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Somalia threatens to attack Kenya

February 28, 2011   ·   0 Comments

Somalia’s Islamist insurgent group al-Shabaab has threatened to mount an attack on her neibouring East African nation, Kenya for training Somali government forces and permitting Ethiopian forces to stage raids from its territory.

“The Kenyan government has always gone against us,” Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage, al-Shabaab spokesperson, told reporters in Mogadishu on Sunday. “They allow both the apostate troops to have bases in their territory and Ethiopian troops to use its ground to attack us. We should directly attack them.”

Al-Shabaab last year killed more than 75 World Cup fans in a twin bombing in the Ugandan capital Kampala where in revenge for Ugandan peacekeepers backing the weak Somali government.

African Union (AU) peacekeepers and Somali troops are in the midst of an offensive aimed at gaining territory in Mogadishu, where the government controls around the half the city, and in areas of insurgent control across Somalia.

Sources say the AU-backed forces are close to seizing a Mogadishu stadium used as a staging ground for insurgent attacks – a development that would be a major setback to al-Shabaab operations in Mogadishu.

While al-Shabaab has yet to strike directly at Kenya, the East African nation has suffered two bombings at the hands of al-Qaeda, which has links to the Somali group.

Twin bombings of US embassies in the Kenyan capital Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania claimed hundreds of lives in 1998, while al-Qaeda also bombed an Israeli-owned hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002.

Somalia has been embroiled in chaos since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

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