Somali News In Warsom
Somali rebels vowed to avenge a deadly Kenyan air raid as the two countries’ prime ministers pledged to defeat the “common enemy” and called for international support.
While both Kenya and the Somali government are battling the Al Qaeda-linked Shebab insurgents, Nairobi’s decision to send troops and warplanes across the border had caused unease in Mogadishu.
A raid on a southern Somali town Sunday killed at least five civilians, including three children.
“Kenya has brutally massacred civilians already displaced by hardship … We will ensure that Kenya mourns more than we did,” a regional Shebab official Sheikh Abukar Ali Ada told reporters.
Kenyan security forces say they have stepped up surveillance and last week a 28-year-old Kenyan was jailed for life after confessing to being behind a grenade attack in central Nairobi that killed one and wounded several.
Nairobi at first insisted it hit a Shebab target on Sunday but witnesses and aid sources said one bomb ploughed into a camp of displaced civilians.
Later on Monday, Kenyan army spokesman Emmanuel Chirchir said the deaths were caused after a Shebab vehicle mounted with an anti-aircraft gun was hit, and then drove into a camp of civilians “on fire and laden with explosives.”
Doctors Without Borders said at least five civilians were killed in the air raid, which struck a camp hosting 9,000 internally-displaced Somalis in Jilib.
“We would like to minimise any collateral damage that happens, but incidents can happen,” said Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, the prime minister of Somalia’s Western-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG).
“Any loss of life of a Somali is a tragic loss to all of us,” Ali told reporters in Nairobi, after meeting with his Kenyan counterpart Raila Odinga.
Kenya’s military onslaught followed the abduction of four foreigners in recent weeks, including two Spanish aid workers from the Dadaab camp hosting almost half a million refugees, mainly Somalis who have fled conflict and famine.