Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has dismissed the capture of settlements by al Shabaab militants in the country this month, saying they were of no strategic value and cannot be used to signal a resurgence of the Islamist group.
Al Shabaab is keen to topple Mohamud and his western backed government.
The militia group has already retaken the central town of Buqda and two other southern settlements this month and has as well attacked African troops.
The raids follow a military campaign by the African Union’s AMISOM forces and Somali troops that pushed the rebels out of towns on the coast and drove them into increasingly small pockets of the countryside, mostly in the south of Somalia.
Mohamud said that the Somali National Army have liberated most of the major towns in Somalia and have taken over strategic locations.
He said that the Islamist group that once ruled most of the country now had had limited access to the sea, which experts said was its major source of generating money and smuggling arms.
Even though it is allegedly weakened, al Shabaab is still a threat to Somalia’s gradual reconstruction and state building process.
Just last week, the militia group killed at least three soldiers who were waiting to collect their salaries at the military camp in Kismayu.
