NAIROBI, Kenya — Five suicide blasts rocked government and international targets in northern Somalia on Wednesday, killing at least 31 people, according to international security officials, in the most highly coordinated terrorist strike in years in the troubled East African nation.
Although no group immediately claimed responsibility, the strike had the markings of an al-Qaeda attack because of its timing and organization, Jendayi Frazer, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said in Nairobi, where regional leaders were holding meetings on Somalia’s long-running political crisis.
The midmorning blasts occurred within an hour in the semi-autonomous northern regions of Somaliland and Puntland, which are separated from the Arabian Peninsula by the Gulf of Aden.
Until now, the regions had been spared the high levels of violence that have engulfed the southern capital, Mogadishu, where an increasingly formidable Islamist insurgency has been raging for nearly two years. Security experts said the attacks appeared timed to disrupt the regional meeting in Nairobi aimed at jump-starting a peace process for Somalia, which hasn’t had a functioning government since 1991.
The insurgency is led by the militant group al-Shabaab, which the State Department has designated a terrorist organization and has claimed ties with al-Qaeda. The group has boycotted the peace talks, and its leaders have said they won’t respect a cease-fire that was signed over the weekend until all troops from neighboring Ethiopia, which invaded Somalia nearly two years ago with U.S. intelligence support to oust a hard-line Islamist regime, leave the country.
The worst damage Wednesday occurred in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, where car bombs struck the presidential residence, a United Nations compound and the Ethiopian Embassy.
The attacks underscored the huge obstacles that the peace process faces. A U.N.- backed transitional government was formed nearly five years ago to restore order to Somalia, but it has split apart because of corruption, infighting and clan divisions.
