Team in Somalia May Be Planning U.S. Strikes
By Steve Vogel and Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 11, 2001; Page A21
A five-member U.S. government delegation visited western Somalia on Sunday to meet with local
warlords and Ethiopian military officers in what regional analysts said appeared to be a scouting mission for
possible strikes against terrorist targets in the country.
The meeting, in the western town of Baidoa, was reported by a radio station in Mogadishu, the Somali
capital 150 miles to the southeast, and was confirmed yesterday by Western aid workers who operate
in Baidoa.
"They didn't stop to talk to us, but we saw them there," said one humanitarian worker.
"They were in civilian clothes. They saw the Somali leadership and the Ethiopians,
who were in uniform."
A Defense Department official said no U.S. military personnel were involved in the visit, but the official
added he could not exclude the possibility that other government agencies might have been involved.
Bill Harlow, the chief CIA spokesman, refused to comment.
U.S. military planners said the Bush administration has begun to look at Somalia as a possible future
venue for the U.S.-led war on terrorism. U.S. officials charge that Somalia harbors members of al Qaeda,
the terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden, and there are fears that al Qaeda militants being
driven from Afghanistan could try to take refuge there.
"People mention Somalia for obvious reasons," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz
told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday, though he appeared unaware of reports of Sunday's
visit to the country by the U.S. officials. "It's a country virtually without a government,
a country that has a certain al Qaeda presence already."
Afghan fighters backed by U.S. airstrikes are advancing on al Qaeda positions in fortified
caves in eastern Afghanistan, and Wolfowitz said the United States is stepping up
surveillance of "possible escape
routes, possible sanctuaries."
The effort includes a force of U.S. and allied warships in the Arabian Sea that for the
last month has been questioning and, in some cases, boarding ships coming
out of Pakistan. "We're using everything we've got," a Navy official said.
"Every ship we have out there is participating in this in some sense."
U.S. submarines and P-3 aircraft are working with surface ships to monitor sea traffic,
officials said. The United States has 30 to 40 ships in the area. The carrier
USS John C. Stennis is expected in the region soon, which will give the
United States an additional carrier battle group in the area before the
carrier USS Carl Vinson is sent home.
The interdiction force includes British, French, Italian, Canadian and Australian ships.
France maintains a large naval base on the Gulf of Aden in Djibouti, which is on
Somalia's northern border.
On average, about 30 to 40 boats, ranging from large ships to small ones, are challenged each day,
and a much smaller number are searched, but no ship has been detained, officials said.
Last Thursday, U.S. forces intercepted a large container ship suspected of carrying senior al Qaeda
leaders in waters south of Pakistan. A contingent of Marines and U.S. Navy SEALS from the USS
Shreveport boarded the ship by helicopter and went through dozens of containers. "They boarded,
searched and didn't find anything," said a Navy official.
The reason for the visit by the U.S. officials to Somalia was unclear. The Reuters news service quoted
sources in Somalia as saying the five officials were meeting with local warlords and Ethiopian officers to
discuss possible cooperation should the war on terrorism focus on Somalia.
"They were discussing whether they [the warlords] know of any terrorist bases in south and
southwest Somalia," one of the sources said.
The sources said the Americans met with leaders of the Rahanwein Resistance Army, a faction
opposed to Somalia's fledgling government, Reuters reported, as well as with four officers of the Ethiopian
army, which has been actively backing the anti-government factions.
There have been no known U.S. military visits to Somalia since 1994, when the Clinton administration
withdrew U.S. military personnel from the country following the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in a clash
with militias in Mogadishu the year before.
Wolfowitz cautioned against speculation that the United States is shifting its war aims outside
of Afghanistan. "Our focus is on Afghanistan, and there's a great danger if we don't keep that focus,
if we start spreading our net too wide, that we will lose the focus," Wolfowitz said.
U.S. officials and experts they are consulting say Somalia, a lawless state that has been
without a central government since 1991, makes a relatively poor candidate for military strikes.
Intense aerial reconnaissance has failed to produce hard physical targets such as
terrorist training camps, said one U.S. specialist on the region.
The Islamist organization al-Ittihad al-Islamiya, which the Bush administration
said has ties to al Qaeda, "is not very visible at all" since being thrashed by
Ethiopian forces four years ago, a regional security expert said.
Given the absence of hard targets, the likeliest U.S. action in Somalia
would be "extraction" of suspected terrorists, according to U.S. sources.
By one count, American investigators have identified roughly a dozen al Qaeda figures
believed to have been inside Somalia recently. "And they may have been snatched
already," said one source. "This is a moving target."
Such abductions could be carried out by American forces. But analysts called that
option unlikely.Analysts said U.S. policymakers can avoid the expense and risk of engaging
U.S. forces by using proxies.Ethiopia, which shares a long border and has a history
of rivalry with Somalia, has already fought al-Ittihad, and it has publicly volunteered what
it called evidence that its neighbor harbors Islamic extremists.
Analysts said local militias might also be put to use.
In an apparently unrelated development yesterday, Kenyan police announced they had
arrested a possible suspect in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.
Acting on a tip forwarded in October by the U.S. mission in Nairobi, police detained a man thought to
be Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, one of two men alleged to have purchased the truck packed with
TNT and detonated outside the embassy on Aug. 7, 1998.
But the identity of the suspect was uncertain, according to embassy and police spokesmen. Local Islamic
activists said the man arrested in Mandera, on the border with Somalia, was in his sixties, or roughly
a generation older than Swedan.
Vick reported from Nairobi. Staff writer Vernon Loeb contributed to this report.
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