Fighting Continues in Somalia; Gov't Soldier Killed

washington post

Nairobi, Jan. 10 -- Fighting continued Wednesday in the Somali capital Mogadishu and in the southern part of the country, two days after a U.S. warplane attacked alleged al-Qaeda (the keyword here is alleged) terrorists there.

In Mogadishu, at least one government soldier was killed and several others were wounded after gunmen ambushed military posts manned by Ethiopian troops and forces loyal to the interim Somali government, a local news service reported. In the south, two heavily armed local militias clashed in Bergani. Residents also reported continued airstrikes in the region where the Ethiopian air force has been attacking Islamic militias, and where the American airstrike occurred overnight Sunday.

A Somali official told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the U.S. military had told him the attack killed Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who is considered the mastermind of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in east Africa.

But military officials in Washington declined to provide information about any casualties from the strike. And Abdirizak Hassan, the Somali official who said he received the news in a U.S. military briefing, said Wednesday that he had not received any further updates.

Mohammed, and two other suspects linked to the embassy bombings that killed 225 people, are believed to be among the remnants of the Islamic Courts movement whose leaders fled south from Mogadishu in the face of Ethiopian attacks late last month, taking refuge in into an area of thick forests, swamps and rural villages along the Indian Ocean coastline.

The United States has accused Islamic Courts leaders of sheltering the three embassy bombing suspects, but the degree to which the suspects wielded influence within the Courts has remained sketchy.

The U.S. attack was greeted with rage in Mogadishu, where many Somalis see the transitional government as a pawn of the Ethiopians and the United States, and where many fighters loyal to the Islamic Courts are thought to have gone underground.

The Islamic Courts movement was widely popular for the security it brought to the capital, even if ordinary Somalis, who tend to adhere to a moderate version of Islam, were uncomfortable with the harsh social restrictions that the Courts imposed --the Courts frowned upon singing, for instance.

"I am angry," Ahmed Weli Mohamed, 37, a biology teacher, said on Tuesday. "I am very, very angry . . . Even if there are terrorists, there are maybe two or three people, but hundreds of people are killed. Is this logical? It's inhumanity. We feel we are not considered human beings. Americans don't respect us as humans."

Several European diplomats have expressed concern that the U.S. airstrikes will only destabilize Somalia further, and in a statement on Wednesday, African Union Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare joined in the criticism, saying he is "concerned" and urging "all actors to refrain from any action likely to complicate the current situation."

U.S. military officials say they have not conducted additional strikes since the attack that occurred late Sunday (early Monday, Somali time). Air activity since then, they say, likely comes from the Ethiopian military.

But Hassan, chief of staff to Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, said he believed the United States was still involved, and some local residents interviewed Wednesday said they thought the planes flying over the area were American.

In Mogadishu, reports circulated that as many as 50 people, many of them civilians, were killed in the attack by a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship. U.S. officials said they are fairly certain that at least one targeted individual was hit; they said they had no information about civilian deaths in the strike along the Kenyan border.

Several officials suggested that stories reaching Mogadishu of many deaths and continuing U.S. attacks had confused the airstrike with ongoing operations in the area by Ethiopia's military, including helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. But it was impossible to confirm independently any of the widely differing accounts in Mogadishu or in Washington.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman confirmed Tuesday that a single airstrike occurred on Sunday, targeting "what we believe to be principal al-Qaeda leadership." Officials said that no further information would be released until U.S. personnel could assess directly the results of the strike and identify any dead.

Direct U.S. access to the area, where fleeing Islamic fundamentalist forces are being pursued on the ground and from the air by the Ethiopians, is viewed as problematic but necessary.

A principal target of the airstrike was Abu Talha al-Sudani, a Sudanese who U.S. officials have said is a longtime associate of Osama bin Laden and a key figure in an East African al-Qaeda cell based in Somalia. He is considered the financier behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Other targets included Mohammed and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, two other al-Qaeda operatives said to be responsible for the embassy bombings; Somali fundamentalist leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the former head of a militant group accused of links to al-Qaeda in the 1990s; and several other Somali Islamic leaders described as terrorists.

"I don't think anybody has packed up and gone home," another official said of U.S. operations in the area.

The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower was moved into the Indian Ocean near the Somali coast to provide assistance, if needed, to the AC-130 on Sunday, and to use its aircraft to pinpoint the location of targets on land or sea. Four other U.S. naval vessels from the Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet are in the area.

News of the airstrike made shop owner and retired Somali soldier Hussein Farah Guley, 56, recall the early 1990s, when U.S. troops were part of a U.N. force that monitored a cease-fire in the country. Among the many foreigners killed by warring Somali clans during that period were 18 U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force soldiers, who were attacked in Mogadishu after a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down in 1993.

"The Somalis, they will get angry," Guley said, "and if they see anyone from the outside, they will kill them."

Gedi's transitional government, which U.S. officials said gave permission for the airstrike, is perceived by many Somalis as having interrupted a months-long period of unusual calm. The government is also seen as being too closely aligned with its leadership's clan and with outsiders, particularly Ethiopia and the United States.

Somalis have already begun to express anger toward Ethiopian troops. Tuesday night, a former police building in the capital, now occupied by the Ethiopians, was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired from a speeding car. One Ethiopian and one Somali soldier were killed, and three civilians were injured.

The United States is leading an effort to deploy an African peacekeeping force to replace the Ethiopians, and it is pressing Gedi's government to open talks with Islamic leaders who are seen as moderates. No progress was reported on either front yesterday. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said a possible U.N. force is also being "actively discussed."