The United States Africa Command has conducted an airstrike against al-Shabab militants in the vicinity of Seiera, a village northwest of the southern port city of Kismayo, Somalia.
‘The U.S. has claimed it conducted an airstrike against an Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist group in Somalia over the weekend. According to the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the Somali government had requested combat support on Saturday because its national army was ‘engaged’ by Al-Shabaab terrorists.
The response involved ‘a collective self-defense airstrike’ around 28 miles from the southern coastal city of Kismayo. An initial assessment suggested that 13 militants had been killed and no civilians hurt, AFRICOM claimed in a statement.
‘The command will continue to assess the results of this operation and will provide additional information as appropriate’, the statement read.
The Pentagon has increased drone strikes in Somalia in recent months, citing requests from the country’s federal government.
An offshoot of Al-Qaeda, Al-Shaabab has been active in Somalia since the mid-2000s. The Horn of Africa country has been plagued by continuous civil wars and an acute humanitarian crisis for more than three decades. At least twenty soldiers were killed last month when a suicide bomber blew up his vest inside an army base in the capital, Mogadishu”. -RT
Born out of the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion back in December of 2006 that toppled the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition of Muslim groups that briefly held power in Mogadishu, AFRICOM describes Al-Shabaab as “the largest and most kinetically active Al-Qaeda network in the world”.
As the radical offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union, the group’s first recorded attack was in 2007, and, finally, in 2012, Al-Shabaab pledged its loyalty to Al-Qaeda after years of fighting the U.S. and its military proxies.
Although the U.S. military often hypes the threat of Al-Shabaab due to its Al-Qaeda affiliation and expansionist rhetoric, while the Pentagon sending troops to Somalia to help the Mogadishu-based government fight Al-Shabaab, it’s generally believed that the group has abandoned its transnational goals and does not have ambitions outside of Somalia.