Somali armed group Al-Shabaab and African Union’s AMISOM force have each claimed to have killed large numbers of the other side’s combatants in a gun battle in central Somalia.
The town of Halgan, where Thursday’s clash occurred, lies in the Hiraan region of central Somalia, about 300km north of the capital Mogadishu.
The AMISOM force fighting in Somalia said its troops repelled an attack on one of its bases by Al-Shabaab and killed 110 fighters.
Al Shabaab incurred heavy casualties in the attempted attack in #Halgan. 110 AS fighters were killed including one white foreign fighter.
— AMISOM (@amisomsomalia) June 9, 2016
Conversely, Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, Al-Shabaab’s military operations spokesperson, told Reuters: “Our fighters stormed the Halgan base of AMISOM … We killed 43 AU soldiers from Ethiopia in the fighting.”
He said “several” Al-Shabaab fighters had died in the raid but he did not give a figure.
Residents said they heard a huge explosion at the base and a heavy exchange of gunfire shortly before dawn.
Al-Shabaab often launches gun and bomb attacks on officials, Somali security forces and AMISOM in an effort to topple the government and impose its own brand of government 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.
