Mogadishu (Somtribune) – The Somalia-based, Al-Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabaab, has today, shelled the heavily fortified Halane Compound adjacent to the capital’s Turkey-managed international airport, Adan Adde.
A number of shells, according to reliable sources, landed at the high-security compound which houses the headquarters of the African Union peacekeeping mission, AMISOM, foreign embassies and a number of high-profile international organizations and companies taking part in the reconstruction of federal Somalia.
The attack, according to an Al Shabaab statement, resulted in heavy casualties and destruction of property. The statement, however, avoided quoting numbers of the dead and injured cited in the claim.
The daylight mortar shelling of the most guarded area in the capital shows how vulnerable the Somalia capital as well as how hollow and meaningless the often repeated ‘improvement to security’ on the part of really are.
It was only last Tuesday, 25 February, that the Head of the United Nations’ Assistance Mission to Somalia (UNSOM) and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, James Swan, so glowingly commended the SNA and AMISOM in gaining on the Islamist fighters.
“Turning to the security situation, let me first pay tribute to the courage of the Somali National Army and the African Union Mission in Somalia in confronting al-Shabaab,” he said in his statement to the Security Council.
Neither the government nor international political and development partners Halane house have yet released a statement on the situation.
In an unrelated fatal incident in a place not far from Warmahan of the Lower Shabelle, Somalia’s Southwest Federal State region, 4 soldiers lost their lives to a roadside bomb the Group planted.
In both the Lower Shabelle and Middle Shabelle regions, on either side of Somalia’s beleaguered capital, bomb blasts and physical, often costly confrontations, between Al Shabaab and Somalia army forces has always been a weekly if not a daily occurrence – a situation underlining how impotent and ineffective government operations still are against the determined fighters holding the capital in a pincer grip.
