Somali Islamist militant group Al Shabaab says it has killed 43 soldiers in an attack on a base of Ethiopian troops serving with the African Union’s AMISOM force.
An AMISOM spokesman had no immediate comment — the force usually says it is up to the troop-contributing country to announce casualties.
In the past, casualty figures cited by Al Shabaab have been much higher than official numbers.
“We killed 43 soldiers from Ethiopia in the fighting,” Al Shabaab’s military operations spokesman Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab told the Reuters news agency.
He said “several” of the group’s fighters had also been killed, without giving a figure.
The base at Halgan town lies in a region of central Somalia about 300km north of the capital, Mogadishu.
Residents said they heard a huge explosion at the base and a heavy exchange of gunfire shortly before dawn.
They reported gunfire could still be heard at least an hour after the initial blast.
The group said it used a suicide car bomb and then militants exchanged fire with Ethiopian troops.
The group often launches gun and bomb attacks on officials, Somali security forces and AMISOM in a bid to topple the Western-backed government and impose its own strict interpretation of Islam on Somalia.
In January, Kenyan troops serving with AMISOM suffered heavy losses when Al Shabaab made a dawn raid on their camp in El Adde, near the Kenyan border.
Al Shabaab said it killed more than 100 soldiers, but Kenya gave no exact casualty figure.
radioaustralia.net.au
