In Somalia, at least 20 people were killed Monday in a pair of car bomb attacks. The militant group al-Shabab took responsibility, claiming the attack in the central city of Beledweyne killed Somali government officials and soldiers. The violence came after the U.S. military said it killed the leader of al-Shabab in an airstrike on Saturday. U.S. Africa Command says its initial assessment showed Abdullahi Nadir was killed, while no civilians were injured in the strike 230 miles southwest of the capital Mogadishu.
This comes after the Pentagon claimed in an annual report published last week that U.S. forces killed only 12 noncombatants in 2021. The war monitoring group Airwars accused the Pentagon of vastly undercounting civilian deaths, noting that it documented up to 25 civilians killed by the U.S. last year in Syria alone.