MOGADISHU (AFP) - The United States has launched air strikes on
suspected Al-Qaeda hideouts in Somalia in its first overt military
intervention in the lawless nation since the early 1990s.
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 targetting of the camps where suspects in the 1998
bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are believed
under the protection of hardline Islamists.
"The Americans had a right to carry out the air strikes on some
Al-Qaeda members," he told reporters Tuesday, 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 United States "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 AFP.
"Absolutely, a lot of people were killed," government spokesman
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 targetted 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 five-million-dollar 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.
Monday's 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 strikes were the first overt US military intervention in
Somalia since the early 1990s.
The last such effort ended in 1994 with the final withdrawal of US
forces from the UN-backed Operation Restore Hope stabilization
mission following heavy losses in what was dramatized in the book
and a film "Black Hawk Down."
However, last year, the United States 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 subclan -- believed to be sheltering the militants --
failed to disclose the whereabouts of the three
fugitives.