Two dead in an Al-Shabab attack on a Turkish military base in Somalia

At least two civilians were killed today in a suicide attack attributed by the jihadist group Al-Shabab against a Turkish military base in Mogadishu, the Somali Government reported. The attack occurred at the gates of Camp Turksom, Turkey's largest overseas military base (covering some 400 hectares), which also serves as an academy for training Somali Army soldiers.

The attacker detonated his explosives after he was intercepted by base guards as he tried to queue up new military recruits preparing to enter the facility. The suicide bomber "posed as a recruit at the Turkish-Somali academy, but was shot and exploded outside the camp, killing himself and two civilians," said Somali government spokesman Ismael Mukhtaar Omar on his Twitter account. No Turkish soldiers or nationals were affected by the attack, the spokesman added.

According to local media, the jihadist group Al-Shabab, which opposed the presence of foreign troops on Somali soil, took responsibility for the attack. Built in 2017, the base is located along the coast about five kilometres from the Aden Adde International Airport in the Somali capital, adjacent to the so-called "Green Zone", which houses embassies, United Nations offices and the multinational force of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).

Mogadishu suffers frequent attacks from Al-Shabab, an organisation affiliated to Al Qaeda since 2012 and which controls the rural areas of central and southern Somalia, a country in which it seeks to establish an Islamic state of Wahhabi (ultraconservative) status. The bloodiest attack by the terrorist group occurred in the Somali capital in October 2017 with truck bombs that caused more than 500 deaths.

Somalia has been living in a state of war and chaos since 1991, when the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown, leaving the country without an effective government and in the hands of Islamist militias and warlords.