U.S. Strikes Al Qaeda in Somalia Posted: January 9, 2007

The United States has carried out an air strike against suspected Al Qaeda operatives in Hayo, Somalia, according to Pentagon officials. American officials have long suspected that members of Al Qaeda were hiding in the southern Somali village.

The January 7, 2007, strike was the first overt military action carried out by the U.S. in Somalia since 1993, when 18 U.S. Army Rangers were killed when Somali militias, suspected to have been trained by Al Qaeda, shot down two military helicopters.

U.S. forces have sought to capture Al Qaeda members suspected of fleeing Somalia after an Ethiopian military offensive drove the Islamist militant group, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), from the Somali capital. 

U.S. officials have accused the ICU, which had controlled Mogadishu since the summer of 2006, of harboring suspects in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed 225 people. 

The main target of the strike reportedly was Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who allegedly planned the 1998 attacks.  Mohammed and two other Al Qaeda members linked to the 1998 attacks “were very much influencing the leadership of the council of the ICU - for example providing logistics, fuel and arms to the militias,” according to the U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary for African Affairs.

Mohammed is also suspected of planning the November 2002 attacks on Israeli tourists visiting Mombasa, Kenya.  Attackers fired a pair of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, which narrowly missed an Israeli passenger jet as it took off from Mombasa’s airport.  Almost immediately afterward, three suicide bombers detonated a car bomb at the Paradise Lodge, an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, killing three Israeli tourists and 10 Kenyans.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, had urged Somalia’s Islamic militia to attack Ethiopian forces in an audiotape posted on the Internet.  “I speak to you today as the crusader Ethiopian invasion forces violate the soil of the beloved Muslim Somalia,” al-Zawahri said.

The ICU, a union of Sharia law courts suported by militias, formed in the 1990s to administer justice in the districts in which they were established.  In February of 2006, 11 of these courts combined their military resources.  One of the courts is led by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who is on an American list of terrorism suspects for his affiliation an Al Qaeda-linked group.  Another ICU leader, Adan Hashi Ayro, was reportedly trained in Afghanistan.