On Monday, a government spokesman for Somalia announced that Al-Shabaab militants attacked a hotel. The assault has caused at least 12 casualties when the armed men, equipped with AK-47 rifles and explosives detonated a car bomb before invading the Elite hotel and shooting with reckless abandon.
Terrorist insurgency
Somalia Special Forces took four hours to reclaim the hotel from the assailants. The establishment is a popular hangout of many government officials and members of Somalia's diaspora. The special forces killed five of the armed men and were able to rescue approximately 200 guests in the hotel.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the rescued hostages include the owner of the hotel, Abdullahi Mohamed Nor, who is also a former finance minister and is now a member of parliament.
The head of African Union troops in the country, Francisco Madeira, said the attack was an apparent attempt to cause the most number of casualties on innocent civilians, whether they were men, women, or children.
A few hours later, al-Shabaab struck once again and assaulted an army base located in the southwestern region of Somalia where they killed five soldiers stationed in the area.
Militant members of al-Shabaab have for more than a decade been in constant conflicts with Somalia's relatively weak federal government. The group uses an insurgent-style strategy that the country's government finds challenging to fend off despite support from the United States.
US President Donald Trump has increased military involvement in the region, and the African Union has assigned 22,000 troops to patrol the area made up of soldiers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, and Burundi.
The United States government ordered several drone strikes in the country last year and was able to hit 63 targets, which is higher than the recorded 47 attacks conducted in 2018. The US African command said that within the first five months this year, the United States military had already ordered 40 drone strikes.
Ongoing assaults
Despite the military efforts, al-Shabaab had continued its attacks across the nation in recent months. The most devastating of the assaults took place in December of last year where the group detonated a truck bomb that took the lives of more than 80 people in the city of Mogadishu, as reported by The New York Times.
An analyst, Rashid Abdi, focused his observations on the Horn of Africa and said that the insurgency is as notorious and lethal as it was before. He noted that while the efforts of the United States government using drone strikes reduced the leadership ranks of the group, it was not enough to make a dent in its capacity for destruction.
Experts believe Somalia's government has an increased challenge with the rise of militant attacks. The country has been facing flash floods that have severely affected more than 100,000 of its citizens this year, and several swarms of pesky locusts have laid bare to farmlands and their harvest along with the global crisis that has ravaged the world, the coronavirus pandemic.
