US air strike in Somalia targets al Shabaab senior leader
WASHINGTON - The US military has made an air strike against a senior leader of the al Qaeda-linked militant group al Shabaab in Somalia, the Pentagon said, and African forces said they killed another senior al Shabaab commander.
The Pentagon said the results of its airstrike, carried out on Thursday, were still being assessed. It said its target was Hassan Ali Dhoore, who played a direct role in al Shabaab's Christmas Day 2014 attack on Mogadishu airport, in which an American was among the dead, and in an attack on a Mogadishu hotel in 2015 that killed 15 people, including a Somali-American.
African Union forces (AMISOM) said they killed "notorious al Shabaab commander for Janaale Abdirashir Buqdube together with 22 other terrorists" in an operation with the Somali army in Janaale, south of the capital Mogadishu on Friday night. AMISOM issued its statement on Saturday.
It said another 12 al Shabaab fighters were killed in the previous two days after they ambushed AMISOM and Somali army troops repairing boreholes and clearing roads in the area. Its statement did not mention the US strikes.
