Somalia: the army repels a counter-offensive by Shebabs in Galcad and kills a commando in Kenya

Members of the Islamist Shebab militia in Somalia (illustrative image) Reuters / Mowliid Abdi

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The "total war" promised last summer by President Hassan Cheikh Mohamoud against the Shebab jihadists is still intensifying.

On Friday, the latter launched a deadly counter-offensive against the army in a city they had lost the day before.

And in neighboring Kenya, a military operation near the border killed a dozen fighters who had carried out attacks in the area.

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At dawn on Friday, in Galcad, an agricultural town in the countryside 375 km north of Mogadishu, the Shebabs launched their attack.

Two pickup trucks loaded with explosives were thrown at the camp of the soldiers who had dislodged them from the city the day before.

Then a battalion of Shebab fighters mounted in contact, in vehicles or in hand-to-hand combat.

A witness told AFP that the fighting had lasted at least “ 

”.

The jihadists were eventually repelled and the toll is heavy: the Somali army claims to have killed a hundred assailants and lost seven soldiers.

Among them, Hassan Mohamed Osman, the commander of the 27th special forces division "Danab", an elite counter-terrorism force trained by the American forces, the government confirmed.

The day before, in Kenya, more than a thousand kilometers away, the army announced that it had decimated a Shebab commando.

Ten fighters were reportedly killed, and equipment and weapons seized, according to a statement.

Last week, in the same area, a mine laid by the jihadists killed four employees of the road authority.

And a few days later, a driver was killed when his convoy was hit by a rocket.

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• Somalia

• Shebabs