• Dispute over political power struggle is blamed for the clashes, with minority groups targeted to be driven out.
• Efforts to build peace and co-existence through mediation have not successful.
The killing of two women and a boy in Marsabit on May 24 is the latest in episodic attacks that have been blamed on inter-clan feuds over pasture, water resources and politics.
Attackers raided Manyatta Konso village, sprayed bullets at homesteads leaving three boys with serious injuries.
It is the lastest of inter-clan clashes between the Borana, Gabra, Rendile and Burji communities in Marsabit county.
Crisis Group International, a think-tank that researches on peacebuilding in the horn of Africa, says clan feuding in the larger Northern Kenya is decades-old and often triggered by disputes over grazing land, water resources, and politics.
Devolution is among the undercurrents that have exacerbated the blood letting as candidates vying for various seats run on the platform of advancing their clan interest which antagonise other communities.
The group's report shows that in 2013, minority clans of Rendille, Gabra, and Burji formed a political coalition that saw them block the majority Borana candidates from winning major seats in county elections.
This enhanced tension and animosity, causing a bloody clash in August of the same year in which dozens were killed and more than 38,000 displaced.
"The outcome fuelled Borana discontent and sense of marginalisation. This renewed tensions, especially between the two main rivals (Borana and Gabra), led to a series of bloody inter-communal clashes in August 2013 in Moyale, a mixed population town on the Ethiopian border. The conflict was overlain by competing claims on grazing land," the report says.
The report was authored by Abdullahi Abdille, a Horn of Africa researcher for the Crisis Group International.
Communities often get reinforcement from their kinsmen across the border in Southern Ethiopia, the report said.
When the clashes subdued, President Uhuru Kenyatta appointed former NCIC chairman Francis Ole Kaparo and Garisa Senator Yusuf Haji to mediate a mission that achieved a short-lived truce.
That the raids, conducted by militia youths from across the clans, tend to be lethal is a belaboured point. Boundary disputes remain one of the motivations behind the attacks, with the aim of pushing the minority groups out of the disputed area.
One such raid was on July 12, 2005 when an estimated 500 youth militia youth attacked a primary school and opened fire, killing 53 people, majority of them pupils.
The killings were the height of episodic raids and counter-raids by the rival communities. Quelling the bloody conflict has been elusive with part of the efforts to find lasting peace culminating in the death of high ranking politicians in a plane crash in 2006.
All the four MPs from the region at the time died. They included the then deputy leader of opposition and North Horr MP Bonaya Godana, Abdi Sasura (Saku), Guracha Galgallo (Moyale) and Laisamis MP Titus Ngoyoni. They were on a peace mission to Marsabit when the military plane they were travelling in crashed a few metres from the venue.