Death in the morning: Why Amisom soldiers had little fighting chance in Janaale
Ugandan soldiers serving with Amisom at a base in Somalia. Set up in January 2007 by the African Union’s Peace and Security Council, Amisom was meant to be a small, short-term peacekeeping force to keep warring Somali factions apart as a new transitional government built up support and credibility. In March that year Uganda landed its first 1,700 soldiers in Somalia, followed by Burundi six months later. PHOTO | AFP
The explosion went off at around 5:25am. Daylight was breaking in Janaale, a sleepy town in the southeastern Lower Shabelle region of Somalia, about 90 kilometres from the capital Mogadishu.
Through the fast-clearing early morning darkness, two soldiers on guard duty at the Quarter Guard were the first to spot the suicide bomber as he raced an explosive-laden vehicle into the tree log contraption that served as a gate to the detachment. The two soldiers fired at the old truck, which veered off sharply, away from the Quarter Guard, towards a building that housed the second-in-command of the detachment, before exploding in an orange fireball of deadly shrapnel.
