First lot of Somali soldiers come home from Eritrea
The first batch of 5,000 Somali men sent to train as soldiers in Eritrea returned home to be deployed against an Islamist insurgency, a minister said.
Their return ends months of worry among families who feared they might have been recruited under false pretence and held captive.
Somali defence minister Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur described it as "good news" that they had been brought home to the Horn of Africa nation.
It will have "so much meaning for the ongoing military operations," he added, referring to the fight against the Islamist rebel group Al-Shabaab.
"The rest of the troops will return in the next couple of days," Nur said, without disclosing how many had come back.
Rumours had swirled in the country of 17 million people that the soldiers may have been deployed to the war-torn Ethiopian region of Tigray.
"This will be a blow to the evildoers (Al-Shabaab), and anyone else who is doing harm in the country," Nur said.
Somalia has been wracked by decades of civil war, political violence and an Islamist insurgency.
Forced out of the country's main urban centres around 10 years ago, Al-Shabaab have been waging a bloody insurgency against Somalia's internationally backed federal government for 15 years.
They remain entrenched in vast swathes of rural central and southern Somalia and continue to carry out deadly attacks in the capital Mogadishu.
