On a good day, Salat Ahmed and his pregnant wife Sadiyo make two dollars (1.80 euro) selling kilogram bundles of khat, a leafy green herb that is mildly narcotic when chewed.

They run their business from a corrugated tin shack beside an extravagantly cratered dirt road in Ifo, one of five camps that together form the world's largest refugee settlement, Dadaab in northeast Kenya.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta promised Wednesday not to force refugees home, backtracking on a three-month deadline issued by his deputy that would have pushed hundreds of thousands back to war zones.

Kenya had threatened to send refugees home -- including closing the world's largest camp complex in Dadaab, where more than 360,000 Somali refugees live -- following last month's university massacre of 148 people in Garissa by Somalia's Al-Qaida-affiliated Shebab insurgents.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that war-torn Somalia was facing a better future, as he made a landmark visit as the most senior U.S. official to visit since Washington's doomed military intervention more than two decades ago.

The top U.S. diplomat spent just a few hours in the capital, Mogadishu, and did not venture out of the heavily-fortified airport, where he met Somalia's internationally-backed President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmake.

One of the men shot dead by police when he and an accomplice attempted to storm an event hosted by an anti-Muslim group in Texas was investigated by the FBI over his alleged jihadist sympathies, it emerges.

Investigators were delving into the backgrounds of the two suspected Islamist gunmen -- they were roommates, The Los Angeles Times reported -- who opened fire with assault rifles outside Sunday's controversial exhibit of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Somalia's government has ordered journalists to call Islamist Shebab insurgents "the Group that Massacres the Somali People," or "Ugus", the acronym of the phrase in Somali.

"The meaning of al-Shebab is 'The Youth', and that is a good name," Somalia's intelligence chief Abdirahman Mohamud Turyare told reporters.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry vowed support to Kenya on Monday in the battle against Somalia's al-Qaida-affiliated Shebab, after calling for unity in the face of terror attacks.

"The U.S. continues to stand resolutely with the government and people of Kenya in the effort to end scourge of violent extremism," Kerry said.

Kenya's interior minister on Thursday admitted that intelligence was ignored and the security response botched regarding the Islamist massacre of nearly 150 people at Garissa university in April.

Security should have been "beefed up" but was not, and once the attack began a "lack of coordination" undermined the response, Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery told a parliamentary committee.

Somalia's Shebab militants are divided over whether to maintain their allegiance to Al-Qaida or shift to Islamic State, according to militant and security sources, analysts and clan elders.

The division comes at a time when Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has become the jihadist franchise of choice, attracting fighters from abroad and other militant groups such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, while Al-Qaida too has recently expanded its territory in Yemen.

President Barack Obama's admission Thursday that a U.S. drone strike accidentally took the lives of two hostages has raised fresh questions about the limits and the risks of the country's "targeted killing" campaign.

Since taking office in 2009, Obama has relied heavily on drone raids to hunt down Al-Qaeda leaders and other Islamist extremists from Pakistan's tribal areas to Somalia and Yemen.

Somalia's prime minister warned Thursday that the conflict in Yemen poses dangers across the Gulf of Aden where an influx of refugees is stretching scarce resources and al-Qaida militants are eager for support.

More than 2,000 refugees have so far arrived in the northern Somali regions of Puntland and Somaliland, with the U.N. refugee agency preparing to receive as many as 100,000 in the coming months.