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Al-Shabaab militants launched a major suicide attack on Sunday against a military intelligence base in the capital Mogadishu, setting off a car bomb before storming inside, security officials said.
Somalia’s interior ministry said the three attackers were all killed in the raid, and that Somali security forces who fought them suffered no casualties.
An alliance of Tuareg-led rebels and the Malian government signed a peace deal on Saturday meant to draw a line under a 2012 uprising and allow the authorities to focus on tackling Islamist militants in the desert north.
The Algerian-brokered deal, signed by a representative of the rebel Coordination of Movements of Azawad (CMA), grants greater autonomy to sparsely populated northern Mali in a bid to end a cycle of four uprisings since independence from France in 1960.
Egyptian government forces have carried out separate operations in the violence-plagued Sinai Peninsula, killing more than a dozen Takfiri militants.
A local security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Saturday that army tanks and artillery units pounded the bases of Velayat Sinai militants, previously known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, south of the town of Sheikh Zuweid, located about 334 kilometers (214 miles) northeast of the capital, Cairo, on Friday, killing 15 extremists.
Chad’s military announced it had carried out air strikes against Boko Haram bases in Nigeria in retaliation for twin suicide bombings in the Chadian capital N’Djamena this week that killed at least 38 people.
The air raids caused heavy human and material damage to six of the Islamist militants’ bases, the military said late on Wednesday (Thursday NZT), without providing further details.
In what could be the first extension of the Washington-led air war against terrorists in Syria and Iraq, the US today killed seven leading members of Libya’s Al-Qaeda-linked Ansar Al-Sharia in an airstrike on a farm outside Ajdabiya.
One of the victims of the raid, which happened at 2am this morning, was the Algerian Mokhtar Belmokhtar, former leader of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) who was accused of organising the January 2013 attack on Algeria’s desert Im-Amenas gas processing plant, in which 39 hostages and an Algerian guard died.
The breakaway region of Somaliland has put its troops based in the disputed region of Sool on high alert, raising new tensions, Horseed Media reports.
Somaliland officials provided equipment, medical and food supplies to the troops stationed near Gambara district, the main base of its forces in Sool region.
The Somaliland Chief of army Ismael Shaqale visited the troops to deliver the supplies on late hours of Saturday.
Boko Haram extremists have burned down six northeast Nigerian villages and killed 37 people near the insurgents’ Sambisa Forest stronghold, a survivor said Friday.
Ahmed Ajimi, a fighter in the anti-Boko Haram Nigerian Vigilante Group, said many victims of Wednesday night’s attacks were farmers who had recently returned home after soldiers earlier this year forced the extremists out of the area where they had declared an Islamic caliphate.