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17 dead in Somalia bomb blast claimed by Al-Shabaab militants
MOGADISHU, July 22, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Seventeen people were killed and more
than two dozen wounded when a car bomb exploded in Mogadishu on Monday, the
latest deadly attack on Somalia’s capital claimed by Al-Shabaab militants.
The blast, near a security checkpoint on the main road to the
international airport, reverberated throughout the city and sent massive
plumes of black smoke into the air.
Witnesses described scenes of carnage as a car veered out of traffic and
detonated outside the main gate of a hotel with tremendous force.
“I could see several people lying (on the ground), some of them dead in a
pool of blood,” said Abdikarim Mohamed, a witness to the attack.
“The blast was huge. It did damage to several nearby buildings.”
Suado Ali was walking out of a travel agency when she “was forced to the
ground by the shockwave”.
“I saw nearly ten people lying on the ground, some motionless and others
screaming for help”, she told AFP.
Medina Hospital, the main trauma facility in the Somali capital, was
inundated by the dead and wounded.
“The bodies of 17 people killed in the blast were taken to the hospital
mortuary while 28 others were admitted for various wounds,” said Mohamed
Yusuf, the hospital’s director.
Another witness, Abdullahi Ahmed, said at least two government security
personnel manning one of the checkpoints on the road were killed in the
blast.
– ‘Martyrdom operation’ –
Al-Shabaab, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated militant group waging a deadly
insurgency in Somalia, claimed responsibility for the bombing.
“The martyrdom operation was carried out using a vehicle loaded with
explosives which targeted a checkpoint along the airport road,” the group
said in a brief statement.
The attack comes just over a week after 26 people were killed and 56
injured in a 12-hour attack by Al-Shabaab jihadists on a popular hotel in the
southern Somali port city of Kismayo.
In that attack, a suicide bomber rammed a vehicle loaded with explosives
into the Medina hotel before several heavily armed gunmen forced their way
inside, shooting as they went.
The attacks are the latest in a long line of bombing and assaults claimed
by Al-Shabaab, which has fought for more than a decade to topple the Somali
government.
The militant group emerged from the Islamic Courts Union that once
controlled central and southern Somalia and is variously estimated to number
between 5,000 and 9,000 men.
In 2010, the Shabaab declared their allegiance to Al-Qaeda.
In 2011, they fled positions they once held in the capital Mogadishu, and
have since lost many strongholds.
But they retain control of large rural swathes of the country and continue
to wage a guerrilla war against the authorities.
BSS/AFP/BZC/1950HRS