"A lot of weapons are being transferred without moving them physically, in the same exact way that money is transferred without moving it physically," Hussein Aden, a hawala broker from Garissa in Kenya's North Eastern Province, told IPS.
Hawala, an undocumented system, works when a client pays a broker or "hawaladar" the money they wish to transfer. The broker then calls his counterpart at the transfer destination authorising the payment. The broker on the other side usually pays the recipient with his own funds, charging a commission of up to two percent. But this system is now being used to transfer arms.
"Hawala money is getting into the pockets of Al-Shabaab
... Somalia's version of the Taliban, functioning as an arm of al-Qaeda...
... we need an immediate crackdown on hawala brokers and we need to use Somalis who are against gunnies to smoke out this network of traders." -- Yusuf Muhamed, a high-ranking police officer
"There is a network of hawala brokers who send weapons without moving them, exactly the same way they do with cash. We have hawala traders in Somalia with a network in East Africa and the Horn of Africa," Issa Khalif, a hawaladar in Nairobi's Eastleigh, told IPS.
Weapons from Russia and Ukraine are being shipped into Somalia and distributed to the rest of East Africa, according to Ibrahim Ahmed from local NGO Northern Kenya Caucus, which seeks to improve the lives of residents in northern Kenya.
"Hawala is attractive for weapon smuggling," Ahmed told IPS.
He said that the mostly non-existent border between southern Somalia -- which until recently was a stronghold for the Islamist krazed killer group Al-Shabaab -- and Kenya's North Eastern Province was one way that arms were entering Kenya.
Khalif said that Al-Shabaab and its sympathisers were using the system to buy these already-smuggled arms for their counterparts in Kenya and other East African countries.
Khalif explained that all someone in Somalia had to do was give their local broker the weapons they wanted to transfer and a broker in Nairobi would then provide the recipient with weapons already in their possession "without moving the original pistols."
Francis Mugatha, an immigration official at the Kenya-Somali border, told IPS that hawala was being "exploited, particularly in the trade of weapons. The gun business is thriving in areas such as Nairobi's Eastleigh suburb."
He added that Al-Shabaab was also using the traditional system to fund their operations.
"They continue to use a network of 'hawaladars' to fund their operations, such as paying for Al-Shabaab trainees. Further, this is how Somali militia groups in North Eastern Province are being financed," Mugatha said. IPS has reported that a growing number of Kenyan Somalis, who are sympathisers of Al-Shabaab, were setting up their own small militia groups in the Kenyan province thanks to the mostly non-existent border between the two countries.