Al Shabab gunmen storm Kenya village

NAIROBI // Al Shabab gunmen raided a village in north-eastern Kenya, the interior ministry said Friday, the latest in a string of brazen attacks by the Somali-led, Al-Qaeda affiliated insurgents.

There were no casualties reported in the remote village, close to the porous border with Somalia, and some 80 kilometres north-east of regional capital Garissa.

“Security forces on Thursday evening thwarted an attempted attack at Yumbis village,” Mwenda Njoka, the interior ministry spokesman, said in a statement Friday.

“Security forces swiftly mobilised and engaged the militants in a gun battle, no casualties were reported.”

In April, Shabab gunmen massacred close to 150 people, most of them students, in a dawn attack on a university in Garissa.

Two days before this latest raid on Yumbis village Shabab militants briefly took control of a mosque in Garissa, delivering a hardline sermon to captive worshippers.

Thursday night’s raid is the latest in a series of attacks and massacres in Kenya’s north-east and its Muslim-majority coastal areas. In 2013 Shabab gunmen launched an assault on the Westgate shopping mall in the capital Nairobi that left at least 67 dead.

Al Shabab has warned of a “long, gruesome war” unless Kenya withdraws its troops from Somalia, where they have been fighting the Islamists since 2011.

* Agence France-Presse