An undated file photo shows an AC-130 gunship. A U.S. attack plane killed many people with barrages of gunfire in a remote Somali village occupied by Islamists thought to be hiding at least one al Qaeda suspect, a Somali government source said on Tuesday. EDITORIAL USE ONLY (U.S. Air Force Photo/Reuters)
"Many dead" in U.S. strike at al Qaeda in Somalia
By Guled Mohamed
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Many people died when a U.S. gunship hunting al Qaeda suspects attacked a village in southern Somalia as part of a wide air offensive against fugitive Islamists, officials said on Tuesday.
In Washington's first overt military intervention in Somalia since a disastrous peacekeeping mission that ended in 1994, an AC-130 plane rained gunfire on the remote village of Hayo late on Monday, a senior government official said.
"There are so many dead bodies and animals in the village," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
Somalia's defense and information ministers told Reuters other airstrikes took place south of Hayo, near Ras Kamboni and Badmadow at Somalia's southernmost tip near the Kenyan border.
Neither would say if the United States or Ethiopia, which has jets and helicopters in the area, carried them out, or precisely when they occurred.
U.S. intelligence believes Abu Talha al-Sudani, named in grand jury testimony against Osama bin Laden as a Sudanese explosives expert, is al Qaeda's east African boss and is hiding among Islamist troops fleeing Ethiopian and Somali forces.
It was not clear if he was killed in the attack, which the Pentagon declined to confirm or deny.
Hundreds of Islamists have sought refuge in southern Somalia's bush, where Ethiopian and Somali government troops chased them after their defeat in a lightning war before the New Year that ended six months of Islamic rule.
Before Ethiopian intervention, the Islamists seemed set to drive the weak interim government out of its only base in the small town of Baidoa.
In another sign of a more muscular U.S. intervention, the U.S. Navy said it had moved the aircraft carrier Eisenhower to the Somali coast to beef up a naval cordon to cut off any Islamist escape via the Indian Ocean.
BOMB SUSPECTS
U.S., Ethiopian and Kenyan intelligence officials say the Islamists hid a handful of al Qaeda members, including suspects in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and a 2002 hotel bombing on the Kenyan coast.
Besides al-Sudani, Washington has named Comorian Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who has a $5 million reward for his capture, and Kenyan Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan among those in Somalia.
The European Union, which has frequently differed with Washington over Somalia, criticized the U.S. air raid.
"Any incident of this kind is not helpful in the long-term," a spokesman for the European Commission said, adding that only a political solution would bring peace to the anarchic nation.
Somali Information Minister Ali Ahmed Jama "Jangali" told Reuters: "The Islamists are hiding in the thick jungle and it's only airstrikes that eliminate them from there. The strikes ...will continue until no terrorist survives."
Following the air raid, the U.S. embassy in Nairobi renewed a warning to Americans in the region of the danger of terrorist attacks, saying defeat in the Somalia war could push al-Qaeda agents into other parts of the region.
"Terrorist actions may include suicide operations, bombings, kidnappings or targeting maritime vessels," the embassy said.
A Somalia security expert based in Kenya said Ethiopian warplanes had been striking remote villages in the south since Monday and the dead included a newly-wed couple.
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf told reporters in Mogadishu, where he went on Monday for the first time since the Islamist defeat, that he could not confirm the strikes, but said Washington should hunt al Qaeda agents wherever they were.
"They have a right to take action. We are fighting terrorists, whether they are international terrorists or Somalis. We are not fighting Islam. Somalis are 100 percent Muslim," Yusuf said.
The presence of Ethiopians in Somalia has uncorked an ancient enmity between the Horn of Africa neighbors, and a handful of protests and small attacks have broken out in the past few days in Mogadishu.
Ethiopian troops are helping the government tame the gun-filled country while an African peacekeeping force is assembled. It is the 14th attempt to impose order since the 1991 ouster of the last national president sparked anarchy.
Ethiopian and Somali troops have chased al-Sudani since he led Islamist fighters near Buur Hakaba, close to the government base of Baidoa, in the early days of the war, Somali government officials told Reuters.
After the disastrous 1992-94 U.S. mission, chronicled in the film "Black Hawk Down," Washington had kept clear of intervention in Somalia for a decade. But the CIA was widely reported to have been bankrolling warlords who controlled Mogadishu before being ousted by the Islamists last June.
The AC-130 is a propeller-driven converted cargo plane with sophisticated sensors that allow it to pinpoint targets with heavy automatic cannon fire.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Abbas in Bahrain, and Bryson Hull in Nairobi)
