Two major al-Shabaab leaders killed in US airstrike and raid by Somali forces
Abdullahi Haji Da’ud and Mohamed Dulyadin presumed dead, Pentagon and Somali officials reported on same day al-Shabaab gunmen killed 10 in Mogadishu
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/al-shabaab-leaders-killed-airstrike-raid-somalia-abdullahi-haji-daud-mohamed-dulyadinAlan Yuhas and agencies
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Wednesday 1 June 2016 17.20 EDT
Last modified on Thursday 2 June 2016 10.32 EDT
Somalia’s al-Shabaab militants have come under renewed pressure from the US and Somalia, as military leaders announced an airstrike and special forces raid that are presumed to have killed two major militant leaders.
News of the two operations coincided with another brutal terror attack in the capital of Mogadishu, where al-Shabaab gunmen killed at least 10 people at the Ambassador hotel.
The airstrike on 27 May targeted Abdullahi Haji Da’ud, “a senior military commander” for the al-Qaida-linked group, the Pentagon press secretary, Peter Cook, said in a statement on Wednesday. Da’ud was “principal coordinator” and intelligence chief for attacks in Somalia, Kenya and Uganda, Cook said. Cook added that the militant was “responsible for the loss of many innocent lives through attacks he has planned and carried out”.
“We are confident that the removal from the terrorist network of this experienced al-Shabaab commander,” Cook said, “will disrupt near-term attack planning, potentially saving many innocent lives.”
Cook told reporters that Da’ud was “presumed killed”, but the Pentagon declined to confirm details of the attack, or that it had killed Da’ud, saying only “we are currently assessing the results of the operation”.
The US also assisted in a Somali special forces raid that killed senior militants in the south of the country, according to officials who spoke anonymously to Reuters. One of the men killed, according to Somali officials, was Mohamed Dulyadin, also known as Kuno Gamadere and the man believed to have orchestrated an attack on Kenya’s Garissa University in April 2015. In that attack, four al-Shabaab gunmen killed 148 people, 142 of whom were students, at the school north-east of Nairobi, Kenya.
The Pentagon also declined to describe what kind of support it provided the African forces in the raid, though the US routinely provides intelligence and helicopter transport to east African allies.
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“Sixteen armed men, four of them senior commanders, including Mohamed Mohamud Ali, known as Dulyadin,” said Abdirashid Janan, minister of state security for Jubaland, an autonomous region in southern Somalia, “were killed by the Somali commandos and the special forces of the Jubaland.”
Last summer the Kenyan government claimed that a US drone strike had killed Dulyadin but quickly recanted the statement.
Although not nominally at war in any African nation, the US has steadily increased military action on the continent in the wake of mass terror attacks like the one at Garissa University. In April, a US drone strike near the Kenyan border killed al-Shabaab leader Hassan Ali Dhoore, who helped plan a 2014 Christmas day attack and 2015 hotel attack. In March, US warplanes and drones bombed a training camp in Somalia, killing more than 100 people in what was probably one of the largest single American military raids in over a decade.
The US has also sent special forces into Somalia to assist government troops against al-Shabaab, which has affiliated itself with al-Qaida and staged terrorist attacks in Somalia and Kenya for years.
Earlier on Wednesday at the luxury Ambassador hotel, a car bomb exploded at the gates and al-Shabaab gunmen stormed the building, killing at least 10 people. Police captain Mohamed Hussein told the Associated Press that “at least two gunmen are still holed up inside the building” and battling soldiers.
Though al-Shabaab forces have largely been expelled from Somali cities, they have continued suicide attacks, killing nine people at another hotel in February and exploding a car outside a restaurant in April, killing five.
