Is this recent flare up in Somalia a masterplan to lure al Qaeda fighters out of Iraq into a new battlefield for the War on Terror?...if successful it would give the Iraqi army & gov much needed relief from terrorism:
>>Official: Bomb suspect in Somalia killed
By SALAD DUHUL, Associated Press
The suspected al-Qaida militant who planned the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in east Africa was killed in an American airstrike in Somalia, an official said Wednesday.
"I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage," Abdirizak Hassan, the Somali president's chief of staff, told The Associated Press. "One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead."
Mohammed, 32, allegedly planned the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 225 people.
He is also suspected of planning the car bombing of a beach resort in Kenya and the near simultaneous attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner in 2002. Ten Kenyans and three Israelis were killed in the blast at the hotel, 12 miles north of Mombasa. The missiles missed the airliner.
Mohammed is thought to have been the main target of an American helicopter attack Monday afternoon on Badmadow island off southern Somalia.
Mohammed joined al-Qaida in Afghanistan and trained there with Osama bin Laden, according to the transcript of an FBI interrogation of a known associate. He came to Kenya in the mid-1990s, married a local woman, became a citizen and started teaching at a religious school near Lamu, just 60 miles south of Ras Kamboni, Somalia, where one of the airstrikes took place Monday.
A slight, youthful man born in Comoros, an Indian Ocean archipelago-nation, he is a master of disguises, able to appear African, South Asian or Arab. He speaks French, Arabic, Swahili and English and the FBI says he likes to dress casually and wear baseball caps.
Kenyan and U.S. authorities believe Fazul has been hiding in Somalia since the 2002 hotel attack. In 2003, the CIA was offering rewards to Somali warlords in return for capturing al-Qaida suspects. At least two were captured, but Fazul managed to evade them with the help of Somali Islamic extremists.
Fazul was briefly captured by Kenyan police for credit card fraud, but the officers did not recognize him as a terrorist suspect. He escaped the next day.
In Somalia, he was protected by members of Al-Ittihad al-Islami, an organization listed by the United States as a terrorist group linked to al-Qaida. The leader of Al-Ittihad, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, later became the key organizer of the Council of Islamic Courts in January 2006.
The Islamic courts fighters captured Somalia's capital Mogadishu in June, and by August controlled most of southern Somalia.
Ethiopia intervened on Dec. 24, and over 10 days drove the Islamic leaders, and the alleged terrorist suspects, into the rugged, forested southern corner of Somalia.
On Wednesday, Hassan said that American airstrikes in Somalia would continue.
"I know it happened yesterday, it will happen today and it will happen tomorrow," he said.
U.S. attack helicopters also strafed suspected al-Qaida fighters in southern Somalia on Tuesday, witnesses said.
The two days of airstrikes by U.S. forces were the first American offensives in the African country since 18 U.S. soldiers were killed here in 1993.
U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity because of its sensitive nature had said earlier that the strike in southern Somalia on Monday killed five to 10 people believed to be associated with al-Qaida.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman on Tuesday spoke of one strike in southern Somalia, but would not address whether military operations were continuing. Other defense officials speaking on condition of anonymity suggested that more strikes were either planned or under consideration.
A Somali lawmaker said 31 civilians, including a newlywed couple, died in Tuesday's assault by two helicopters near Afmadow, a town in a forested area close to the Kenyan border. The report could not be independently verified.
A Somali Defense Ministry official described the helicopters as American, but witnesses told the AP they could not make out identification markings on the craft. Washington officials had no comment on the helicopter strike.
Col. Shino Moalin Nur, a Somali military commander, told the AP by telephone late Tuesday 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 next to Kenya.
Somali officials said they had reports of many deaths.
On Monday, witnesses and Nur said, more U.S. airstrikes were launched against Islamic extremists in Hayi, 30 miles from Afmadow. Nur said attacks continued Tuesday.
"Nobody can exactly explain what is going on inside these forested areas," the Somali commander said. "However, we are receiving reports that most of the Islamist fighters have died and the rest would be captured soon."
Whitman said Tuesday that the assault was based on intelligence "that led us to believe we had principal al-Qaida leaders in an area where we could identify them and take action against them."
The U.S. military said Tuesday that the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived off Somalia's coast and launched intelligence-gathering missions over Somalia. Three other U.S. warships were conducting anti-terror operations.
U.S. warships have been seeking to capture al-Qaida members thought to be fleeing Somalia by sea after Ethiopia's military invaded in Somalia.
President Abdullahi Yusuf, head of the U.N.-backed transitional government, told journalists in Mogadishu that the U.S. "has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania."
Other Somalis in the capital said the attacks would increase anti-American sentiment in their largely Muslim country. Many Somalis are already upset by the presence of troops from neighboring Ethiopia, which has a large Christian population.
It was the first overt military action by the U.S. in Somalia since it led a U.N. force that intervened in the 1990s in an effort to fight famine. The mission led to clashes between U.N. forces and Somali warlords, including the battle, chronicled in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down," that killed 18 U.S. soldiers.
Somalia has not had an effective central government since warlords toppled dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. The warlords turned on each other, creating chaos in the nation of 7 million people.<< |
