Tag: al Shabaab

Twenty-six people were killed and 56 injured in a 12-hour attack by Al-Shabaab jihadists on a popular hotel that ended early Saturday in the southern Somali port city of Kismayo.

A suicide bomber rammed a vehicle loaded with explosives into the Medina hotel on Friday before several heavily armed gunmen forced their way inside, shooting as they went, authorities said.

It was the largest coordinated attack by the Shabaab in Kismayo since 2012 when it lost control of the city.

The victims included several foreigners and a prominent Somali-Canadian journalist, Nodan Halayeh, who perished along with her husband.

Three Kenyans, three Tanzanians, two Americans, one Briton and one Canadian were among the dead, president Ahmed Mohamed Islam of the semi-autonomous Jubaland region told a news conference.

“There are also two wounded Chinese citizens,” he added.

The hotel was packed with politicians and prominent businessmen as meetings were underway for upcoming presidential elections in Jubaland, due in August.

One of the candidates in the election died in the siege, local authorities said.

‘Martyrdom attack’

“The whole building is in ruins, there are dead bodies and wounded who have been recovered from inside. The security forces have cordoned off the whole area,” said witness Muna Abdirahman.

Another witness Hussein Muktar said, “The blast was very big.”

“The security forces are in control now and the last terrorist was shot and killed”, security official Mohamed Abdiweli said.

“There are dead bodies and wounded people strewn inside the hotel,” Abdiweli added.

He said authorities believed four gunmen, who one witness described as wearing Somali police uniforms, were involved in the attack.

Halayeh’s death sparked an outpouring of grief on social media.

She was an ardent campaigner for Somali unity and peace and had started an online TV show named Integration.

In a recent podcast, Nalayeh said her television programme about the Somali diaspora gave the community a voice.

“Social media has changed the game for how people learn about culture. So, if we don’t become the creators of our own content, we are going to be at the mercy of other people telling the stories of Africa,” she had said.

A local journalist, Mohamed Omar Sahal, also died in the siege, the Somali journalists’ union SJS said, adding that these were the first journalist deaths in the country this year.

Shabaab, the Al-Qaeda-linked group, claimed responsibility for the siege describing it as “a martyrdom attack”.

The US Mission to Somalia condemned the attack and said it would “continue to work with our Somali and other international partners in the fight against violent extremism.”

‘Criminal, murderous, destructive’

The African Union’s Special Representative in Somalia, Francisco Madeira, said the attack was “meant to derail progress in Somalia as the country rebuilds and consolidates the gains made on peace and security.

“The attackers are a group of people with a criminal, murderous and destructive agenda. They cannot claim to be fighting to bring good governance to the country,” he said.

The attack is the latest in a long line of bombing and assaults claimed by Shabaab, which has fought for more than a decade to topple the Somali government.

The militant group emerged from Islamic Courts that once controlled central and southern Somalia and are variously estimated to number between 5,000 and 9,000 men.

In 2010, the Shabaab declared their allegiance to Al-Qaeda.

In 2011, they fled positions they once held in the capital Mogadishu, and have since lost many strongholds.

But they retain control of large rural swathes of the country and continue to wage a guerrilla war against the authorities.

AFP

Security forces on Friday ended a siege by Al-Shabaab insurgents nearly 24 hours after jihadists mounted an attack in the Somali capital Mogadishu that left at least 19 dead.

“The last terrorist gunman was killed after the security forces destroyed a room in which he was taking cover and the siege is over now,” Ismail Muktar, the commissioner for Hamar Jajab district, told reporters.

“The security forces are clearing the area.”

The attack began on Thursday evening at around 1800 GMT, when a Shabaab militant in a car blew himself up, causing a huge blast that ripped the front off a major hotel and left several cars in flames on the busy street.

Other fighters then stormed inside a building housing a restaurant, where they were quickly surrounded by police.

Sporadic shooting continued throughout Thursday night and into Friday.

Medics pulled five bodies from the wreckage immediately after the explosion, but the recovery of more bodies was blocked for hours by the ensuing fighting.

“Those killed include children. The Shebab assailants, whom we saw, were only two,” said former Somali MP Abdi Barre Jibril.

By Friday afternoon, officials said the death toll had climbed significantly.

“We have recovered 14 more dead bodies from under the rubble of collapsed buildings, bringing the total number of dead to 19,” said Aamin Ambulance director Abdikadir Abdirahman.

At least 112 people were admitted to the city’s three main hospitals, hospital sources said.

Heavy explosions could be heard coming from the building on Friday afternoon as elite soldiers appeared to move in to storm Shabaab positions.

– Huge blast –
The attack is the latest in a long line of bombing and assaults claimed by the Al-Qaeda-linked group.

The organisation announced that fighters waged a “martyrdom-seeking” and commando operation against what it described as a “luxury hotel inhabited by government officials and security service officers”.

The explosion which began the assault was so powerful that it tossed several vehicles into the air that then burst into flames.

Witnesses said the bombing took place in the early evening, when the street was filled with people relaxing after a day’s work.

“The whole area was in flames,” said Abdisamed Mohamed, a witness. “There was gunfire too.”

The head of Somalia’s journalist union, Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimuu, who survived the attack, described the devastation.

“I was the first one who came out of the hotel when the explosion took place and I saw many vehicles burning at the scene,” he said.

Bloody history

The Shabaab emerged from Islamic Courts that once controlled central and southern Somalia and are variously estimated to number between 5,000 and 9,000 men.

In 2010 the Shabaab declared their allegiance to Al-Qaeda.

The following year, the group were chased out of Mogadishu by the 22,000-strong African Union peace-enforcement mission, AMISOM.

They have since lost many of their strongholds but retain control of large rural swathes of the country and continue to wage a guerrilla war, frequently hitting Mogadishu.

In October 2017 a truck bombing in a busy neighbourhood of the capital killed over 500 people, the deadliest attack in Somalia to date.

The Shabaab have also carried out a string of attacks in Kenya since 2011.

The deadliest of these took place on April 2, 2015, when 148 people were killed at Garissa University in northeastern Kenya.

In 2013, a Shabaab raid on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall left 67 dead, a siege that unfolded over four days. And in January this year, 14 people were killed in a Shabaab-claimed attack on a luxury hotel complex in Nairobi.

AFP