For as long as most Pokot can remember, raiding cattle from rival tribes was a dangerous game where boys became men. Males from the nomadic tribe with a reputation for belligerence stole livestock for dowry or to boost community wealth, always after getting permission from elders. 

If they killed a man in battle, they were given a tattoo that marked them as a hero, making them more attractive to the opposite sex. Somewhere in the last 25 years, the rules of engagement changed in Kenya's wild west. An influx of automatic weapons helped turn traditional banditry into modern warfare. Young men began to ignore tribal elders and prohibitions against killing women, children or the elderly, many Pokot say. 

"Cattle raiding, stealing cows from the Turkana, the Karamojong, used to be a game. Now things have taken a different dimension," elder Krop Lotiywa said. In West Pokot district, around 400 km (250 miles) northwest of the capital Nairobi and home to the 350,000-strong tribe, poverty, poor development, minimal education, insecurity, scarce water and food have all played a role in aggravating conflict. "It is true we have been stealing from them, and they from us," Lotunale Wangole, a 60-year-old elder in the village of Namit near the Ugandan border, said as he pointed towards the land where rivals from the Sabiny and Turkana tribes live. 

"Why are we raiding? It is because of the children we see here, because we can't stand to see the pain of them dying," Wangole said, gesturing to a group of skinny boys including one with no trousers sitting on the dry red earth. "We want to take them to school, but no one wants to put a school here, a road here," he said. 

FORGOTTEN FRONTIERS 
Poverty, alienation and insecurity are not the only reasons for the raids. Sometimes, traditional tribal justifications for raiding are exploited for political and financial gain, experts and Kenyan security officials say. 

"What are we seeing is a financialisation of these raids. Some of these livestock end up in major markets. It's actually like any other robbery," Ruto Pkalya, a Pokot peace activist who works with aid group Practical Action in Kenya, told Reuters. He said politicians also manipulate tribal animosities. 

"A Turkana politician or a Pokot politician will incite these people and then protect them, and that is how they get their seats," Pkalya said. The steep hills and scrubby plains where the Pokot live in the northern Great Rift Valley were the first targeted in a new government drive to disarm tribes blamed for cattle rustling. 

Security forces have rolled into the bush with heavy weapons and helicopters as part of the operation, which has revived memories of a bloody 1984 effort to disarm the Pokot. 
Some Pokot leaders describe the crackdown as community punishment; privately others will admit that their reputation for violence has made it hard to win sympathisers. 
But they feel they cannot give up their guns until the government guarantees their security -- and, after decades of isolation and neglect, they don't expect that to happen soon. 

In the village of Keringet, there is a police post that used to be a checkpoint. Only those with permits could pass. In such places the roads are few, electricity and water are scarce and insecurity almost guaranteed. The government presence is rarely more than a handful of soldiers, police and officials who don't mind forbidding territory and well armed locals. 

The Pokot in Namit say they moved there in 2003 to be closer to a camp for paramilitary police for protection and to farm a little -- an unusual practice for pastoralists. 
"The raiding is actually reducing, because we are doing more farming. But there are some boys still rustling," elder Tapangole Lokeno, 75, said. But fellow elder Wangole said the village gets little protection and has no relationship with the paramilitaries. 

That makes him nervous because Namit gave up most of its guns under a 2004 deal brokered by local activists with the neighbouring Sabiny tribe, who still have theirs. He fears the imbalance will drive some youths to take up arms again. 
"Now, the issue of rustling might not end because those people (Sabiny) have more power," Wangole said.