(CNN)Two top Al-Shabaab figures were among the scores killed in a US attack Saturday in Somalia, a senior Somali intelligence source said.
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Helicopter gunships struck training camps used by al-Qaeda-linked militants in Somalia’s southern Lower Shabelle region, a witness and a local official said.
The militant group’s military operations spokesman, Sheikh Abdiaziz Abu Musab, claimed the “foreign forces” (he didn’t know their home country) came to the Al-Shabaab camp on two helicopters. Roughly 50 US special operations troops have been operating in Somalia on a rotational basis for the last few years.
The three were drinking tea when the blast occurred and the driver of the auto was “seriously wounded”, Mogadishu police commissioner Ali Hersi Barre said.
The U.S. military’s involvement has consisted of numerous drone strikes.
African Union ground forces succeeded in ousting al-Shabab fighters from Somalia’s capital in 2011 and protecting the weak government. The exact target of the raid, if any, remains unclear.
More recently, the Pentagon says, American forces – including both manned and unmanned aircraft – were involved in an operation Saturday that killed as many as 150 Al-Shabaab fighters.
These are some of the most aggressive military actions in Somalia since a US military intervention in the early 1990s during a starvation culminated in the so-called Black Hawk Down battle, with heavy USA losses. They said the mobile phone network did not work during fighting.
Mohamed Hassan, an elder in Awdhegle, told The Associated Press that the foreign forces parked their helicopters outside the town and walked at least 3 kilometers (1.9 miles), sneaking into the town to avoid detection by the Islamic fighters and launch a surprise raid.
Since then, however, they have been unable to stop other violence: assaults on AU forces, including one that killed up to 200 Kenyan soldiers in January, frequent suicide attacks on civilians in Mogadishu, and an unsuccessful attempt last month to bring down an airliner with a bomb.
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The airstrike appears to have caused more casualties than any other attack against al-Shabab, said J. Peter Pham, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.
