The carnage came Saturday, when a massive truck bomb killed over 320 people and wounded 300 more at a busy intersection in the capital, Mogadishu. The blast destroyed nearby hotels, restaurants, and government offices. Just a few hours later, a second explosion rocked the suburb of Medina, setting dozens of vehicles on fire.
The government has accused al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group that has been waging a bloody insurgency in the country for more than a decade, of carrying out the attacks. Al-Shabaab militants have carried out dozens of high-profile attacks in Somalia and neighboring Kenya in recent years, including the April 2015 massacre at Kenya’s Garissa University in which militants targeted mainly Christian students, killing 148, and the siege of a popular pizza restaurant in Mogadishu just four months ago that left 31 people dead. [...]
The sheer scale of the devastation of Saturday’s attacks is hard to comprehend. Witnesses speaking to the UK’s Guardian newspaper described an area of destruction the size of “two or three football fields” in downtown Mogadishu.
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