Beffore the refugees came, Dadaab was a forgettable little way-station in northeastern Kenya on a dusty road to Somalia. More than two decades later the original town is dwarfed by five sprawling camps spread across flat, dry land that together house at least 350,000 people. It is Kenya's fourth-largest population centre and the world's biggest refugee settlement. As Kenya's government struggles to deal with Islamist terrorism, it is blaming Somali refugees and wants Dadaab gone. The Shabab, a group that is linked to al-Qaeda, are based in Somalia but operate with growing frequency in Kenya. They boasted that they had perpetrated a massacre in early April, when four gunmen killed 148 people, mostly students, at a university in Garissa, a town 80 km (50 miles) southwest of Dadaab. The Shabab also carried out an attack in 2013 on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, killing at least 67 people.
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