At least 10 reported killed in suicide bomb blast in Somalia's Mogadishu
The attacker on Sunday targeted a queue of young recruits lining up outside Damanyo base, killing at least 10 people, Reuters news agency quoted witnesses as saying.
Teenagers were lining up at the base's gate when the suicide bomber detonated their explosives, they said.
Medical staff at the military hospital told Reuters that they had received 30 wounded people from the blast and that six of them had died immediately.
Separately, an official told Anadolu the attack had killed at least 11 people.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
More to come…
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Al Jazeera
3 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
What is Israel's ‘most moral army in the world' doing in Gaza?
The Israeli military, which styles itself as the 'most moral army in the world', may be routinely committing war crimes, according to analysts in Israel and doctors who have worked in Gaza. While killings, beatings and the arbitrary arrest of Palestinians are not new to the Israeli army, a long process of dehumanisation, the infiltration of far-right ideologies in the army and a lack of accountability have led to a scenario where Israeli soldiers can do as they please without even needing an operational reason, analysts said. 'As far as I can see, this is a new phenomenon,' Erella Grassiani of the University of Amsterdam, who has written on what she referred to as the moral 'numbing' of Israeli soldiers during the second Intifada of 2000. 'It's not as if Israeli soldiers haven't beaten and arrested children for throwing stones before, but this is new,' she said. 'Previously, there were some kind of rules of engagement, even if they were loosely followed, but they were there. What we're seeing now is completely different,' she said. War as sport Accusations of casual brutality by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, and the occupied West Bank, are longstanding. Israeli soldiers have posted social media videos of themselves wearing the dresses of women whose homes they have raided, or playing with their underwear. And there are accounts of soldiers shooting civilians for 'target practice' or simply to stave off boredom. In early August, the BBC investigated the cases of Israeli soldiers killing children in Gaza. Of the 160 cases examined, 95 children had been shot in the head or the chest – shots that could not be claimed as 'intended to wound only'. In addition to killing children, there are accounts suggesting that Israeli soldiers have been using the civilians who gather around aid distribution sites run by the self-styled GHF for target practice. 'The GHF sites are set up as death traps,' British surgeon Nick Maynard, who returned in July from his third trip to Gaza since the war began, told Al Jazeera. 'They're compounds containing enough food for a family to eat for a few days, but not for all of the thousands of people they keep waiting outside. They then open the gates and let the chaos, fighting and even rioting happen, which they then use as a justification to fire into the crowd,' he said. The nature of the shooting became clear to the doctors and emergency room medics at nearby Nasser Hospital, where Maynard was working. 'I was operating on a 12-year-old boy, who later died,' Maynard said. 'He'd been shot at one of the GHF sites. I had a conversation about it with a colleague in the Emergency Room later, who told me that he and other medics had seen repeated and strong patterns of wound grouping,' he explained. Wound grouping refers to the phenomenon where several patients present with an injury to the same part of their body. The following day, many patients come in with a wound on a different part of the body, suggesting to Maynard that Israeli snipers were either playing or using civilians to improve their aim, as he told Sky News previously. An investigation by the Israeli magazine +972 in July 2024 painted a bleak picture of Israeli soldiers with no restrictions on their ability to shoot at civilians in Gaza. 'There was total freedom,' a soldier who served in Gaza for months told +972. 'If there is [even] a feeling of threat, there is no need to explain – you just shoot … it is permissible to shoot at their centre of mass [their body], not into the air', the anonymous soldier continued. 'It's permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.' Of the 52 probes that the Israeli army said it carried out into crimes it has been accused of committing in Gaza or the West Bank between October 2023 and June 2025, 88 percent were stalled or were closed with no action taken, according to a study by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV). Only one had resulted in a prison sentence against the accused. According to AOAV, the 52 cases they examined involved the killing of 1,303 people, the wounding of 1,880 people and the reported torture of two more. Even when there was footage of an incident, such as what appeared to be the gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman Israeli prison facility, public pressure, including from members of the Israeli cabinet, led to the accused's eventual release. Accusations that the Israeli army routinely tortures Palestinians date back to at least 1967, when the Red Crescent documented the systematic torture of prisoners in Nablus Prison in the West Bank. There has also been an increase in the dehumanising language used to refer to Palestinians that researchers now say is commonplace within the army. As far back as 1967, Israeli figures such as David Hacohen, one-time Israeli ambassador to Burma, now Myanmar,, were recorded denying that Palestinians were even human. In 1985, a survey of 520 books in Hebrew children's literature found that 86 depicted Palestinians as 'inhuman, war lovers, devious monsters, bloodthirsty dogs, preying wolves, or vipers'. Twenty years later, when many of those now deployed to Gaza were likely at school, 10 percent of a sample batch of Israeli children who were asked to draw Palestinians depicted them as animals. 'The dehumanisation of Palestinians is a process that goes back decades,' Grassiani of the University of Amsterdam said. 'But I'd say it's now complete. 'We've seen incredibly cruel acts from the first day to now, with Israeli soldiers seeking revenge for [the Hamas-led attack of] October 7,' she said. 'It's like a snowball running down a hill to which there's no bottom,' Haim Bresheeth, author of An Army Like No Other, a book about the Israeli military. 'Every year, the violence is ratcheted up,' he said. 'The idea of using civilians as target practice is the logical outcome. 'It's a new sport, a blood sport, and these sports always develop from the bottom up,' he said of Israel's infantry. 'It's twisted, murderous, and it's sick.'
Al Jazeera
8 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Mali's former prime minister charged with embezzlement, remanded in custody
Mali's former prime minister, Choguel Maiga, has been charged with embezzlement and remanded in custody as the West African country's military leaders intensify a crackdown over allegations of a coup plot. The charges against Maiga were revealed on Tuesday following a hearing before Mali's Supreme Court. Maiga, who took office after a second coup in Mali in 2021, was sacked in November 2024 after he publicly denounced the military for a lack of clarity over when it would hand over power to a civilian government. Maiga's lawyer, Cheick Oumar Konare, told the AFP news agency that no date has yet been set for the former leader's trial. 'We believe in justice, we are calm while awaiting the trial,' Konare said, explaining that Maiga would remain in prison for the trial. A statement from the public prosecutor said the charges against Maiga involve 'money laundering equal to many billions of CFA francs', or several million US dollars. The former prime minister was arrested one week ago, according to the AFP, days after Mali's military leaders carried out dozens of arrests to quash an alleged plot within the army's ranks to topple the government in turn. Nine of Maiga's colleagues from his time as prime minister also appeared before the court on Tuesday, with two being charged, some acquitted and others still awaiting their hearing, the AFP reported, citing a judicial source. Earlier this month, another former prime minister, Moussa Mara, was imprisoned after tweeting his support for jailed critics of the military. Mali has been gripped by a security crisis since 2012, driven by violence from armed groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the ISIL (ISIS) group, as well as local criminal gangs. The fighting has resulted in thousands of deaths, while up to 350,000 people are currently displaced, according to Human Rights Watch. The crisis set off mass protests in 2020, paving the way for the military to topple the country's elected government in a coup. The military briefly ceded power to a transitional government but took over in a second coup in 2021. The colonel who led the two power grabs, Assimi Goita, was also sworn in as transitional president that year. Under his government, the military has reneged on pledges to hand back power to civilians by the end of March 2024, and has tightened its grip on power by dissolving all political parties, and jailing dissidents and leading civil society figures. In July, the military-appointed legislative body also passed legislation that granted Goita a five-year presidential mandate, renewable 'as many times as necessary' and without elections. Maiga was one of the leaders of the protests that helped topple Mali's civilian government in 2020, and previously said he believed the military would safeguard the country's democracy. 'We must refound the Malian state, so that no political power can ever again create the conditions for a return to an unconstitutional order!' he told Al Jazeera in an interview in 2023. Since his dismissal, however, Maiga has become one of the military's fiercest critics, accusing it of weaponising the courts to silence dissent. Experts, meanwhile, have described Maiga's arrest and imprisonment on Tuesday as a sign of the military government's fragility. 'If the most prominent opposition leaders are arrested and imprisoned, including Choguel, who once gave the junta credibility, then I believe today the junta credibility is greatly weakened,' said Alioune Tine, the former United Nations rapporteur on Mali to the Security Council. 'Just 50km [31 miles] from Bamako, you're still in danger. Al-Qaeda's affiliate JNIM controls most of the territory. The only way forward now is for President Goita to change course: free political prisoners, release activists and journalists, and open a national dialogue that leads to real democratic elections,' he said. Mali's military leaders have replaced Maiga with General Abdoulaye Maiga, who had previously served as government spokesman in the West African country. The military's power grab in Mali helped set off a wave of coups in the Sahel region, south of the Sahara desert, including in the neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, which are fighting the same groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL. The three countries have withdrawn from the Economic Community of West African States amid pressure from the bloc to return to civilian government. They have now banded together to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) and created a 5,000-strong force for joint military operations to try to drive out armed groups.
Al Jazeera
15 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Gunmen kill at least 27 in mosque attack in northern Nigeria, officials say
At least 27 worshippers have been killed and several wounded when armed bandits stormed a mosque in northern Nigeria's Katsina state during morning prayers, the village head and a hospital official said. The gunmen opened fire inside a mosque as Muslims gathered to pray at around 04:00 GMT in the remote community of Unguwan Mantau in Malumfashi local government area, residents said. No one immediately claimed responsibility, but such attacks have become more common in Nigeria's northwestern and north-central regions where local herders and farmers often clash over limited access to land and water. The attacks have killed and injured scores – an attack June in in north-central Nigeria killed more than 100 people. Amnesty International called for the government to end the 'almost daily bloodshed in Benue state'. That attack took place in Yelwata, a town in Benue State, according to Amnesty. The prolonged conflict has become deadlier in recent years, with authorities and analysts warning that more herdsmen are taking up arms. The state's commissioner, Nasir Mu'azu, said the army and police have deployed in the area of Unguwan Mantau following Tuesday's bloodshed to prevent further attacks, adding that gunmen often hide among the crops in farms during the rainy season to carry out assaults on communities.
