Security forces in Somalia yesterday braced for a wave of new attacks by Muslim extremists following a bloody overnight assault on a hotel that ended on Saturday.
The death toll from the attack in the southern port city of Kismayo, which began on Friday evening, has risen to 26 people, including a prominent Canadian-Somalian journalist and several foreigners.
The victims include one Briton, three Kenyans, three Tanzanians, two Americans and one Canadian, said Ahmed Madobe Islam, the president of the Jubaland regional state that controls Kismayo.
Photo: AP
He told reporters that 56 people, including two Chinese, were injured.
At least four al-Shabaab militants attacked the Asasey hotel, which is popular with politicians, foreigners and lawmakers.
A suicide car bomb demolished the entrance gate, allowing gunmen to storm the main building.
Al-Shabaab tends to launch campaigns of multiple strikes when it is under pressure.
Five people, including three civilians, were killed in a gunbattle in the capital, Mogadishu, on Monday, after extremists opened fire on a checkpoint.
Regional intelligence officials and analysts said that a spate of public executions by al-Shabaab in the past few weeks is part of a broader effort to demonstrate continued strength, despite casualties sustained in airstrikes and a series of clashes with Somalian troops over the past few months.
The pace of US airstrikes against al-Shabaab has escalated dramatically. There were 47 last year and have been 50 this year. These are thought to have killed about 300 militants, according to a count by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
Al-Shabaab operations have been disrupted by the airstrikes and although the group’s hold on swaths of territory in central and southern Somalia remains strong, commanders will want to demonstrate their capacity to harm enemies.
Hotels are a favorite target of al-Shabaab, which claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack.
Troops fought for more than 12 hours before eventually killing all attackers inside the hotel compound, police Colonel Abdiqadir Nur said.
Analysts said the operation had all the hallmarks of the group, which often uses suicide car bombs to blast through defenses of heavily fortified targets.
The group was also behind the massive truck bomb in Mogadishu in 2017 that killed more than 500 people.
Despite its proximity to some major al-Shabaab strongholds, Kismayo has been relatively quiet in the past few years.
Hodan Nalayeh, a Canadian journalist, and her husband, Farid Jama Suleiman, died in the attack, confirmed the Mogadishu-based independent radio station Radio Dalsan.
Omar Suleiman, a Texas-based imam who knew the journalist, wrote on social media that “I’m absolutely devastated by the news of the death of our dear sister Hodan Nalayeh and her husband in a terrorist attack in Somalia today. What a loss to us.”
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