Ethiopia: army foils al-Shabab attack near Somali border, US food aid suspended

Ethiopian soldiers are reported to have foiled on Wednesday June 7 a suicide attack by the armed group al-Shabab at a town of Dollo near its border with Somalia, while the US Agency for International Development (USAID) said a day later it was suspending food aid to the East African country because of the aid diversion away from people who need it.

The Ethiopian arm stopped the attackers before they could wreak havoc in the Ethiopia-Somalia border town by “[neutralizing] suicide bombers and [destroying] weapons to be used by the terrorist group,” the Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday. Al-Shabab, which has been linked to al-Qaeda, has been waging an armed rebellion against Somalia’s central government for about 15 years. The alleged incident in Dollo comes days after Uganda announced 54 of its soldiers were killed in an attack on a base housing African Union peacekeepers in Somalia. The terrorist group was driven out of Mogadishu in 2011 by an AU force, but it still controls swathes of countryside and regularly carries out deadly strikes on civilian, political and military targets.

Meanwhile, US top diplomat Antony Blinken on Thursday welcomed the Ethiopian government’s commitment to investigate the diversion of American food aid away from people who needed it, the State Department said. This comes just hours after the USAID announced its finding, in coordination with the Ethiopian government, that a “widespread and coordinated campaign is diverting food assistance from the people of Ethiopia.” It did not, however, say who was behind the campaign or who the aid was being diverted to. The USAID added that it intended to resume food assistance as soon as it was confident in the integrity of the system.

Blinken met with Ethiopian leaders on the margins of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS (Islamic State) in Saudi Arabia.