Despite the killings of Osama bin Laden and radical U.S.-Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaida terror network remains a "real threat to the United States," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a TV interview late Wednesday.

CBS News released excerpts of an interview with Panetta scheduled to run Sunday, in which the Pentagon chief discusses U.S. strategy to disband al-Qaida's global networks.

U.S. Special Forces troops flew into Somalia on a nighttime helicopter raid early Wednesday, freed an American and a Danish hostage and killed nine pirates in a mission that President Barack Obama said he personally authorized.

The Danish Refugee Council confirmed that the two aid workers, American Jessica Buchanan and Dane Poul Hagen Thisted, were freed and "are on their way to be reunited with their families."

An Islamist suicide bomber from the al-Qaida linked Shebab blew himself up Tuesday at an Ethiopian army base inside the central Somali town of Beledweyne, officials and insurgents said Tuesday.

"There was a heavy explosion that shook the whole the city, it occurred at a base where Ethiopian forces are stationed," local security official Mohamed Osman told Agence France Presse.

Kenyan troops clashed with Somalia's al-Qaida linked Shebab militants in southern Somalia, the latest attack in a three-month long push forward against insurgent bases, officials said Monday.

Two Kenyan and one Somali soldiers were killed during an attack late Sunday on hardline Shehab positions at Delbio and Hosingo, said Kenyan army spokesman Major Emmanuel Chirchir, who claimed Shebab gunmen had retreated.

A U.S. drone strike killed a Lebanese-British al-Qaida official fighting alongside insurgents in Somalia in a three-missile attack, officials said.

Three missiles fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle hit Bilal al-Berjawi's car on the outskirts of Mogadishu, according to a statement from the insurgent al-Kataib media foundation late Saturday. Berjawi was a Lebanese and British citizen who grew up in West London and fought in Afghanistan before going to Somalia in 2006.

A Lebanese-British fighter with the Islamist Shebab militia in Somalia was killed Saturday during a drone attack in the capital Mogadishu, said the movement's spokesman Sheik Ali Mohamoud Rage.

"This afternoon unmanned aircraft bombed and killed our brother Hilal al-Barzawi from Lebanon with British citizenship who fought in Somalia for a long time," he told reporters.

A foreigner has been kidnapped in a semi-autonomous province of central Somalia, a local official said Saturday.

"We have reports that a foreigner has been abducted from Galmudug," security official Ali Abdulrahman said, adding that he had been on the airport road near the town of Galkayo and was believed to be in the employ of the local government.

Somali Islamist gunmen ambushed a convoy of government officials and journalists Friday during intense fighting in Mogadishu, killing three soldiers and an official, an Agence France Presse photographer said.

"We were heading to the frontline when our convoy was ambushed by Shebab fighters, an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) struck one vehicle," the photographer said, adding that he saw four bodies.

African Union-backed Somali government forces launched a fresh offensive Friday to seize holdout Islamist Shebab positions in the war-torn capital Mogadishu, officials and witnesses said.

Heavy fighting broke out as troops supported by tanks and artillery from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) moved into the capital's northern Heliwa and Gubta suburbs, still held by the al-Qaida linked Shebab.

Aid group Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres - MSF) said Thursday it had halved its operations in Somalia's war-torn capital after two employees were shot dead last month.

MSF also said it closed down operations in Mogadishu's Hodan district, where it was helping some 200,000 people who fled other Somali regions hit by drought and famine.