Al-Shabaab confirms US strike, says death toll exaggerated
by Compiled from Wire Services
ISTANBULMar 09, 2016 - 12:00 am GMT+3
by Compiled from Wire Services
Mar 09, 2016 12:00 am
Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab confirmed Tuesday that the United States had bombed an area it controlled, but said the U.S. figure of more than 150 casualties was an exaggeration.
The Pentagon had announced it launched air strikes on a training facility on Saturday that had killed 150 militants with the al-Qaida-linked group in the Horn of Africa nation.
"The U.S. bombed an area controlled by al-Shabaab. But they exaggerated the figure of casualties. We never gather 100 militants in one spot for security reasons. We know the sky is full of planes," the group's military spokesman Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab told Reuters. He did not give a casualty figure or offer further details about the raid.
The strike, using both planes and unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drones, targeted al-Shabaab's training camp, a facility about 120 miles north of the capital Mogadishu, the Pentagon said.
The U.S. military has a small and secretive presence in Somalia, with a defense official estimating the current number of American troops in the country on an advise-and-assist mission at 150. The military had been monitoring the camp for several weeks before the strike and had gathered intelligence, including about an imminent threat posed by those in the camp to U.S. forces and African Union peacekeepers, officials said. U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James described the strike as "defensive" in nature.
The African Union peacekeeping AMISOM force, alongside the Somali army, launched a campaign last year that drove al-Shabaab out of its major strongholds. But the group, which wants to topple Somalia's Western-backed government, continues to launch raids.
In the past two weeks, its militants have launched mortar attacks near the presidential palace in Mogadishu, blown up a car bomb near a busy park in the capital, and set off twin blasts in a town northwest of the capital. Dozens of people have been killed. The group had controlled Mogadishu until 2011, when the African forces drove it out. Somali Foreign Minister Abdusalam Omer told Reuters on Monday that the Somali intelligence agency provided information about the camp to the U.S. in the run-up to the attack.
After a relative calm in the Somali capital, al-Shabaab have ramped up attacks in recent months, taking advantage of the apathy of the African Union's AMISOM mission and the weakness of Somalia's central government. Al-Shabaab militants have claimed responsibility for a string of recent attacks, including a twin bombing at a busy restaurant in the Somali city of Baidoa last month. Also Monday, six people were wounded when a laptop bomb exploded at an airport in Somalia, police said, the second such attack in recent weeks targeting passenger aircraft.
On Jan. 15, al-Shabaab militants overran a military outpost in El-Adde, southern Somalia, manned by up to 200 Kenyan soldiers deployed as part of AMISOM.
Kenya has refused to say how many of its soldiers were killed in the attack. Al-Shabaab militants are targeting AMISOM because in the absence of a functioning national army, the 22,000-strong force is the only protector of the internationally backed government the extremists are committed to overthrowing.
U.S. President Barack Obama's administration promised to publish in the coming weeks a casualty count from the air raids it has conducted since he took office in 2009. The toll is due to list both combatants and civilians the U.S. believes were killed. Critics have condemned the lack of transparency on these raids, often taking place in unstable countries inhospitable to U.S. forces like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, where the U.S. is not officially at war.
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