Combined car bomb and suicide attacks in the Somali city of Baidoa that killed at least 30 people at the weekend appear to be part of an accelerating offensive by al-Shabaab. The group aims to disrupt national elections planned for this year, undermine public confidence in international peacekeepers and bring down Somalia’s weak western-backed federal government.
The Baidoa attacks targeted a busy restaurant where patrons were watching the English Premier League football match between Manchester United and Arsenal on Sunday. The bombings, claimed by the al-Qaida-affiliate, followed a lethal attack in the capital, Mogadishu, on Friday. An al-Shabaab spokesman saidgovernment officials had been targeted, but most of the dead in both incidents were civilians. Somalia has suffered two decades of lawlessness, insurrection and invasion since the collapse of the Siad Barre dictatorship in 1991, earning it the label of “failed state”. Instability has spread to neighbouring Kenya, home to large numbers of Somali refugees, following Nairobi’s decision in 2011 to intervene militarily.
Enraged by Kenya’s support for the African Union’s 22,000-strong peacekeeping mission in Somalia (Amisom), al-Shabaab caused mass casualties in attacks on a university in Garissa last year and at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in 2013. Last month as many as 200 Kenyan soldiers died in an al-Shabaab attack on a military camp inside Somalia, according to Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.
Kenyan authorities disputed the figure but did not give a specific death toll. Al-Shabaab later distributed photos of dozens of dead Kenyan soldiers, many apparently shot in the head.
“We have been winning for years and months but [in] that El Ade battle [at the Kenyan camp], we were defeated,” Mohamud said.
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