USA TODAY January 10, 2007
Strikes part of U.S. anti-terror effort in Africa
By Matt Kelley and Richard Willing
WASHINGTON — The U.S. attacks on suspected al-Qaeda forces in Somalia this week are part of a broader military effort to fight terrorism in the Horn of Africa.
At least one AC-130 gunship attacked suspected al-Qaeda fighters in southern Somalia on Monday, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Vician said Tuesday. He gave few details but said the strikes were based on "credible intelligence" that the targets were "the principal al-Qaeda leadership in that region."
Vician and other U.S. officials said Tuesday they didn't know who died in the airstrikes, which targeted people believed to have been involved in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa.
President Abdullahi Yusuf, head of Somalia's transitional government, told journalists in Mogadishu the United States "has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania."
By 2006, al-Qaeda suspect Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, also known as Haroon Fazul, and colleagues Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Abu Talha Al-Sudani had been tracked to Somalia, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer told Congress in June.
The three men are suspects in the embassy bombings, which killed 200 people, including 12 Americans. Mohammed has been indicted in the United States for those attacks and also has been linked to the November 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, in which 13 were killed.
The situation in Somalia changed dramatically in the past two weeks, after neighboring Ethiopia invaded and drove the hard-line Islamic Courts movement out of the capital, Mogadishu. The U.S. has accused the Council of Islamic Courts movement of harboring al-Qaeda members. In June, the State Department had asked the Islamic Courts union to turn the trio over to American authorities, but the union refused.
Osama bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, has made statements supporting the Islamic Courts movement as recently as last week.
Ethiopian forces invaded Somalia Dec. 24 to fight Islamic Courts militias. The Ethiopian forces and the United Nations-backed transitional Somali government quickly pushed the Islamic Courts groups out of Mogadishu and south toward the Kenyan border. Monday's attacks came in that border area.
The Islamic Courts' rapid retreat made al-Qaeda figures in Somalia easier to track, says intelligence expert John Pike, head of the website GlobalSecurity.org.
Since 2003, the U.S. has had a counterterrorism force of about 1,500 troops based in Djibouti, a small former French colony that borders Somalia's northwestern tip. The Pentagon says the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa is there to track terrorism suspects, train the forces of friendly governments and perform humanitarian relief projects such as building schools and digging wells.
As the Islamic Courts fighters fled, the United States placed the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower off Somalia's coast to help block al-Qaeda fighters from escaping by sea, according to the Navy's 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. The carrier joined at least a half-dozen U.S. and British ships in the area that are stopping and searching civilian vessels for terrorist suspects.
Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown, a 5th Fleet spokesman, said aircraft from the Eisenhower have flown intelligence-gathering missions over Somalia. The 60 planes aboard the Eisenhower include E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, which carry sophisticated radar and other sensors used to track enemy movements and direct U.S. attacks.
The AC-130 gunship used in Monday's airstrikes is too big to land on an aircraft carrier. A modified version of the propeller-driven C-130 cargo plane, the gunship carries weaponry that includes a 105mm howitzer, a 40mm cannon and a 25mm gun capable of firing 30 rounds a second.
The gunship's electronics allow it to attack two targets at once from about a half-mile away. The Air Force Special Operations Command oversees the two squadrons of AC-130s, which have been used in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Somalia hasn't had a government and has been wracked with internal violence since the fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. U.S. troops sent to help quell the fighting withdrew in 1994 after a botched attempt to capture a Somali clan leader led to the deaths of 18 servicemembers in an incident chronicled in the book and movie Black Hawk Down.
Contributing: Wire reports
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