The United States launched air strikes on suspected al-Qaeda hideouts in Somalia in its first overt military intervention in the lawless nation since the early 1990s, officials said on Tuesday.
At least two villages in southern Somalia were hit in Monday’s US raids that Somali officials said were appropriate in the global war on terrorism and had killed many people whose identities were not immediately clear.
Interim Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed defended Washington’s targeting of the camps where suspects in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are believed under the protection of hard-line Islamists.
”The Americans had a right to carry out the air strikes on some al-Qaeda members,” he told reporters, a day after returning to Mogadishu following the Islamists’ ouster from the city by Somali and Ethiopian troops last month.
”Those who carried out attacks on the US embassy in Kenya and Tanzania were there, so it was the right thing and the right time to carry out such strikes,” Yusuf said.
”The Americans are cracking down on al-Qaeda terrorists all over the world and this was part of it.”
Interior Minister Hussein Mohamed Aidid echoed those comments, saying the US ”has the right to defend itself and has an international obligation to support a legitimate government under threat by terrorists.”
”Many people were killed and I think the terrorists were eliminated,” Information Minister Ali Jama told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
”Absolutely, a lot of people were killed,” government spokesperson Abdirahman Dinari told AFP. ”So many dead people were lying in the area, we do not know who is who, but the raid was a success.”
Officials and other informed sources said the US had targeted two villages — Badel and Aayo — in the raids carried out by an AC-130 gunship, operated by the US Special Operations Command, according to US television reports.
The identities of those killed could not be confirmed but officials said the targets of the raids included the senior al-Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al-Qaeda operative wanted in the embassy bombings that killed 224 people.
US officials have said bombing suspects Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, a native of the Comoros Islands, Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and a Sudanese national, Abu Taha al-Sudan, are all hiding among the Somali Islamists.
Mohamed, who has a $5-million bounty on his head, was indicted by a US federal grand jury for his role in the embassy attacks.
The three and other Islamist fighters were chased out of Mogadishu on December 28 by Ethiopian and Somali troops and, according to CBS News, were tracked by unmanned US aerial drones.
The raid came after Ethiopian and Somali troops routed the Islamists from their final stronghold in the southern port town of Kismayo, forcing them to flee into scrublands along the border with Kenya.
The AC-130 gunship, an armed variant of the C-130 Hercules transport plane, is designed for close air support.
The last such effort ended in 1994 with the final withdrawal of US forces from the United Nations-backed Operation Restore Hope stabilisation mission following heavy losses in what was dramatised in the book and a film Black Hawk Down.
However, last year, the US covertly supported warlords fighting the Islamist movement in a failed bid to capture or kill the al-Qaeda suspects and prevent the fall of Mogadishu, which fell to the Islamists in June.
In the 1998 attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, al-Qaeda militants, using materials smuggled through Somalia, blew up the US embassies in the two cities, killing 224 people and injuring thousands, most of them Africans.
Attacks in 2002 on an Israeli airliner and Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa also originated in Somalia, US officials say.
Somali officials said Monday’s air strikes came after negotiations with the Ayr sub clan — believed to be sheltering the militants — failed to disclose the whereabouts of the three fugitives. — AFP
