Al Shabaab trains B’Haram fighters, says Somalia’s president

•Troops kill 10 terrorists, rescue 45 captives in Borno
• ‘Military is winning war’

FIGHTERS for the terrorist militant group Boko Haram have been trained in Somalia before returning to West Africa, Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud told a security conference in Germany yesterday.

Somalia, plagued by political in-fighting, corruption and attacks by Al Shabaab insurgents, has recently made limited progress towards creating a functioning political system

Meanwhile, there was no hiding place for terrorists at the Mandara Hills, Borno State at the weekend as Nigerian and Camerounian troops jointly swooped on Boko Haram insurgents, killing 10 of them while others escaped with serious bullet wounds.

The Acting Director of Nigerian Army Public Relations, Col. Sani Usman said troops of 25 and 26 Task Force Brigades in conjunction with Camerounian Armed Forces carried out the “clearance and interception border operations” at Ngoshe village. According to him, the operation was backed by the air components of Operation Lafiya Dole and the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) for over an hour, covering the Pulka-Uba axis of the mountain range.

In a related development, the General Officer Commanding of 7 Division of Nigerian Army, Brig-Gen. Victor Ezugwu, has said that the military is “winning the war against Boko Haram insurgency” despite some of the challenges being faced by troops in Operation Lafiya Dole in the North-East.

“Without a stable Somalia, the whole region of the Horn of Africa will remain unstable and by and large, the African continent. There are proofs and evidence that for some time Boko Haram fighters were been trained in Somalia before they went back to Nigeria.

“The terrorists are so linked together, they are associated and so organized that we, the world, need to be organized too,” he said.

It was not clear from his comments whether he believed Al Shabaab was still training Boko Haram fighters, who have pledged allegiance to Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq.

Somalia’s Al Shabaab, which has links to al Qaeda and wants to overthrow the Somali government and impose a harsh version of Islamic law, claimed responsibility for a blast this month that punched a hole in the fuselage of a plane.