United States forces were reported to have launched a third consecutive day of air strikes in Somalia on Wednesday as a Somali government official said one of three al-Qaeda suspects targeted by the raids was believed to have been killed.
The official said the operation was understood to have killed an al-Qaeda militant thought to be behind the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people in all.
However, US officials on Wednesday said there have been no new US air strikes on targets in Somalia since the previously reported operation on Monday, contradicting a report from a Somali government source.
”I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage. One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead,” said Abdirizak Hassan, the Somali president’s Chief of Staff.
Mohammed was reportedly killed during the first wave of attacks on Monday, when US AC-130 planes attacked targets around Ras Kamboni, in the south of the country, he said.
The suspect is thought to have been one of the key targets of the US strikes, along with Abu Taha al-Sudani, a Sudanese explosives expert believed to head al-Qaeda operations in East Africa, and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan.
It was not known whether either of the other two men had been killed, the official added.
The Reuters news agency quoted a government source as saying a new attack was taking place after raids on Monday and Tuesday. ”As we speak now, the area is being bombarded by the American air force,” the source said.
He said the attacks had targeted four places close to Ras Kamboni, a coastal village near the Kenyan border where many fugitive Islamists are believed to be sheltering after Ethiopian forces began an offensive into Somalia last month.
A Pentagon official said on Tuesday the attacks were based on ”credible intelligence” that the three al-Qaeda leaders had fled Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and gone to the southern part of the country.
The men have long been sought by the US, which previously tried to capture them with the help of warlords who ruled Somalia through the 1990s until 2005, offering bounties for their capture.
The attacks are America’s first direct military action in Somalia since the disastrous operation of the early 1990s, which killed 18 US troops. The action later provided the setting for the Hollywood film Black Hawk Down.
Somali officials said at least 27 people had been killed on Monday in air strikes led by AC-130 gunships around Ras Kamboni.
The village of Haya, near the Kenyan border, was also strafed on Monday, Somali officials said.
Tuesday’s strike by two US helicopters near the southern town of Afmadow killed between five and 10 people, according to a US intelligence official cited by the Associated Press. Locals put the death toll at 31, saying two newlyweds were among civilians killed.
The Pentagon said on Tuesday it had sent an aircraft carrier, the USS Eisenhower, to join three other US warships off the coast for what appeared to be a concerted military operation.
”It’s pretty clear that this administration will continue to go after al-Qaeda,” White House spokesperson Tony Snow told a press conference. ”People who think they can establish a safe haven for al-Qaeda any place have to know that we are going to find them.”
The US tracked the Islamists from its Combined Task Force headquarters in Djibouti, which was established as a counter-terrorism base after the September 11 2001 attacks.
The US attacks have the support of the Somali government, whose shaky grip has been challenged by the rise of the Somali Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC). The US ”has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania”, the Somali president, Abdullahi Yusuf, told journalists in Mogadishu.
They are being carried out under cover of Ethiopia’s military push into Somalia late last month, which is believed to have forced the leadership of the militant Islamic Courts Union from Mogadishu.
Like Ethiopia, the Bush administration accuses the SCIC of harbouring al-Qaeda fighters and of having fallen under al-Qaeda’s influence.
In recent years, the US has deepened its cooperation with the Ethiopian intelligence agencies to try to get on-the-ground information on Somalia. Analysts said the US believed the three al-Qaeda fugitives had sought refuge with Somali clans.
When Ethiopia sent thousands of troops in to back Somalia’s weak government against the Islamists towards the end of last year, the US gave its tacit approval. But analysts said it remained an enormous challenge to establish the whereabouts of suspected al-Qaeda cells or to carry out an accurate strike against them, given the limitations of the AC-130.
”It’s akin to the heart of darkness, just shooting into the jungle,” said Bob Baer, a former CIA agent. ”At the end of the day, you are just making more enemies.” — Guardian Unlimited Â