Al-Shabaab attacks Kenyan soldiers in Somalia army base
The al-Qaeda-linked militant group al-Shabaab has claimed to have killed at least 63 Kenyan soldiers in an assault on an African Union base in western Somalia.
The raid, confirmed by Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta, comes a day after Somali political leaders gathered to plan a road map for parliamentary and presidential elections due later this year. Analysts said the attack was probably designed to remind the nation and the international community that the group still posed a major threat to stability despite losing large stretches of territory.
Abdiaziz Abu Mudan, a spokesman for al-Shabaab, said on local radio that the group’s forces launched the early morning attack on the base in the town of El-Adde, near the Ethiopian border. Sixty-three Kenyan soldiers were killed and 28 vehicles had been seized, he said.
Mr Kenyatta confirmed the attack on a Kenyan “camp” in the town and admitted some troops had died, but declined to give any casualty figures.
He insisted the attack would not prompt Kenya to withdraw its troops from Somalia, where they have been since 2011 as part of the AU force Amisom trying to defeat al-Shabaab and restore order to the country that has been ravaged by civil war for more than a decade.
“We will not be cowed by these cowards,” Mr Kenyatta said in a statement. “With our allies, we will continue in Somalia to fulfil our mission. We will hunt down the criminals involved in today’s events. Our soldiers’ blood will not be shed in vain.”
Earlier, Colonel David Obonyo, a Kenyan military spokesman, said it was a Somali army base that was attacked and that Kenyan troops counter-attacked and intensified operations against al-Shabaab. Local media reported that military jets attacked al-Shabaab positions on Friday afternoon.
Amisom also confirmed the attack but gave no details.
Somalia-based al-Shabaab has increasingly turned its attention to Kenyan targets as it has lost ground in its native Somalia. It was responsible for the attack on a university in the Kenyan town of Garissa last year that killed almost 150 people, and a raid on a Nairobi shopping mall in 2013 that left 67 dead.
Kenya responded to those attacks with air strikes on al-Shabaab training camps and by cracking down on illegal money transfers to the group.
In the past year al-Shabaab has also attacked bases and convoys of other members of the 22,000-strong Amisom force, including those from Burundi and Uganda.
Cedric Barnes, the Horn of Africa project director for the International Crisis Group, a research organisation, said the raid was likely to have been timed to coincide with the conference in the southern town of Kismayo to plan the elections. “This looks like it’s al-Shabaab saying ‘We’re here, this is what we can do and we haven’t gone away’,” he said.
Somalia’s politicians are divided over how to run the elections, with some preferring a system based on geographical districts and others on one organised along clan lines. The result of the conference has yet to be announced.
Al-Shabaab rose to prominence in Somalia in the mid-2000s and later allied itself to al-Qaeda. It has been fighting the Somali government and its allies in the region with the goal of imposing sharia law in the country.
The group says its attacks on Kenya, which have killed more than 400 over the past two years, are retribution for Kenya’s military intervention in Somalia’s civil war.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Your Comment have been submited and will be Visible after Approval