Two car bombs exploded Saturday at a busy junction in Somalia's capital near key government offices, causing “scores of civilian casualties" including children, national police said. One hospital worker counted at least 30 bodies amid fears of possibly many more. The attack in Mogadishu occurred on a day when the president, prime minister and other senior officials were meeting to discuss expanded efforts to combat violent extremism, especially by the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Shabab group that often targets the capital. It also came five years after another massive blast in the exact same location killed over 500 people. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Al-Shabab rarely claims attacks with large numbers of civilians killed, as in the 2017 blast. But President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud blamed al-Shabab by name, calling the attack “cruel and cowardly.” A volunteer at the Medina hospital, Hassan Osman, said “out of the total of at least 30 dead people brought to the hospital, the majority of them are women. I have seen this with my own eyes.” At the hospital and elsewhere, frantic relatives peeked under plastic sheeting and into body bags, looking for loved ones. The Aamin ambulance service said they had collected at least 35 wounded. One ambulance responding to the first attack was destroyed by the second blast, director Abdulkadir Adan added in a tweet. “I was 100 meters away when the second blast occurred,” witness Abdirazak Hassan said. “I couldn't count the bodies on the ground due to the (number of) fatalities.” He said the first blast hit the perimeter wall of the education ministry, where street vendors and money changers were located. An Associated Press journalist at the scene said the second blast occurred in front of a busy restaurant during lunchtime. The blasts demolished tuk-tuks and other vehicles in an area of many restaurants and hotels. He saw “many” bodies and said they appeared to be civilians traveling on public transport. The Somali Journalists Syndicate, citing colleagues and police, said one journalist was killed and two others wounded by the second blast while rushing to the scene of the first. The attack occurred at Zobe junction, which was the scene of a huge al-Shabab truck bombing in 2017 that killed more than 500 people. Somalia’s government has been engaged in a high-profile new offensive against the extremist group that the United States has described as one of al-Qaida’s deadliest organizations. The president has described it as “total war" against the extremists, who control large parts of central and southern Somalia and have been the target of scores of U.S. airstrikes in recent years. The extremists have responded by killing prominent clan leaders in an apparent effort to dissuade support for that government offensive. On Saturday, Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre said the attack would not dampen the public uprising against al-Shabab, and he and the president expressed the government's determination to wipe out the extremist group.

The United Nations says “famine is at the door” in Somalia with “concrete indications” famine will occur later this year in the southern Bay region. This falls just short of a formal famine declaration in Somalia as thousands are dying in a historic drought made worse by the effects of the war in Ukraine. U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told reporters that he was “shocked to my core these past few days” on a visit to Somalia in which he witnessed starving babies too weak to cry. A formal famine declaration is rare and a warning that too little help has come too late. At least 1 million people in Somalia have been displaced by the worst drought in decades, driven by climate change, that also affects the wider Horn of Africa including Ethiopia and Kenya. Famine is the extreme lack of food and a significant death rate from outright starvation or malnutrition combined with diseases like cholera. A declaration means data shows more than a fifth of households have extreme food gaps, more than 30% of children are acutely malnourished and over two people out of 10,000 are dying every day. Also read: UN warns 6 million Afghans at risk of famine as crises grow Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been described as a disaster for Somalia, which has suffered from a shortage of humanitarian aid as international donors focus on Europe. Somalia also sourced at least 90% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine before the war and has been hit hard by scarcity and the sharp rise in food prices. “Ukraine has occupied the narrative,” Griffiths said. Hungry families in Somalia have been staggering for days or weeks on foot through parched terrain in search of assistance. Many bury family members along the way. Even when they reach camps outside urban areas, they find little or no help. At one camp outside the capital, Mogadishu, Fadumo Abdi Aliyow showed The Associated Press the graves of her two small sons next to their makeshift home. Disease had overwhelmed their weakened bodies. One was 4. The other was eight months old. Also read: Ukraine's ports must be reopened to avert looming famine threat: UN “I wanted to die before them so they could bury me,” Aliyow said. Another resident of the camp of 1,800 families, Samey Adan Mohamed, said the last meal she and her eight children had was rice a day ago. Today they had only tea. Camps like theirs are ringed by death, bringing aid workers to tears. “I couldn’t get out of my head the tiny mounds of ground marking children’s graves,” UNICEF’s deputy regional director Rania Dagash said last week. “I’m from this region and I’ve never seen it so bad.” A formal famine declaration would bring desperately needed funding. But “tragically, by the time a famine is declared, it’s already too late,” the U.N. World Food Program has said. When famine was declared in parts of Somalia in 2011, the deaths of a quarter-million people were well underway. “This is not a repeat of the 2011 famine. It is much worse,” the U.N. humanitarian agency said last week. So far, at least 730 children have died in nutrition centers across Somalia, it said, and more than 213,000 people are at “imminent risk” of dying. “You feel like you’re looking at the face of death,” Mercy Corps CEO Tjada McKenna told the AP after visiting the badly hit city of Baidoa. There is not enough therapeutic food to treat the acutely malnourished, said McKenna, who saw many young children and pregnant women. “For every one person I saw, imagine all the people who couldn’t get that far. And so many people were arriving each day.” At the same time, aid funding has dropped more than 60% from the response to Somalia’s previous drought in 2017, USAID administrator Samantha Power said last week, noting a “degree of despair and devastation” not seen before in her career. The Horn of Africa region has seen four straight failed rainy seasons for the first time in well over four decades. The upcoming rainy season is also expected to fail. That endangers an estimated 20 million people in one of the world’s most impoverished and turbulent regions. “Sadly, our models show with a high degree of confidence that we are entering the fifth consecutive failed rainy season,” the director of the regional climate prediction center, Guleid Artan, has said. “In Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, we are on the brink of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.” The rainfall in this year’s failed March-to-May season was the lowest in the last six decades, Artan told the AP. Next year’s March-to-May season doesn’t look good either, he said, worrying that “this could be the seven-year drought, the biblical one.” Formal famine declarations are rare because data to meet the benchmarks often cannot be obtained because of conflict, poor infrastructure or politics. Governments can be wary of being associated with a term of such grim magnitude. Somalia's recently elected president, however, appointed a drought envoy in one of his first acts in office, which Griffiths called “impressive.” Because of the remote nature of Somalia’s drought, and with some hard-hit areas under the control of the al-Shabab extremist group which has been hostile to humanitarian efforts, no one knows how many people have died — or will in the months to come. Hundreds of calls from across Somalia, including from al-Shabab-controlled areas, come in daily to the Somali-run Radio Ergo. Some say no aid is available in camps. Others say water sources have run dry or lament the loss of millions of livestock that are the foundation of their health and wealth. “People don’t cry because they want their voice to be heard,” radio editor Leyla Mohamed told the AP. “But you can feel they are hurting, that they feel more than we can hear.”

Islamic militants have stormed a hotel in Somalia's capital, engaging in an hours-long exchange of fire with the security forces that left at least 20 people dead, according to police and witnesses. In addition, at least 40 people were wounded in the late Friday night attack and security forces rescued many others, including children, from the scene at Mogadishu's popular Hayat Hotel, they said Saturday. The attack started with explosions outside the hotel before the gunmen entered the building. Somali forces were still trying to end the siege of the hotel almost 24 hours after the attack started. Gunfire could still be heard Saturday evening as security forces tried to contain the last gunmen thought to be holed up on the hotel’s top floor. The Islamic extremist group al-Shabab, which has ties with al-Qaida, claimed responsibility for the attack, the latest of its frequent attempts to strike places visited by government officials. The attack on the hotel is the first major terror incident in Mogadishu since Somalia's new leader, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, took over in May. In a Twitter post, the U.S. Embassy in Somalia said it “strongly condemns” the attack on the Hayat. Read: Gunmen kill 4 in attack targeting lawmaker in NW Pakistan “We extend condolences to the families of loved ones killed, wish a full recovery to the injured, & pledge continued support for #Somalia to hold murderers accountable & build when others destroy,” it said. There was no immediate word on the identities of the victims, but many are believed to be civilians. Mohamed Abdirahman, director of Mogadishu’s Madina Hospital, told the AP that 40 people were admitted there with wounds or injuries from the attack. While nine were sent home after getting treatment, five are in critical condition in the ICU, he said. “We were having tea near the hotel lobby when we heard the first blast, followed by gunfire. I immediately rushed toward hotel rooms on the ground floor and I locked the door,” witness Abdullahi Hussein said by phone. “The militants went straight upstairs and started shooting. I was inside the room until the security forces arrived and rescued me.” He said on his way to safety he saw “several bodies lying on the ground outside hotel reception.” Al-Shabab remains the most lethal Islamic extremist group in Africa. The group has seized even more territory in recent years, taking advantage of rifts among Somali security personnel as well as disagreements between the government seat in Mogadishu and regional states. It remains the biggest threat to political stability in the volatile Horn of Africa nation. Forced to retreat from Mogadishu in 2011, al-Shabab is slowly making a comeback from the rural areas to which it retreated, defying the presence of African Union peacekeepers as well as U.S. drone strikes targeting its fighters. The militants in early May attacked a military base for AU peacekeepers outside Mogadishu, killing many Burundian troops. The attack came just days before the presidential vote that returned Mohamud to power five years after he had been voted out.

Somalia's regional forces in Galmudug State killed 17 al-Shabab militants who attempted to attack a local town early Friday, security officials said. The security officials told the state-owned Somali National Television that the terrorists were killed after they attempted to capture Baxdo town in central Somalia. Read: Dozens of protesters, 12 police dead in Kazakhstan protests "The regional forces of Somalia's Galmudug State have repulsed an attack by al-Shabab on Baxdo town, killing 17 terrorists in the early hours of Friday," the television station reported. The move comes amid intensified operations by Somali forces against al-Shabab militants in central and southern regions where the militants still hold swathes of rural areas conducting ambushes and planting land mines.

Somalia has agreed to a Bangladesh proposal on joint contract farming in the African country for better use of its huge unutilized cultivable land. Visiting State Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Somalia Balal Mohamed Cusman agreed to the proposal made by Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen when the two met on Wednesday.   Read:South Africa looks for greater collaboration with Bangladesh Balal Mohamed met Momen on the sidelines of IORA 21st meeting of Council of Ministers and discussed bilateral issues. Both sides agreed to establish cooperation in education, IT and agriculture sectors as well as develop the existing trade and commerce.  Dr Momen proposed that the agreement on cooperation on avoidance of double taxation may be signed between two countries.  He also sought the support of Somalia on the issue of safe and dignified return of the displaced Rohingya people to their homeland.  The Balal Mohamed sought support of Bangladesh for Somalia contesting for UN Security Council Election in 2025-2026 turn.  He expressed his heartfelt thanks for the warm welcome extended by Bangladesh side to the Somalian delegation during IORA conference.  Read:BGMEA for branding 'Made in Bangladesh' Foreign Minister Momen informed that Bangladesh is observing the birth centenary of the Father of the Nation of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who dreamt for emancipation of the people across the globe.  He apprised the Somalian State Minister about the extensive vaccination programme of the Bangladesh Government as well as Government plan for coproduction of Covid vaccine to immunize the people.  Momen also apprised him about the development march of Bangladesh and said that Bangladesh is maintaining robust economic growth despite the effect of Covid Pandemic.  He underlined that both countries may cooperate in various areas including agriculture, education and IT &ICT.  The Foreign Minister suggested that Somalian students may choose to study in Bangladesh private Universities as education is being offered in various disciplines.  He also mentioned that Bangladesh has made lot of progress in agricultural research areas as well as agricultural production.  Bangladesh is exporting pharmaceuticals to a large number of countries.  Bangladesh also has acquired expertise in ship building and it is producing ship, burges and boats.  Momen mentioned that Bangladesh has earned expertise in sectors like IT and ICT, agriculture including fisheries and livestock.   He said Bangladesh and Somalia maintain friendly cooperation.  Somalia has been supporting international candidature of Bangladesh.  He sought support of Somalia at the next IMO and Human Rights Councils.

A vehicle laden with explosives rammed into cars and trucks at a checkpoint leading to the entrance of the Presidential Palace in Somalia, killing at least eight people, police said Saturday. The checkpoint is the one used by Somalia’s president and prime minister on their way to and from the airport in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Read:At least 2 killed in German chemical blast; 31 injured Nine other people were wounded in the bombing, police spokesman Abdifatah Adam Hassan said. The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group has claimed responsibility. The group often carries out such attacks in the capital.

The death toll has risen to at least 20 after a vehicle packed with explosives rammed into a popular restaurant in Somalia’s capital on Friday night, with 30 wounded, the government news agency reported Saturday.

As richer countries race to distribute COVID-19 vaccines, Somalia remains the rare place where much of the population hasn’t taken the coronavirus seriously. Some fear that’s proven to be deadlier than anyone knows.

Eight people were killed and 28 others injured in a car-bomb attack at Elite Hotel in Liido Beach of Mogadishu on Sunday, said officials.

Somalia's homegrown Islamic extremist rebels, al-Shabab, have claimed responsibility for a truck bomb in the capital, Mogadishu, that killed at least 79 people last week, including many students.