US military strike kills 60 al-Shabab rebel fighters

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’s Africa Command said on Tuesday it had carried out the deadliest attack against Islamic extremist group al-Shabab in nearly a year, killing about 60 fighters in central Somalia.

The strike took place on Friday in the vicinity of Harardhere, about 480 kilometres northeast of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, the military said. Africa Command officials offered no other details except to say it did not kill or injure any civilians, suggesting the militants were in a camp or massing for an attack.

The strike came after a recent spate of attacks that al-Shabab has conducted against Somali security forces and their US advisers across the country.

On Sept 21, al-Shabab fighters attacked US and Somalia troops 48km northwest of Kismayo. Ten days earlier, militants struck Somalia and US forces in Mubarak, in central Somalia, killing one Somali soldier.

“These sustained attacks demonstrate that Shabab retains the ability to launch conventional offensives, in addition to its terrorist attack capability,” said Bill Roggio, editor of FDD’s Long War Journal, a website run by the Foundation for Defence of Democracies that tracks military strikes against militant groups.

In its remarks, the Africa Command said last week’s strike was the deadliest against al-Shabab since an air strike against an alShabab camp northwest of Mogadishu on Nov 21 killed about 100 militants.

So far this year in Somalia, the United States has conducted 27 strikes, including by drone attacks, mostly against small numbers of al-Shabab fighters. That is on pace to surpass last year’s attacks against the group.

In 2017, the military carried out 35 air strikes in Somalia — 31 against al-Shabab fighters and four against Islamic State militants, according to Roggio.

The attacks by al-Shabab, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in East Africa, underscore the resilience of regional arms of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in places like Yemen, Libya, West Africa and Afghanistan.

“Shabab is waging a relentless campaign of bombings and assassinations targeting local government forces,” Russell Travers, the acting director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week.

Last weekend marked the anniversary of al-Shabab’s deadliest attack, a truck bombing in Mogadishu that killed well over 500 people.

There are now roughly 500 US troops in Somalia; most of them are Special Operations forces, including Army Green Berets, Marine Raiders and Navy SEALs stationed at a small constellation of bases throughout the East African nation.

They have been training and fighting alongside local troops in Somalia for more than a decade, and are now buttressed by invigorated air strike authorities under the Trump administration.

Over the past year, the Pentagon has shown renewed concerns about al-Shabab, which was also responsible for another of the deadliest terrorist attacks on the African continent when it struck a popular shopping mall in 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya, leaving at least 67 dead.

US military officials have expressed concern that the group is again growing — even after losing much of its territory in Somalia in recent years and being targeted by US drone strikes.

In June, a US Special Operations forces soldier, Staff Sgt Alexander W Conrad, 26, was killed, and four others wounded, in an attack in southwestern Somalia against alShabab fighters, three Defence Department officials said. At the time, Conrad’s death was the second American combat loss in Somalia in about a year.