Islamic Militants Kill 12 in Somalia Car Bomb Blasts

(AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)

Via The New York Times:

Suicide bombers from the Shabab militant group killed at least 12 people in Somalia on Tuesday morning, staging attacks near the airport and bases for the United Nations and African Union in the capital, Mogadishu, officials said.

The car bombings took place around 9 a.m. The United Nations mission in Somalia said that at least a dozen people had been killed; Abdifatah Omar Halane, a spokesman for the Banadir region of Somalia, of which Mogadishu is also the capital, put the death toll at 13.

The African Union said that the blasts had occurred at checkpoints near an entrance to one of its bases, and images from the scene showed the mangled wreck of a vehicle on the road.

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OK, Shabab (alternatively: Al-Shabaab) isn’t ISIS, but I’ll give you one guess what they have in common.

What is disturbing in a couple of ways here is that this story pretty much got back-burnered by the horrific murder of a priest by ISIS in France.

That could be due in part to the prevalence of Western media in France and the relative lack of it in Somalia. Still, there are at least a dozen casualties thus far from this attack. It would seem to merit just as much, if not more, coverage.

Perhaps, as many fear, the world is just becoming too numb to notice all of it, or to process it all.

That, in many ways, is as scary as the attacks themselves.

The one small bright spot here is that officials who aren’t in Europe or North America don’t have to be coy about motives and can quickly condemn.

“Al-Shabaab is desperately seeking relevance and will do anything to keep in the news headlines. AMISOM will continue to work with the Somali security institutions to forestall Al-Shabaab acts of terror,” Ambassador Madeira said.

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