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US helicopters launch fresh attacks in Somalia
2007-01-09
The United States launched air strikes on suspected Al-Qaeda targets in southern Somalia, amid criticism that it risks further destabilising the lawless Horn of Africa nation. A Somali defence ministry official said at least two US helicopters struck targets in the same area where an airforce AC-130 gunship had pounded two villages the previous day. Local village elders said at least 19 civilians had been killed in the gunship attack which, according to Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, had targetted the "principal Al-Qaeda leadership in the region." There were no immediate reports of casualties from the second attack. "We are going to remain committed to reducing terrorist capabilities when and where we find them," Whitman said. The US military intervention -- its first in Somalia since the early 1990s -- followed an offensive by Ethiopian-backed Somali government forces that routed Islamist fighters who Washington accused of harbouring senior Al-Qaeda operatives. US Navy spokesman Lt. Commander Charlie Brown said the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower had been deployed off the coast of Somalia as part of an operation "to monitor terrorist activities." The US air strikes caused concern in European capitals and at the United Nations where UN chief Ban Ki-moon said he feared they may lead to a "new dimension" in the conflict and a "possible escalation of hostilities". "Any incident of this kind is not helpful in the long term," said Amadeu Altafaj, spokesman for EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel, while Italian Foreign Minister Massimo d'Alema stressed Rome's opposition to "unilateral initiatives that could spark new tensions." The level of instability in Somalia was highlighted by gunmen on Tuesday firing rockets into a camp housing Ethiopian troops in the capital Mogadishu, sparking an intense exchange of fire. It was the second such attack in three days. Islamist leaders had vowed to wage a guerrilla war following their defeat at the hands of the joint Ethiopian and Somali government forces. Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf defended the US air raids which came after the Somali Ayr subclan allegedly refused to disclose the whereabouts of three senior Al-Qaeda operatives that Washington accused it of sheltering. Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, a native of the Comoros Islands, Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and a Sudanese national, Abu Taha al-Sudan, are accused of organising the 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing at least 224 people, most of them Africans. "The Americans had a right to carry out the air strikes on some Al-Qaeda members," Yusuf told reporters in Mogadishu. "Those who carried out attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were there, so it was the right thing and the right time to carry out such strikes," Yusuf said. "The Americans are cracking down on Al-Qaeda terrorists all over the world and this was part of it," he added. Yusuf, who took office in 2004, returned to Mogadishu on Monday for the first time in 20 years. The last case of overt US military intervention in Somalia ended in 1994 with the final withdrawal of US forces from the UN-backed Operation Restore Hope following heavy losses in what was dramatized in the book and film "Black Hawk Down." However, last year, the United States covertly supported warlords fighting the Islamist movement that captured Mogadishu in June, marking the latest chapter in Somalia's slide towards chaos since civil war broke out in 1991. In August 2003, Kenyan security forces arrested Mohamed -- who has a five-million bounty on his head -- but he escaped when an accomplice set off a hand grenade killing himself and a Kenyan police officer. Attacks in 2002 on an Israeli airliner and Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa also originated in Somalia, according to US officials. Apart of the three, Washington has also designated Somali Islamist hardline leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys as a terrorist.
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