MOGADISHU, Somalia – An attack took place in Mogadishu’s Kahda district on Friday night, shattering a relative calm that has been witnessed since Hassan Sheikh took office.
The Al-Qaeda-linked militant group Al-Shabaab was reported to have carried out an ambush gun attack targeting a military police checkpoint in the district, according to the witnesses.
An official said the attack was repelled by the police and pushed back the attackers from Al-Shabaab, who wanted to show their presence and power to hit any target in the city.
The night-time gun attack was followed by an explosion in the morning which resulted from an IED planted in an area, where the police were manning a checkpoint to check the cars.
The details of the casualties remained unclear as local authorities did not release a statement regarding the gun and bomb attacks in the Kahda district in the Benadir region.
For the past several months, security experts and community leaders in Mogadishu have been calling on government security agencies to step up their operations in the capital to avert what they called “pending al-Shabab terror attacks.”
The Somali president Hassan Sheikh declared a “total war” against the al-Qaida-linked militants in August 2022 shortly after being elected by lawmakers in an indirect vote held in Mogadishu.
