Al-Shabab killed 200 Kenyan troops in El-Adde attack, Somali president.

Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud says as many as 200 Kenyan soldiers had been killed when Al-Shabab terrorists attacked an African Union base in the country last month.
President Mohamud said during an interview with a Somali TV channel that nearly 200 Kenyan troops lost their lives when ash-Shabab terrorists attacked the base in the town of El Adde in the southwestern Gedo region in mid January.

“When about 200 soldiers who came to help your country are killed in one morning, it is not something trivial,” the Somali president said, adding, “We have been winning for years and months but that El Adde battle, we were defeated. Yes, in war, sometimes something that you do not like happens to you.”

Newspaper pictures of coffins draped with Kenyan flags bringing back dead soldiers after the attack increased the disquiet from ordinary Kenyans and the opposition alike over Kenya’s continued presence in Somalia.

Kenya sent soldiers into Somalia in 2011 after raids in the border region and kidnappings that threatened the tourism industry in the region’s biggest economy and wider regional destabilisation.

It later joined the AMISOM operation.

Al Shabaab’s attacks in Kenya have included a raid by gunmen on the upscale Westgate shopping mall in 2013 and a university in Garissa in 2015.

Kenya Defence Forces spokesman, Colonel David Obonyo, denied the number given by the Somali president and questioned the source of the information.

The al Qaeda-aligned militants have been driven out of major strongholds in Somalia by AMISOM and Somali army offensives, but the group still controls some rural areas and often launches guerrilla-style assaults and bomb attacks.

Al Shabaab, which wants to overthrow Somalia’s Western-backed government, had initially said it had killed more than 100 soldiers in the attack.