First up this April 13th, Kenya is building a wall. It'll stretch 435 miles, roughly the span of the country's border with Somalia. Kenya's also reportedly telling the United Nations to relocate the world’s largest refugee camp. It's in Kenya, it contains 600,000 Somalis. Kenyan officials want it moved to Somalia, though the U.N. says it hasn't gotten an official request. 

 

All this has to do with security. Kenya says it has to change the way the U.S. did after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks. The al-Shabaab terrorist group is based in Somalia. Kenya believes its operatives cross the border into Kenya, possibly filtering through the refugee camp, before targeting Christians and killing 147 people at a Kenyan university earlier this month.

 

Al-Shabaab also claimed responsibility for an attack in 2013 that killed 67 people in Kenya's Westgate shopping mall.

 

Here's a look at how porous the border is between Kenya and Somalia.

 

This is the border between Kenya and Somalia. Now, we can't show you this for security reasons, but either side of this border is a pretty substantial security set up and that has only grown up in size and scrutiny in the aftermath of the Westgate attack in Nairobi.

 

But this isn't the only route into Somalia. Hacked out the undergrowth, this is where traffic flows. The Panya routes, so-called rat routes, used by smugglers to cross back and forth undetected. Branching brazenly out from the government roads, they're certainly a smoother ride. In spite of the Kenyan government's efforts to beef up border security.

 

Now up through these smugglers' routes, we've managed to enter Somalia from Kenya without any checkpoints, without being asked for ID, without seeing any sort of government presence.

 

Night falls and it's rush hour on the Panya routes. People and goods ferry back and forth. Everyone is too afraid to stop for long here, even to help the stranded families we see along the way. Many are escaping the uncertainty back home in Somalia, but some are seeking to enter Kenya undetected for their own ends.

 

The Panya routes end in the Dadaab refugee camp. Authorities believe that during the build-up to Westgate, al-Shabaab operatives traveled from Somalia, through the Panya routes, and hid among the refugees in the camp. And it's from there, the Kenya authorities say, that they and other undocumented people made their way through government checkpoints and deeper into Kenya.