Washington: A medical evacuation helicopter reached five US soldiers in Somalia on June 22 roughly 20 minutes after they radioed that they were being shelled by militants, according to a military spokesman, a prompt response that underlines the disparity in US military resources spread across Africa.

One of the soldiers, Staff Sergeant Alexander W. Conrad, 26, of Chandler, Arizona, who was identified by the Pentagon the next day, died from his injuries shortly after he arrived at a US base in Kismayo, a town about 225 miles (362km) southwest of Mogadishu, the capital. The four other Americans were wounded in the attack by the militant group Al Shabab.

The response to the firefight stood in stark contrast to the one after a bloody ambush in October on the Niger-Mali border in West Africa, when it took more than four hours to evacuate the wounded.

The roughly 500 US troops in Somalia — stationed at a small constellation of bases throughout the East African nation — have been training and fighting alongside local troops there for more than a decade. They are now buttressed by invigorated air strike authorities under the Trump administration.

Until recently, Special Operations troops in Somalia had been fighting a noticeably different war from their counterparts in West Africa, one constrained by a smaller geography and the longtime presence of extremist groups.

For any large operation like the one in Somalia on June 22, Special Operations troops routinely pre-stage medical evacuation helicopters and have armed air support.

By contrast, in the October ambush in Niger, which was led by more than 50 militants from the group known as Daesh in the Greater Sahara, the troops relied on contracted medical evacuation that is not as capable as the military’s. The only armed air support arrived by way of French fighter jets, more than an hour after the gun battle started.

The attack on June 22 came towards the end of a daylong operation in which a team of Green Berets from the 3rd Special Forces Group — the same unit that fought in the ambush in Niger — worked to clear several villages from Al Shabab control alongside 800 local troops from Somalia and Kenya. The US team, which numbered about 25, including civil affairs and intelligence personnel, had also helped with the construction of a combat outpost.

According to Major Casey Osborne, a spokesman for the Africa Command’s Special Operations branch in Germany, the enemy attack was quick, giving the armed reconnaissance aircraft overhead little time to find the militants firing at the Americans. According to one military official familiar with the attack, the Special Forces soldiers had less than a month left on their deployment.

Al Shabab said in a post translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremist message boards, that its fighters had attacked a joint US-Somali base near Kismayo, mounting what it called a “fierce attack”.

Over the past year, the Pentagon has shown renewed concerns about Al Shabab, which was responsible for one of the deadliest terrorist attacks on African soil when it struck a popular shopping mall in 2013 in Nairobi, Kenya, killing at least 67 people.

US military officials worry that the group is growing once more, even after losing much of its territory in Somalia in recent years and being targeted by US drone strikes.