New US strike in Somalia against al Qaeda targets

Washington Post:

A U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship staged an airstrike against suspected al-Qaeda operatives in southern Somalia on Monday, the second such attack this month, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

There was no immediate information on specific targets or the strike's results. The United States has said that at least three senior al-Qaeda operatives were being sheltered by the Islamic Courts movement that was ousted from power in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, by the Ethiopian military last month.

Word of the new attack came the same day as a long line of Ethiopian artillery, armored vehicles and trucks loaded with soldiers rolled toward the edges of Mogadishu, beginning a withdrawal from a fragile capital that many residents fear will now slip further into chaos.

A spokesman for Somalia's transitional government, Abdirahman Dinari, said that the Ethiopians may take several weeks to complete a full withdrawal from the country and that a large force would remain on the Ethiopian side of the Somalia-Ethiopia border.

The Ethiopians have remained in the capital to protect the nascent transitional government, which hardly has enough forces to secure the oceanside city.

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Details of a proposal to send in a peacekeeping force of at least 8,000 troops from other African countries are under negotiation, and many analysts doubt that that number can be mustered. Dinari said an initial force of about 1,000 soldiers from Uganda will probably arrive next week, and others from South Africa, Malawi and Nigeria will follow. The United States has promised airlift and logistics support.

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The story provided no additional details on the latest strike. The enemy has been pushed into an ever shrinking area of defense near the Kenya border and many of the Islamist have surrendered to Kenyan officials. It is possible that one of the remaining pockets of resistance was spotted and targeted.

The European Union and the US have pressured the new Somali government to reach some accommodation with the defeated Islamist. The government believes that such pressure encourages the enemy to continue to hold out for a better deal. It probably does. The thinking behind the pressure is that without a deal the resistance will continue. The question is will hopelessness cause the enemy to quit or continue fighting? I think they will continue fighting whether there is a deal or not and whether they are hopeless or not. They must be destroyed for peace to survive.

Time adds a few more details, but much of the operation remains secret.

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At the Defense Department, spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to confirm any new strike but said in general that the United States is "going to go after al-Qaida in the global war on terrorism wherever it takes us." He said the nature of some military operations, especially those by special operations commando forces, requires that they be kept secret in order to preserve an advantage in future missions. Lt. Cmdr. Marc Boyd, a spokesman at U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, declined to comment.

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At this time there is no confirmation that any high value targets were hit.