Al-Shabab Attacks African Union Base In Somalia

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned the terrorist attack perpetrated by Al Shabaab this morning against an African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) base in the town of El Adde, Gedo region in Somalia.

Al-Shabaab claimed the attack killed 61 Kenyan soldiers serving as part of the African Union forces, while other soldiers escaped.

The Islamist militant group said they rammed a suicide auto bomb into the gates of the base, about 550 kilometers west of the capital Mogadishu, before their fighters burst inside.

“Our gallant soldiers reacted swiftly to protect their camp”, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said.

The Shabab have also staged attacks in Kenya, killing at least 67 people at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in 2013 and massacring 148 people at a university in Garissa in April 2015.

Eyewitnesses said they saw the al-Shabab flag hoisted within the base and bodies paraded through the streets.

The Kenyan army said it wasn’t their base that was attacked but that of the Somali army.

The Al-Shabaab militant group, which has pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda, is seeking to overthrow the Western-backed Somalian government and impose a form of Islamic sharia law. “The SNA camp was overrun, and KDF troops under Amisom counterattacked in support of SNA”.

He said that Al-Shabaab claims of large-scale casualties among AMISOM troops were “total propaganda”.

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Heavily armed fighters from the al-Shabab group launch coordinated assault on the base in the town of El-Ade.

“We counted 63 Kenyan bodies inside the base”.

The Kenyan Defense Ministry said in a statement that only Somali forces were overrun.

In Friday’s raid, an al-Shabaab spokesman said the militants detonated a vehicle laden with explosives at the fence of the base in El-Adde and fired rocket-propelled grenades at the troops inside.