{"id":27283,"date":"2013-10-17T16:39:02","date_gmt":"2013-10-17T20:39:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=27283"},"modified":"2013-10-17T16:39:35","modified_gmt":"2013-10-17T20:39:35","slug":"seals-strike-al-shabab-in-somalia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2013\/10\/seals-strike-al-shabab-in-somalia\/","title":{"rendered":"SEALs Strike al-Shabab in Somalia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"A team of US Navy SEALs has carried out a strike on a coastal town in southern Somalia against al-Shabab, the group behind last month\u2019s mall attack in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.<\/div>\n

The SEALs attacked a senior al-Shabab commander’s seaside villa in a pre-dawn raid in the town of Baraawe.<\/span><\/p>\n

A US military official said that the SEALs did not get their target.<\/p>\n

A former US military official also confirmed the assault by the SEALs, but did not give more details.<\/p>\n

“The Baraawe raid was planned a week and a half ago,” a US security official said.<\/p>\n

“It was prompted by the Westgate attack,” he added, referring to the September 21 attack by the al-Shabab on a shopping mall in Nairobi that left 67 people dead during a four-day siege.<\/p>\n

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.<\/p>\n

According to reports, the dead also included three British nationals, two French women, two Canadian citizens including a diplomat, a Chinese woman, two Indians, a Ghanaian poet, a South Korean, a South African, and a Dutch woman. Several Americans were also injured during the hostage crisis.<\/p>\n

The US Defense Department declined to comment over the issue.<\/p>\n

The al-Shabab confirmed the strike, but said that the attack had failed.<\/p>\n

Al-Shabab spokesman Abdulaziz Abu Musab said that commandos had stormed the beach by boat.<\/p>\n

“The bungled operation was carried out by white people, who came with two small boats from a larger ship out at sea … one Shabab guard was killed, but reinforcements soon came and the foreigners fled,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Where the foreigners had been, afterwards we saw lots of blood, so maybe we wounded some,” he added.<\/p>\n

On September 25, the leader of Somalia\u2019s al-Shabab, Ahmed Godane, confirmed that the group was behind the attack on the mall, saying the raid was in retaliation for the Kenyan military\u2019s invasion of southern Somalia in October 2011.<\/p>\n

“Take your troops out or prepare for a long-lasting war, blood, destruction and evacuation,” Godane said.<\/p>\n

Kenya has more than 4,000 army soldiers in southern Somalia, where they have been battling the al-Shabab fighters since 2011.<\/p>\n

The Kenyan troops are part of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) that gets training and equipment from the United States.<\/p>\n

Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991, when warlords overthrew former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A team of US Navy SEALs has carried out a strike on a coastal town in southern Somalia against al-Shabab, the group behind last month\u2019s mall attack in the Kenyan… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27283"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}