Nairobi, Kenya: Mar. 4th. (NY Times) — American naval forces fired missiles into southern Somalia on Monday, aiming at what the Defense Department called terrorist targets. Residents reached by telephone said the only casualties were three wounded civilians, three dead cows, one dead donkey and a partly destroyed house. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington, said the target was a “known Al Qaeda terrorist.” The missile strike was aimed at Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan born in 1979 who is wanted by the FBI for questioning in the nearly simultaneous attacks on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and on an Israeli airliner taking off from there, in 2002, said three American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the strike or its details. One American military official said the naval attack on Monday was carried out with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a submarine. The official said the missiles were believed to have hit their targets. Witnesses on the ground, though, described the attack differently. “I did not know from where they were launched, but what I know is that they hit a house in this town,” said Muhammad Amin Abdullahi Osman, a resident of Dhobley, a small town in southern Somalia near the Kenyan border. Mr. Muhammad said two missiles slammed into the house around 3:30 a.m. In the attacks to which Mr. Nabhan is linked, three suicide bombers drove up to the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa on Nov. 28, 2002, and blew themselves up, killing three Israeli tourists and 10 Kenyans, many of them young people in a welcoming party in the lobby. That attack took place after terrorists aimed shoulder-fired missiles at an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombasa’s airport, but missed. The Kenyan police say Mr. Nabhan bought the sport utility vehicle used in the hotel bombing. Kenyan authorities also suspect that Mr. Nabhan was involved in the bombings of the United States Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, in which more than 200 people were killed and 5,000 wounded. Monday’s attack was not the first time that American forces had fired missiles into Somalia or used airstrikes in pursuit of what the Pentagon has called terrorist operatives in the country. They did so at least three times last year.
Dhobley lies in the growing swath of southern Somalia that seems to be falling under the control of the country’s Islamist movement once again. The Islamists rose to power in 2006 and brought a degree of law and order to Somalia for the first time since the central government collapsed in 1991. But they were driven out of Somalia in late 2006 and early 2007 by a joint Ethiopian-American offensive. The Americans and Ethiopians said Somalia’s Islamists were harboring Qaeda terrorists, including men connected to the 1998 embassy bombings. Thousands of Ethiopian troops poured across the border, backed up by American warplanes and American intelligence. The Islamist movement then went underground. But in the past several months, the Islamists seem to be making a comeback, taking over towns in southern Somalia, including Dhobley, and inflicting a steady stream of casualties on Ethiopian forces with suicide bombs and hit-and-run attacks. Efforts by foreign diplomats and the UN to broker a truce have failed, and concerns are rising that Somalia could be headed toward another war-induced famine like the one it suffered in the early 1990s.
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Eric Schmitt. Mohammed Ibrahim &Yuusuf Maxamuud contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Mozlink
No comments:
Post a Comment