Al Shabaab militants attacked two military bases belonging to the Somali National Army early on Saturday morning, witnesses and the militants said.

At least seven soldiers were killed when fighters of the Somali militant group al Shabaab stormed a jail in the semi-autonomous state of Puntland early on Friday, police and the group said.

A suspected suicide car bomb exploded on Sunday in Somalia's capital and was followed by a shootout between militants and security forces at a hotel, causing an unknown number of casualties, witnesses and authorities said.

Ugandan soldiers working as part of a peacekeeping force in Somalia have killed 189 al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab fighters in an attack on one of their camps, the Ugandan army said.

The United States said on Tuesday one civilian was killed and three were injured in a US air strike in Somalia in February, the second such admission since it launched quarterly reports

An explosion shook parts of the Somali capital of Mogadishu early on Saturday as a suicide car bomber drove into a checkpoint just outside the port, witnesses said, but police made no immediate comment on casualties.

At least seven people have died in two separate bomb attacks in southern and central Somalia in the last 24 hours, police and military officers said on Sunday.

A police reservist and two armed attackers were killed in a gunfight on Sunday in Kenya's northeast Mandera county near the border with Somalia, a security official said.

Al Shabaab militants killed at least 12 Somali soldiers and briefly captured a military base southwest of the capital on Wednesday

Somali insurgents linked to al Qaeda claimed responsibility for a car bombing on Saturday that wounded at least 15 people in Afgoye, northwest of the capital Mogadishu.

Somalia's al Shabaab militant group attacked on Sunday a military base in Kenya used by both US and Kenyan forces and published pictures of masked gunmen standing next to an aircraft in flames.

Armed assailants on Thursday killed three people and injured two others in Kenya's Lamu county, a coastal region near the border with Somalia, police said.