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Shabaab attack African Union base in Somalia

– Collecting bodies –

Mohamed Shire, a Somali military commander in the area, said there had been “a heavy explosion and fighting.”

Witnesses said Shabaab fighters had breached the barricades around the camp.

“Many people stormed the camp after AU soldiers fled, and they started looting together with Al-Shabaab,” said local resident Hussein Idris, who said gunmen loaded corpses of AU troops onto trucks.

The Shabaab has previously gathered the bodies of dead soldiers for use in propaganda videos of its attacks.

“They were collecting dead bodies, I saw nearly 30 soldiers killed during the fighting,” Idris said.

Another eyewitness, Ahmed Ali, said he had seen AMISOM troops fleeing the base, and had counted as many as 20 bodies.

“The fighters also looted weapons and ammunition,” Ali said.

Another local eyewitness described how a Shabaab suicide bomber first attacked the camp gates.

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“Heavy fighting broke out after a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into the camp,” said Ali Moalim Yusuf. “I saw heavily armed fighters chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is greatest’) pouring into the base.”

The Shabaab, fighting to overthrow Somalia’s internationally-backed and AU-protected government, has launched a string of similar attacks.

In June, Shabaab fighters killed dozens of Burundian soldiers when they overran an AMISOM outpost northwest of Mogadishu. The militants also stage frequent suicide attacks inside the capital.

But the 22,000-strong AMISOM force has also made significant gains against the Shabaab, pushing them out of several strongholds in the southwest of the country.

Decades of fighting and erratic rains mean that some three million people in the Horn of Africa nation remain in need of aid, according to the United Nations.

On Monday, aid experts warned Somalia remains in a “critical” state four years after a devastating famine in which over 250,000 people died, with a sharp rise in those needing food aid in the past six months.

Poor rains have impacted harvests, leaving nearly 215,000 children aged under five acutely malnourished and with almost 40,000 of those children facing a “high risk of disease and death”, the UN said.

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