The Somali militant Islamist group al Shabaab attacked a Mogadishu hotel on Sunday, driving a car packed with explosives through the hotel gate and killing at least 13 people, a first responder and the rebel group said.

China’s Foreign Ministry said that a Chinese national who worked doing security at its embassy in the country, which is located in the hotel, was among the dead, and that three others received minor injuries.

A police officer, Major Nur Osoble, told Reuters a suicide car bomb had rammed the gates of the hotel, damaging the facade.

Al Shabaab, which said it was behind the blast, frequently stages bomb and gun attacks in the capital in its bid to topple Somalia’s Western-backed government. The nation is trying to rebuild after two decades of conflict and chaos.

“It is a response to attacks and helicopter bombing against al Shabaab by AMISOM and the Somali government,” Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab’s military operations spokesman, told Reuters.

AMISOM, the African Union’s force in Somalia, has been battling the Islamist rebels with the Somali army. Al Shabaab has been pushed into increasingly smaller pockets of territory by a military offensive this year.

Somalia’s Shebab insurgents assassinated a lawmaker and his guards, the president said, hours after US President Barack Obama said the Al-Qaeda affiliated militants had been “weakened”.

Gunmen sprayed the car of MP Abdulahi Hussein Mohamud with gunfire as he travelled through a southern district of the capital Mogadishu earlier Saturday, killing him, his two guards and the driver.

President Hassan Sheik Mohamud said he was “devastated” at the attack, the latest in a string of murders of Somalia’s lawmakers.

“The lawmaker was martyred while serving the nation, but such killings will not deter us from going forward,” Mohamud told reporters.

The Shebab said in a statement that their “mujahedeen fighters targeted and killed a member of the parliament and his guards”, adding that they “will continue targeting” lawmakers.

The Shebab have carried out repeated attacks including a campaign of suicide attacks and assassinations targeting government figures.

UN envoy to Somalia Nicholas Kay called the murders a “despicable act”.

Witnesses said the militants fled after the attack.

“They opened fire on the car of the lawmaker and all of the passengers including him died,” witness Abdirahman Mire said.

The Shebab is fighting to overthrow Somalia’s Western-backed government which is propped up and protected by the 22,000-strong African Union force (AMISOM).

– Civilians killed –

The attack came as Obama, on a visit to neighbouring Kenya, praised AMISOM’s efforts, but said while the insurgents had been “weakened”, the overall security threat posed by the group remained.

“We have been able to decrease their effective control within Somalia and have weakened those networks operating here in East Africa. That doesn’t mean the problem is solved,” Obama said.

“We can degrade significantly the capacity of the terrorist organisations, but they can still do damage,” he added.

Somali government troops backed by African Union forces last week launched “Operation Jubba Corridor” — an offensive it said was aimed at flushing the insurgents out of rural areas in southern Somalia in an operation involving Ethiopian and Kenyan forces.

Deployed to Somalia since 2007, AMISOM has helped push back Shebab across much of the country’s south, retaking towns and territory the group had held for years. US drone strikes have also taken their toll on Shebab, killing senior commanders, including the group’s leader Ahmed Godane in September.

On Saturday, there were reports of helicopters — believed to be from Ethiopia — carrying out airstrikes targeting Shebab fighters in the southern Bay region.

Government officials said the attacks had killed several Shebab fighters, but residents said civilians had also been killed.

“Al-Shebab are defeated, and they are forcing the civilians to flee with them in order to use them as human shields,” said local government official Abdirahman Mohamed, adding he had no reports of civilian deaths.

But residents around the forests of Dolondole said a truck carrying civilians fleeing the fighting had been blown up.

“A missile struck a truck and six civilians including two children died, I saw seven others who were seriously wounded,” said local resident Mohamud Sheik Mumin. Other witnesses said civilians had been killed.

The deaths on Saturday follow witness reports earlier in the week in the southern Bakool region of dozens of civilians killed.

At least 14 people have been killed after a suicide bomber detonated an explosive at a popular night spot in the town of Maroua in northern Cameroon, three days after two attacks there, authorities say.

Midjiyawa Bakari, governor of the far northern region of Cameroon, told The Associated Press news agency that authorites were still counting the dead and wounded following Saturday night’s explosion in the Pont Vert district.

A local official, who was reportedly at the scene of the attack, told Reuters that the suicide bomber was a woman.

While there was no immediate claim of responsibility, fighters from Boko Haram have been blamed for scores of attacks in the region this year.

On Wednesday this week, in separate attacks in the town, explosives worn by two young girls detonated, killing at least 20 people and injuring at least another 22.

One of the girls was at a central market and the other was at the adjoining Hausa neighbourhood when the explosives detonated.

Authorities later told the Associated Press that one of the girls, aged nine, was disguised as a begger before the explosives went off.

Somali government troops backed by African Union forces captured the Shebab stronghold of Dinsor, the second town seized from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamists this week, the defence minister said.

While Dinsor fell without a major fight, with Shebab gunmen fleeing ahead of the assault, witnesses have reported heavy casualties in the week-long offensive with civilians caught up in the fighting. Village elders reported that dozens of bodies have been buried.

“Our forces have secured control of Dinsor, and the insurgents have fled after losing the battle… the troops are now conducting security operations to clear the town,” Somalis’ defence minster, General Abdulkadir Sheikh Ali Dini, told reporters.

The fall of Dinsor, in Somalia’s southwestern region and near the border with Kenya and Ethiopia, comes after the capture by AU troops of the nearby town of Bardhere on Wednesday. The two towns were some of the last remaining Shebab strongholds.

Witnesses confirmed the takeover of the southern town, saying the Shehab fled ahead of government and Ethiopian troops with the AU force, pulling out of the town on Thursday afternoon.

“Most of the residents fled so it looks like a ghost town,” said resident Mohamed Added. “There are very few people remaining, most of them elderly.”

The African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, last week launched “Operation Jubba Corridor” — an offensive it said was aimed at flushing the insurgents out of rural areas in southern Somalia and which has involved Ethiopian and Kenyan forces. In the southern Bakool region, elders in five villages reported dozens of civilians killed.

A refugee camp deep inside Cameroon is receiving around a hundred people each day who are fleeing Islamist violence in Nigeria, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported Tuesday.

Families are leaving unstable and dangerous zones on the Nigeria-Cameroon border “and seeking shelter some 100 kilometres (62 miles) inland at the Minawao camp,” run by UNHCR and its partners, spokesman Leo Dobbs said.

Most of the new arrivals had initially stayed close to the border after fleeing clashes between Boko Haram jihadis and Nigerian troops in the hope they could return home quickly, Dobbs added.

Refugees said they had run from militant attacks in Nigeria’s Borno state. The Boko Haram insurgency has killed more than 15,000 people in Nigeria since 2009.

The population of the Minawao camp has risen to roughly 44,000 from 30,000 at the same time last year.

The UNHCR and Cameroon’s government are trying to contact refugees remaining in border territory to see whether they would prefer to come to Minawao or be taken to secure zones inside Nigeria, Dobbs said.

The UN agency estimates that nearly 12,000 unregistered refugees are in northern Cameroon, while Camerooonian authorities put the figure at 17,000.

Boko Haram, which has extended its campaign across Nigeria’s borders and prompted a regional military response, carried out its first suicide bombing in Cameroon last Sunday.

Two women wearing the full Islamic veil blew themselves up in the far northern border town of Fotokol, killing 11 people.

While the economic cost of Somali piracy has fallen and considerable progress has been made in deterring pirate operations, the latest attacks on Iranian fishing vessels by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean may be another signal that it is too early to cut back international counter-piracy efforts, according to a new report.

The report by Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP), titled “State of Maritime Piracy 2014”, underscores that due to restrictive reporting criteria, small-scale attacks on dhows and vessels are not always included in official piracy records.

“[This] may hide a development that the reduced cost is masking – namely that Somali pirates still possess the means and capability – and are waiting for opportunities to strike,” it says.

Conditions conducive to the development of piracy in the first place, such as illegal fishing, poverty, political instability and a lack of economic opportunities, have not been properly addressed yet, according to the analysis.

As reported by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a specialised division of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the number of pirate attacks has been steadily decreasing since Somali piracy peaked with 237 attacks in 2011. While the IMB had reported a total number of 75 attacks in 2012 and only 15 attacks in 2013, the number has fallen further to 12 attacks in 2014.

Even though the actual numbers of attacks, including on dhows and foreign fishing vessels, might be higher, a significant decline in piracy over the course of the past four to five years cannot be denied.

This is due to a variety of factors. Speaking to IPS, Oceans Beyond Piracy Program Director Jon Huggins highlighted in particular the efforts of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS), which have allowed practical solutions to be developed.

Created in January 2009 pursuant to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1851, the CGPCS is an ad hoc international forum bringing together countries, organisations and industry groups to provide support to international counter-piracy efforts in Somalia.

As explained in a report by the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) dedicated to lessons learnt from the CGPCS, the CGPCS is a highly unconventional if not unique international governance mechanism due to its open architecture, informality and malleable structure. It was established outside the U.N. system to “ensure that it was as inclusive, apolitical, issue-driven, result-focused, efficient and flexible as possible.”

“The setting up of the Contact Group reveals the limits of existing security institutions in tackling non-traditional threats which are neither state-based nor of a strictly military nature and that therefore require new forms of policy response.”

Commenting on the practical solutions supported by the Contact Group, Jon Huggins identified a combination of four main mechanisms that were required to suppress piracy. He stressed that each of these mechanisms acting alone would not have proven successful.

Thus, as outlined by Huggins, one major reason for the decline in piracy was the military counter-piracy operations carried out by the international community, especially EU NAVFOR ATALANTA, beginning in 2008, and NATO Operation Ocean Shield, beginning in 2009.

However, as incidents of piracy kept going up, these operations were complemented by wide-ranging protection and self-defence measures and improved watch and awareness procedures adopted by the shipping industry. As recorded in the Economic Cost of Piracy report by OBP, these measures amounted to approximately five billion dollars in 2012, which represented around 85 percent of the total amount the international community spent on fighting piracy.

The measures adopted were part of a broader industry-generated mechanism named the “Best Management Practices (BMP) for Protection against Somalia Based Piracy.”

Another major reason for the decrease in piracy, according to Huggins, was the “private maritime security” who enacted standards and procedures for the use of force by Privately Contracted Armed Security Personnel (PCASP) in the maritime domain.

A fourth factor was the steady enforcement of the rule of law through an expanded prison system, including regional prosecution centres in the Seychelles and Kenya and four new prisons in Somalia built under the UNODC Maritime Crime Programme (MCP).

Two weeks ago, the CGPCS convened for its 18th annual session at the United Nations in New York. Participants commended the immense progress over the course of the past four to five years as evidenced by the decline in pirate attacks, but also stressed the need for continued engagement as piracy networks remain intact and 26 persons are still being held hostage by Somali pirates.

“Piracy has been contained but not eradicated,” Maciej Popowski, Deputy Secretary General for the External Action Service (EAS), said at a U.N. press briefing on the CGPCS 18th plenary meeting.

Therefore, he said, a major goal of the CGPCS gathering was to “look beyond the piracy itself” and deal with a whole range of important topics related to maritime security, such as illegal fishing, migration and smuggling of human beings.

Major economic, political and societal challenges persist in Somalia that might cause setbacks or provide a favourable breeding ground for piracy in the future. According to Jon Huggins, it is vital for the international community to “maintain a minimal effort to keep the suppression going” even though this might involve major financial expenses.

“At the height of piracy in Somalia in 2010, the international community spent seven billion dollars on counter-piracy measures. Last year we calculated 2.3 billion. This is the minimum that is required in order to stay – because we still haven’t addressed the root causes of piracy. There are still ungoverned spaces on the coast line. There is still unemployed youth that might be attracted to piracy.”

According to the United Nations Development Programme in Somalia (UNDP Somalia), 67 percent of Somalis aged 14-29 are unemployed. This is particularly worrisome given that over 70 percent of Somalia’s population is under the age of 30. The school enrolment rate is 42 percent, of which only a third are girls.

Hence, extreme poverty and a lack of prospects for the future for the large majority of Somalis constitute persisting security challenges in the country in addition to the unstable political situation and weak governance structures.

Moreover, there are fears of new threats emerging as a result of the enmeshment of pirate groups with jihadist networks. As reported by Foreign Policy, young Somali pirates in Hargeisa and Bosaso are detained in the same prisons as members of the al-Shabab militant group.

“That means there’s a very real risk that impressionable, disillusioned young men could be radicalised,” it warned.

The United States is eager to boost its ties with Nigeria now that the former president, Goodluck Jonathan, who was often a source of frustration for Washington, has left office.

The Obama administration believes that President Muhammadu Buhari can become an ally in cracking down on Boko Haram, whose collaboration with ISIS is helping the spread of radical extremism in West Africa.

Buhuri, a devout Muslim in a country where a majority of residents are Muslim, said during his election that he’d fight aggressively against radical Islam and promised to ramp up the fight against Boko Haram, which has horrified the world with its kidnappings of Nigerian school girls.

The Obama administration, which had challenged Jonathan to fight terrorism more aggressively, emphasized the effort to combat Boko Haram in its announcement of Buhuri’s visit.

“President Obama looks forward to discussing with President Buhari our many shared priorities including US.-Nigeria cooperation to advance a holistic, regional approach to combating Boko Haram,” the White House said in a statement.

Omolola Adele-Oso, executive director and co-founder of Act For Accountability, a D.C.-based African government watchdog organization, believes Buhuri will prioritize fighting terrorism more than his predecessor. Shortly after being elected, the new president met with the families of the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, she said.

“He made promises to, in the next months, address the issue of Boko Haram pledging to do more to rescue the girls,” said Adele-Oso, who is Nigerian.

The Buhari administration last month slated $100 million for the Multinational Joint Task Force — military personnel from Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon specifically focused on fighting Boko Haram. Buhari made $21 million available immediately.

The extremist group has said it has no interest in negotiating with the Nigerian government, but Buhari’s officials said this month that they are open to discussions.

“If Boko Haram opts for negotiation, the government will not be averse to it,” Femi Adesina, a Buhari spokesman, said in a statement. “The government will, however, not be negotiating from a position of weakness, but that of strength.”

Activists are hoping that the United States can assist Nigeria in halting Boko Haram’s growth, especially by focusing on strengthening the country’s military.

“The largest help the U.S. could give comes with intelligence — helping Nigeria develop and monitor and track our security issues, and develop a better understanding of what it means to control our border,” Adele-Oso said.

While Nigeria would be wise to strengthen its relationship with the United States, ultimately the solutions to the country’s problems — including divisions — will have to be solved internally, said Tukufu Zuberi, a professor at the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

“The solution to that can’t come from Obama. It has to be a Nigerian solution,” he said. “There’s not much France can do or the U.S. can do in order to provide a national consciousness and unity in Nigeria.”

In its statement, the White House also emphasize the U.S. Interest in strengthening “Nigeria’s efforts to advance important economic and political reforms that will help unlock its full potential as a regional and global leader.”

Having recently won Nigeria’s first credible elections, Buhuri enjoys the most respected status internationally of any of his predecessors. Buhuri has said he desires a closer relationship with the United States and other Western partners as he seeks to improve Nigeria’s position in the global community.

But just how thoroughly he’ll bring reform and implant democracy within Nigerian society remains a question.

Buhuri himself is a former oil minister and ran on a platform of cleaning up the rampant corruption in government and the oil sector. With a broom as one of his campaign icons, Buhuri signaled that he plans to clean house in Nigeria.

He has long opposed corruption, but his democratic credentials are less stellar: He once led a military coup against a corrupt government in 1984. He has since, however, become a vocal advocate of democracy.

Adele-Oso is optimistic about Buhari’s desire to make the country more democratic.

“He has a track record of standing by his word. He has a track record of being someone who is being fair, firm and honest. And that is very welcome,” she said.

The United States, for now, has praised the democratic moment in Nigeria and both Jonathan and Buhuri for a peaceful transition of power.

In particular, the White House emphasized the role of the Nigerian public, noting at the time of the election in March that “the last few days have shown the world the strength of Nigeria’s commitment to democratic principles. By turning out in large numbers and sometimes waiting all day to cast their votes, Nigerians came together to decide the future of their country peacefully.”

The United States Itself helped to some extent in this process. The U.S., the United Kingdom and others in the international community warned those considering disrupting the elections that there would be serious consequences.

And what happens in Nigeria could influence what happens around it.

“With Africa’s largest economy, a burgeoning population, and significant political stature, Nigeria matters. Its fate will affect that of its neighbors, of oil companies, and of global security,” wrote foreign policy expert Sarah Chayes of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Nigeria once had a vibrant diverse economy, but has since become an oil monoculture, according to Chayes, senior associate in Carnegie’s Democracy and Rule of Law Program. Following the corruption, terrorism and environmental concerns, multiple countries and businesses have divested from Nigeria’s oil industry.

“There was nothing foreordained in this outcome, and it can be reversed. It is in the interests of energy companies as well as the United States and other Western governments to help Nigeria’s new leadership do so,” wrote Chayes.