When Abdinoor Abdi Mohamed spotted the light of a torch moving through the pre-dawn murk, he and his comrades did what they always do when faced by an Al-Shabaab assault – retreated.
It looked like another routine humiliation for Somalia’s demoralised National Army. But a couple of hours later, Sgt Mohamed and his comrades did something completely unexpected.
“The pressure from their side was too much for us, so we fell back. Then we regrouped and planned a counter attack,” Sgt Mohamed, an NCO in the Somali National Army, told The Telegraph.
“We made them suffer a lot.” The army’s 60th division claims 20 Al-Shabaab fighters, including a key local commander and his deputy, were killed in the skirmish at Goof Gadug Burey on Jan 16.
The Telegraph could not independently verify the claim. But this small fight over a remote village has been hailed as the first success since British troops began...