The United States' decision to bomb Islamists holed up in a corner of Somalia near the border with Kenya is a high-risk tactic which could ignite an Iraqi-style insurgency across a swathe of East Africa, analysts and regional experts say.

Buoyed by the success that its allies - Ethiopia and the UN-backed transitional Government - have had in driving the Islamists out of the capital in recent weeks, Washington clearly feels that it has an opportunity to wipe out what it sees as a persistent threat to Western interests in the region. The Americans have gone for the jugular.

The danger is that the high loss of life reported and the likelihood that many non-al Qaeda sympathisers have been killed, including more moderate leaders of the defeated Union of Islamic Courts, could see the operation backfire spectacularly and unite Somalis against its new US-supported government.

"The US has sided with one Somali faction against another, this could be the beginning of a new civil war … I fear once again they have gone for a quick fix based on false information. If they pull it off, however, it could be a turning point. The stakes are very high indeed, now," said one highly respected regional analyst, recalling the futile US role in the hunt in the early 1990s for one Somali warlord which resulted in the Black Hawk Down incident when 18 US special forces troops were killed.

That incident, for which Osama Bin Laden subsequently claimed credit, scarred US foreign policy for years.

Washington has long argued that al-Qaeda sympathisers have used bases in the Ras Kamboni area, made up of dense mango swamps and small islands, from which to launch terror attacks in the rest of East Africa. Some of the region’s most wanted terrorists are known to be there, including the masterminds behind the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in the Kenyan and Tanzanian capitals of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in which more than 200 people were killed.

The same group are believed to have killed 15 people with the bombing of a hotel in the Kenyan beach resort of Mombasa in November 2002 and narrowly missed bringing down an Israeli chartered tourist jet. However, the links between the al-Qaeda bombers and the UIC’s main Islamic militia, the Shabab, have never been conclusively proven. Many of the Islamists now hiding in the area are also from more moderate factions of what was a loose coalition of 11 groups.

"I fear they are repeating the mistakes of the past, not only in Somalia but in Afghanistan and Iraq and will end up creating a new insurgency which could destabilise this entire region," added the analyst.

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