MOGADISHU: Fighters from the extremist insurgent group Al-Shabab have killed at least 19 civilians in a night-time attack in central Somalia, clan chiefs and local officials said on Saturday.
The attack comes two weeks after Al-Shabab, which has waged a long insurgency against the Somali state, besieged a hotel in the capital Mogadishu for 30 hours, leaving 21 people dead and 117 injured.
The sources said at least eight vehicles were traveling on a road between the towns of Beledweyne and Maxaas when the insurgents intercepted and burned them and killed the passengers overnight Friday to Saturday by Afar-Irdood village.
“The terrorists massacred innocent civilians who were traveling... last night. We don’t have the exact number of victims, but 19 dead bodies have been collected,” local clan elder Abdulahi Hared told AFP.
“The dead bodies are still being collected, including women and children. They could be more than twenty,” said Ali Jeyte, the governor of the Hiiraan region where the attack happened.
“This was a horrible attack that has never happened in our region. These were innocent civilians who did nothing to deserve this,” added another local clan leader, Mohamed Abdirahman.
Al-Shabab in a statement said they targeted fighters from a local sub-clan that recently helped government forces and that they killed 20 “militiamen and those who were transporting material for them,” destroying nine of their vehicles.
Local fighters and the security forces recaptured several villages from Al-Shabab in the region in late August.
The Al-Qaeda-linked group has been fighting Somalia’s internationally backed federal government since 2007.
It has been driven out of the country’s main cities, including Mogadishu in 2011, but remains a serious security threat in large areas of the countryside.
Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, elected in May after a protracted political crisis, promised to wage “an all-out war” to eliminate Al-Shabab following the Mogadishu hotel attack.
Al-Shabab kill at least 19 Somali civilians: Local sources
https://arab.news/4guqp
Al-Shabab kill at least 19 Somali civilians: Local sources
- Al-Shabab in a statement said they targeted fighters from a local sub-clan that recently helped government forces
- The Al-Qaeda-linked group has been fighting Somalia’s internationally backed federal government since 2007
US lawmaker Fine criticized by rights advocates, Democrats after anti-Muslim remarks
- Fine’s past comments include calling for the mass expulsion of all Muslims from the US, labeling of Muslims as “terrorists” and the mocking of the starvation and killing of Palestinians in Gaza, among others
WASHINGTON: Rights advocates and multiple Democrats on Tuesday condemned anti-Muslim comments by Republican US Representative Randy Fine who said on Sunday that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
Fine, whose comments against Muslims have often sparked outrage, has dismissed the criticism and since doubled down on his remarks on social media. The Council on American-Islamic Relations designated the Republican US lawmaker from Florida as an anti-Muslim extremist last year.
“If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” Fine said on X on Sunday in a post that had over 40 million views as of Tuesday afternoon.
Some high-profile Democrats including California Governor Gavin Newsom called for him to resign while House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Fine an “Islamophobic, disgusting and unrepentant bigot.”
Jeffries also called for Republicans — who hold a majority in both chambers of Congress — to hold Fine accountable.
“To ignore this is to accept and normalize it,” Democratic US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said. Fine’s past comments include calling for the mass expulsion of all Muslims from the US, labeling of Muslims as “terrorists” and the mocking of the starvation and killing of Palestinians in Gaza, among others. Rights advocates have noted a rise in Islamophobia in the US in recent years due to a range of factors including hard-line immigration policies and white-supremacist rhetoric, as well as the fallout of Israel’s war in Gaza on American society.
