh, a neighborhood in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
Depending on whom you're talking to, the Eastleigh market is either a tangle of back alleys where Islamist terrorists and pirates go to launder money, or it's one of the brightest spots of African capitalism, a dynamic 24-hour shopping center that's the only place for hundreds of miles where you can buy new jeans and sneakers at 2 in the morning.
Part of the reason Eastleigh attracts such investment, and such suspicion, is that Somalis make up the majority of people doing business there.
"When you come to Eastleigh, you feel that you are in Mogadishu or in other parts of Somalia, so you don't feel that you are an outsider," says Mohammed Shakul. "You feel at home."
Parallel Financial System
Shakul was born in Mogadishu, but he fled the war in his country in the 1990s and managed grocery stores in Nashville, Tenn. Seven years ago, he moved to Kenya and opened a hotel in Eastleigh aimed at other American Somalis and British and Canadian Somalis who like him want to come to the Kenyan capital and invest the money they've saved up in immigrant jobs as taxi drivers and shopkeepers and airline stewards.
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