Military aircraft helicopters provide supplies to Somali troops in liberated Adan Yabaal

Somali troops in the recently liberated strategic town of Adan Yabaal have received air supplies from helicopters which supplied essential food and non-food items, as well as medicines.  

Government forces and allied militias in Somalia have recaptured a strategic town that the al-Shabab armed group had controlled for six years.

Pro-government forces entered the town of Adan Yabal in Hirshabelle, about 220km (140 miles) northeast of the capital Mogadishu, after the al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters withdrew without resisting on Tuesday.

The army and local clan militias known as “Macawisley” have retaken swaths of territory in the central states of Galmudug and Hirshabelle in recent months in an operation backed by United States air attacks and helicopter support from an African Union (AU) force, ATMIS.

According to local officials, the Somali National Army is seeking to expand on areas it is currently actively operational to further push al-shabaab.

The fighters, who have been waging a bloody war against Somalia’s internationally recognised federal government for 15 years, also used the town as a logistics hub.

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud accused Al-Shabaab of making off with electric pumps from the town’s wells and forcing people to “flee with them, to be human shields.”

The president, who declared an “all-out war” against Al-Shabaab after his election in May, said the effort to rid Hirshabelle and Galmudug of the group was in its “final stages” with only “pockets” of resistance remaining.

He said other regional federal member states are also set to join the war to further degrade and incapacitate the group. 

Forced out of the country’s main urban centres around 10 years ago, Al-Shabaab remains entrenched in vast swathes of rural central and southern Somalia and continues to carry out deadly attacks in Mogadishu.

On October 29, 116 people in the capital were killed in two car bomb explosions at the education ministry, and eight civilians died in a 21-hour hotel siege on November 27.

AMISOM, a previous incarnation of the AU force in Somalia, seized Adan Yabal from the rebels in 2016 before ceding control a few months later after Ethiopian troops withdrew.

The government said it has killed around 700 members of al-Shabab and recaptured scores of settlements as part of a months-long campaign to loosen the al-Qaida-linked group’s control over large swathes of the country.