Bartamaha (Nairobi):- At least seven people were killed and 26 others, including several children, were hurt when a stray bomb hit a school in the Somali capital Mogadishu.

It happened as pupils were getting ready to leave at the end of the school day, during fighting between government forces and Islamist insurgents, al-Shabaab, officials said today.

“Our staff have seen seven dead corpses and collected 26 wounded civilians, mainly school children,” Ali Muse Sheikh, a paramedic for Nationlink and Africa Lifeline Ambulance Services, told Bloomberg news service.

Two of the 10 injured school children are in a coma, said Mo’alim Ali Mohamoud, the Qur’an teacher who runs the school.
Islamist militant group al-Shabaab, which was behind a twin suicide bombing in the Ugandan capital Kampala that killed 76, just eight days ago, is battling to bring down the weak Western-backed government.

The group attacked the government yesterday, and captured several positions an al-Shabaab spokesman said.  However, the government denied that the group had made any gains.

Al-Shabaab and other Islamist insurgents have imposed a strict form of Sharia, or Islamic law, in areas they control and have brought in strict punishments such as amputating the hands of thieves and stoning adulterers to death. They also want the African Union peacekeepers, based in Mogadishu, to leave.

Al-Shabaab, which has links to the terrorist group al-Qaeda, controls a lot of south and central Somalia, while the government is confined to just a handful of districts in Mogadishu.

The group’s attack in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, was directed at football fans watching the World Cup final, and it was the first time it had hit abroad. Al-Shabaab said the two bombings were pay back for Ugandan and Burundian troops shelling ordinary people, as part of an African Union peacekeeping mission shoring up the Somali government.

Over the last year, fighting has forced tens of thousands of people from residential areas of Mogadishu, where the battles are fought between pro-government forces and militant groups. And many more hundreds of thousands of Somalis have fled to neighbouring countries over the years.

More than one million people, in a nation the United Nations puts at nine million, have been forced out of their homes.
Drought is adding to the country’s problems, with more than one third of the population depending on food aid. Many other Somalis survive off money sent home by their relatives abroad.

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Source:-SOS.

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