African Union troops in Somalia said Friday they had killed two "senior" commanders of the Al-Qaida-linked Shebab insurgents, in the latest push of an offensive against the extremist fighters.

Witnesses reported that fighter jets also pounded the town of Jilib in southern Somalia's Middle Juba region on Thursday, part of the offensive by the 22,000-strong U.N.-backed AU mission in Somalia (AMISOM), who launched in March a fresh bid to wrest remaining towns from the Islamists.

The only Canadian ever to be convicted of seeking to join an overseas terrorist group was sentenced in a Toronto area courtroom Thursday to 10 years in prison.

Mohamed Hersi, 28, was arrested at Toronto airport in 2011 as he tried to board a plane to his birth country of Somalia.

Three women were arrested Wednesday, in the United States and Netherlands, for allegedly giving financial help to Somalia's al-Qaida-linked Shebab, authorities said.

Since the United States deems the group a terrorist organization, such aid is a crime for which Muna Osman Jama, 34, was arrested at her home in Reston, Virginia, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Somali lawmaker and prominent singer-songwriter Saado Ali Warsame was shot dead Wednesday in the capital Mogadishu in the latest attack by Shebab insurgents against the government, police and witnesses said.

The shooting, with gunmen spraying her car with bullets before escaping, is the latest in a string of shootings or bombings targeting government officials.

At least four people were killed in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa on Sunday in an attack by armed men on a motorbike, according to medical sources.

Another eight people were wounded in the shooting, said the same source.

Three years to the day since a famine that eventually killed more than a quarter of a million people was declared in Somalia, aid agencies warned Sunday the country faced a new catastrophe without urgent aid.

A joint statement issued by a group of charities and aid agencies said there were more than 300,000 malnourished children in Somalia and a total of 2.9 million people in need of life-saving help.

Somalia's al-Qaida-linked Shebab on Saturday claimed an attack on a bus near the Kenyan vacation island of Lamu in which seven people were killed.

The Kenyan Red Cross said five civilians and two police officers died late on Friday when armed men opened fire first on a bus, then on a car and a police vehicle, near the town of Witu, 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Lamu island.

A prominent militia leader in southern Somalia said a suicide bomber killed six people in an attack on his home on Saturday, pinning the blame on al-Qaida-linked Shebab militants. 

Iftin Hassan Basto, a tribal leader who has fought with the Islamist group in the past, said six people, including a child, were killed and seven injured. 

Somalia's al-Qaida-linked Shebab claimed responsibility on Saturday for an attack on a bus and police vehicle on Kenya's restive southeastern coast that killed at least seven people.

At least two people have been killed in Somalia in separate attacks, including a car bombing in the capital Mogadishu, officials and witnesses said Thursday.

Police said one person died and another was seriously wounded on Thursday when an explosive device attached to their car was remotely detonated in the south of the capital.