The US military said it had been monitoring the camp for several weeks and had gathered intelligence, including on an imminent threat posed by the militants.
The Department of Defense hit a camp of al-Shabaab fighters in Somalia Saturday, killing 150 in an act of “self-defense”.
Officials said Monday that the drone strike was carried out over the weekend and dropped Hellfire missiles on a camp located about 120 miles (195 km) north of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Davis did not elaborate on what type of attack the group was allegedly planning. “We shall give details of casualties later”, Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab’s military operation spokesman, told Reuters.
“There was a sense that the operational phase was about to happen”, Davis said.
Al-Shabab also was blamed when a bomb exploded aboard a commercial jet last month, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Mogadishu.
Intelligence indicated the group was training for some time and was in the final stages of getting ready to conduct a “large-scale attack”, Davis said.
The group, which is an off-shoot of al-Qaeda was forced out of the capital in 2011 but continues the violence in an effort to overthrow the Western-backed government. Iraq and Syria, where US airstrikes are pummeling the Islamic State group, now are on that list and won’t be in the report, said a senior administration official, who wasn’t authorized to comment publicly and requested anonymity.
Meanwhile, an Australian Navy ship has seized a huge cache of weapons near Oman’s coast from a fishing vessel bound for Somalia. The strikes reportedly targeted al-Shabab militants. With drones from its nearby bases in neighbouring Djibouti, the USA has succeeded in striking hard at the heart of al-Shabab operations, including killing Ahmed Godane, the leader of the jihadi group, in 2014.
Al-Shabaab was behind deadly attacks in Uganda and Kenya, which both contribute troops to Somalia’s African Union peacekeeping force.