Alwaght-Kenya on Friday announced a new security operation aimed at ousting al- ShabaabTakfiri terrorists from a dense forest along the border with war-torn Somalia.
The massive security operation is being carried out inside Boni forest in the country's coastal northeast which officials say is being used as a hideout by Somalia's Al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab terrorists.
Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery launched the operation a week after police warned the area's residents to hand over any weapons and leave ahead of an "imminent security operation".
This follows a wave of attacks in the county and targets the Jeysh Ayman, a 300-member al Shabaab cell, operating within the forest.
"We would like you to move so that we can clean the forest to eject the criminals that are in there," Nkaissery said Friday at the public launch of the operation in Mpeketoni, where al-Shabaab terrorists massacred around 48 people last year, close to the once-popular tourist island of Lamu.
Boni forest borders Somalia, where al-Shabaab originated and Kenyan officials believe recent attacks -- including a failed assault on an army post in June in which British jihadist terrorists Thomas Evans was killed -- were launched from the reserve.
Al-Shabaab terrorists killed 148 in an attack on a university in Garissa in April, around 100 in a series of raids in Lamu County last year and at least 67 in an assault on Nairobi's Westgate mall two years ago.