Geolocation
Airwars assessment
A US drone strike reportedly killed Abu Ubaidah, leader of al Shabaab, as well as four other fighters. The US told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: “We are aware of the media reports but have no information on the incident.” However two named Somali officials asserted that it was a drone attack.
Ubaidah replaced Ahmed Abdi Godane when he was killed by US drones in September 2014. The US put out a reward in November 2015 for up to $6m to anyone with information leading to the location of Ubaidah.
It should be noted that Airwars was not able to retrieve the original confirmation from Africom to BIJ, and must thus rely on paraphrasing BIJ’s earlier reporting.
The incident occured during the night.
Geolocation notes (1) [ collapse]
Reports of the incident mention that the strike targeted an Al Shabaab base in an area called Shanta Ameriko, reportedly the location of a former American oil company. According to GeoNames the coordinates for the Shanta Ameriko area are: 1.218208, 43.360354. This location is in an area that was explored by the American oil company Amoco during the 1980s however we weren’t able to narrow down a specific oil structure in this area. Due to limited information and satellite imagery available to Airwars, we were unable to verify the location further.