MOGADISHU, Somalia (AFP) — International peacekeepers are battling radical Islamist fighters to retake a strategic Somali town, the African Union mission in the country said on Sunday.

Since the beginning of 2024, the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Shabaab group has seized dozens of towns and villages in an offensive which has reversed nearly all of the gains made by the troubled Horn of Africa nation’s army in 2022 and 2023.

After a string of defeats, the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) on Friday launched a major offensive to retake the town of Bariire, located some 100 kilometers west of Mogadishu in the Bas-Shabelle region.

Home to a significant military operational base, Bariire fell to Al-Shabaab in March without a fight after Somalia’s soldiers retreated, with the jihadists destroying a bridge vital to the military’s supply lines.

Denying Al-Shabaab’s claims that the army has sustained many casualties in attempting to retake Bariire, AUSSOM on Sunday instead said the fighting had resulted in “50 Al Shabaab militants killed and many others sustaining serious injuries.”

Although AUSSOM has more than 10,000 boots on the ground in Somalia, Al-Shabaab has in recent months racked up a spate of successes against the peacekeeping mission and its allies in the Somali army.

At the end of June its fighters killed at least seven Ugandan soldiers deployed to another town in Bas-Shabelle.

Al-Shabaab claimed an attack in March which narrowly missed the convoy of Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, and took potshots at the capital Mogadishu’s airport in April.