Somalia’s deputy PM: US ground forces needed to flush terrorism
Jan 10, 2007 (MOGADISHU) — U.S. special forces are needed on the ground to flush out any remaining al-Qaida suspects in Somalia, the deputy prime minister said Wednesday, after U.S. forces staged at least one airstrike in the first offensive in the African country since 18 American soldiers were killed here in 1993.
Hussein Aideed told The Associated Press that Somali government forces are unable to capture the last remaining hideouts of suspected extremists, who are bunkered in with enough food and water to last them for years.
“The only way we are going to kill or capture the surviving al-Qaida terrorists is for U.S. special forces to go in on the ground,” Hussein Aideed, a former U.S. marine said. “They have the know-how and the right equipment to capture these people.”
On Tuesday, helicopter gunships attacked suspected al-Qaida fighters in the south, as a U.S. intelligence official said the U.S. killed five to 10 people in an airstrike on a target in southern Somalia believed to be linked to al-Qaida. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the operation’s sensitivity, said a small number of others present, perhaps four or five, were wounded.
A Somali lawmaker said 31 civilians, including a newlywed couple, died in Tuesday’s assault by two helicopters near Afmadow, a town in an area of forested hills near the Kenyan border 350 kilometers (220 miles) southwest of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. The report could not be independently verified.
A Defense Ministry official described the helicopters as American, but local witnesses told the AP they could not make out identification markings on the craft. U.S. officials had no comment on the helicopter strike.
No American troops are yet believed to be in Somalia, Aideed said, but covert operations on the ground may be under way. “As far as we are aware they are not on the ground yet, but it is only a matter of time,” he said.
Somalia’s president said the U.S. was hunting suspects in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, and had his support.
The government has ordered all armed militia in Somalia, which is believed to number around 60,000, to gather at five camps around the country to be integrated into a newly established army.
Late Tuesday, Col. Shino Moalin Nur, a Somali military commander, told the AP by telephone that at least one U.S. AC-130 gunship attacked a suspected al-Qaida training camp Sunday on a remote island at the southern tip of Somalia. Somali officials said they had reports of many deaths. Attacks also took place against Islamic extremists in Hayi, 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Afmadow, Nur said, with attacks continuing Tuesday.
U.S. Defense Department officials, speaking privately Tuesday in Washington because the department was not releasing the information, suggested the U.S. military was either planning or considering additional strikes in Somalia.
With a U.S. aircraft carrier off Somalia’s coast, commanders can call in strikes. Defense Department officials said that, as of Tuesday, no carrier-based aircraft had conducted strikes in Somalia. Three other U.S. warships were conducting anti-terror operations off Somalia’s coast.
Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Tuesday that the U.S. military assault had been based on intelligence. He would not confirm any details of the strike, conducted early Monday local time by at least one AC-130 gunship. He would not say if any specific members of al-Qaida had been killed, or address if the operations were continuing.
Somali Islamic extremists are accused of sheltering the embassy bombing suspects, and American officials also want to make sure the militants will no longer pose a threat to Somalia’s U.N.-backed transitional government.
U.S. warships have been seeking to capture al-Qaida members thought to be fleeing since Dec. 24, when Ethiopia’s military invaded in support of the Somali government and drove the Islamic militia out of the capital and toward the Kenyan border.
But in the capital some said the attacks would increase anti-American sentiment in the largely Muslim country, where people are already upset by the presence of troops from neighboring Ethiopia, which has a large Christian population.
The main target on the island attack was thought to be Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who allegedly planned the 1998 embassy attacks that killed 225 people.
Leaders of Somalia’s Islamic movement have vowed from their hideouts to launch an Iraq-style guerrilla war, and al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden’s deputy has called on militants to carry out suicide attacks on Ethiopian troops.
Somalia has not had an effective central government since clan-based warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other. The interim government was established in 2004.
(AP)