An attack with two car bombs has shaken this Saturday Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, a country that suffers recurrent attacks by the jihadist group Al Shabab. The attack has left more than a dozen fatalities and many injured. According to unofficial sources cited by the Associated Press, up to thirty deaths have been counted, some of them children.
The attack took place against the Ministry of Education, which is located near the busy Zoobe intersection. According to police sources cited by local media, among the deceased are a police commander and a well-known Somali journalist.
"We are shocked and saddened by the murder of our colleague, Mohamed Isse Koonaa, who was reporting today for Universal TV on the Mogadishu twin car bombings," the Somali Journalists Union (SJS) reacted on its Twitter account. Two other colleagues, the Reuters photojournalist and the VOA (Voice of America) contributor are injured and in hospital," the SJS added.
In December 2019, at least 92 people died and 128 were injured after the explosion of a car bomb at the same intersection, one of the worst attacks in the Somali capital in memory.
The president of Somalia, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, declared a "total war" on August 23 to "eliminate" Al Shabab, whose terrorists took over a well-known hotel in Mogadishu for thirty hours days before and killed 21 people.
Since then, several US-backed military operations have been carried out against the fundamentalists, which last September killed "more than a hundred members" of the jihadist group, according to the Somali government.
This Saturday's attack takes place when a national meeting is being held between the central government and the presidents of the five federal states of Somalia with the aim of promoting peaceful coexistence and discussing the jihadist threat.
Al Shabab, a group affiliated with the Al Qaeda network since 2012, often perpetrates terrorist attacks in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, and other parts of Somalia to overthrow the central government - backed by the international community - and establish by force an Islamic State Wahhabi court (ultraconservative).
The jihadist group controls rural areas of central and southern Somalia and also attacks neighboring countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia.
Somalia has been in a state of war and chaos since 1991, when dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown, leaving the country without an effective government and in the hands of Islamist militias and warlords.
