American forces bombed a suspected al-Qaeda base in Somalia yesterday, claiming that terrorists hiding there were responsible for deadly attacks on US embassies in Africa.

US AC130 aircraft killed a large number of Islamic extremists close to the border with Kenya, Somali officials said. Helicopter gunships peppered nearby areas with rockets in preparation for an expected assault by Somali troops.

The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived off the Somali coast and deployed aircraft to gather intelligence on the movement of insurgents in jungle swamps near the Kenyan border. The swamps are the suspected hideout of the perpetrators of the 1998 attack on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

This was America’s first overt operation in the Horn of Africa since 1993, when it was part of the ill-fated United Nations mission to relieve famine. That venture led to clashes with Somali warlords, including the infamous Black Hawk Down incident that left 18 US servicemen dead.

The White House said the operation showed that there was no safe haven for Islamic militants. “This Administration continues to go after al-Qaeda,” Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said.

Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, said yesterday that he feared the strike might intensify hostilities in Somalia. Somali political analysts and regional experts agreed that the attacks could ignite an Iraqi-style insurgency across a swath of East Africa, where the combined force of the Somali Government and Ethiopian troops are seen as US proxies.

One source in the area told The Times that the victims included civilians who were part of a donkey cart convoy, the most common form of transport, carrying fruit and sugar.

“The US has sided with one Somali faction against another — this could be the beginning of a new civil war,” one analyst said. “I fear once again they have gone for a quick fix based on false information.”

Until last month, Islamists were in control of much of Somalia, including the capital Mogadishu, and had penned the transitional Government into the south of the country. However, they were routed in clashes with government and Ethiopian forces.

The main area targeted by the US is known as Kamboni, which has long been suspected of being a terrorist training ground. Among the terrorists thought to be there are two senior leaders of al-Qaeda’s East Africa cell, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, and the operative Abu Taha al-Sudan. The group is believed to be behind the US embassy bombings and the 2002 car bomb attack in the Kenyan resort town of Mombasa that killed 15 people.

Analysts say that the US has been buoyed by the Somali Government’s success in driving back the Union of Islamic Courts and feels the time is ripe to wipe out the hardliners. The union, however, denies links with al-Qaeda.

Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the interim President, whose Government includes several former warlords, supported the strikes. “The Americans had a right to carry out the airstrikes on some al-Qaeda members,” he said. “Those who carried out attacks on the US embassy in Kenya and Tanzania were there, so it was the right thing.”

Reports said that the aircraft was flown from America’s counter-terrorism base in Djibouti, Somalia’s neighbour to the north. Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, said suspected terrorists from several countries, including Britain and Canada, were taken prisoner or injured.

Source: Times archive

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