Officers confirmed that they carried out the strike through drones and precision-guided bombs and missiles.
Advertisement
Davis said as many as 200 fighters were believed to be training at the camp which, he added, the U.S. military had been monitoring for several weeks before the strike.
The latest strikes come as East Africa analysts say that Al Shabab, the group responsible for the 2013 attack on the Westgate mall in Kenya, is making a comeback after USA strikes killed the group’s top leadership in 2014.
“The fighters were there training and were training for a large-scale attack”.
“The fighters, who were scheduled to depart the camp, posed an imminent threat to USA and African Union mission forces in Somalia”.
The militants were reportedly preparing to launch a large-scale attack, likely against African or United States personnel.
The airstrike took place on Saturday around 195 kilometers (120 miles) away from the Somali capital Mogadishu. One intelligence agency assessed that the toll might have been higher had the strike happened earlier in the ceremony. “Initial assessments are that more than 150 terrorist fighters were eliminated”, he said.
Somalia’s Islamic extremist rebels, al-Shabab, claimed responsibility for the blast.
“Their removal will degrade al-Shebab’s ability to meet the group’s objectives in Somalia, which includes recruiting new members, establishing bases and planning attacks on United States and AMISOM forces there”, he said.
“There will obviously be some limitations on where we can be transparent, given a variety of sensitivities, including diplomatic”, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
While sketchy details often emerge about individual drone strikes, the full scope of the US drone program – conducted by both the Defence Department and the Central Intelligence Agency – has always been shrouded from view.
If the killings of Godane and Garar initially crippled the group, that no longer appears to be the case.
The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab has been linked to a number of attacks, including the detonation of a bomb aboard a commercial passenger jet last month that forced the plane to make an emergency landing in Mogadishu.
Advertisement
The group also claimed responsibility for a bomb placed aboard a Somali jetliner that tore a hole through the fuselage. An African Union peacekeeper was among the wounded, he said. Its dream is to turn Somalia into a pure Islamic state.
