SOMALIA:Somalia became the latest front line in America's "war on terror" yesterday after the Pentagon said it had ordered US gunships to strike at suspected al-Qaeda operatives in the south of the country.
In America's first direct military action in Somalia since the disastrous "Black Hawk Down" operation of the early 1990s, the Pentagon said it had launched a series of strikes to kill or capture what officials called the "Big Three" of al-Qaeda's network in Africa - operatives suspected in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.
A Pentagon official said the strikes were based on "credible intelligence" that al-Qaeda leaders had fled Mogadishu to the southern part of the country after an offensive last month by Ethiopian forces. Somali officials said at least 27 people were killed in the air strikes, led by AC-130 gunships around Ras Kamboni.
It was not clear whether any of the dead were al-Qaeda operatives, although Pentagon officials confirmed that bodies had been seen on the ground. The village of Haya near the Kenyan border was also strafed on Monday, Somali officials said, and there were further reports of operations yesterday.
The air strikes were the first direct military action by the US since the bungled intervention of 1993 killed 18 US troops, and they appeared to be continuing.
The Pentagon said yesterday it had sent an aircraft carrier, the USS Eisenhower, to join three other US warships off the coast.
"It's pretty clear that this administration will continue to go after al-Qaeda," White House spokesman Tony Snow told a press conference.
"People who think they can establish a safe haven for al-Qaeda any place have to know that we are going to find them."
The US tracked the Islamists from its combined task force headquarters in Djibouti, which was established as a counter-terrorism base after the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
The primary target of the air strikes was thought to be Abu Taha al-Sudani, a Sudanese explosives experts believed to head al-Qaeda operations in east Africa. The attack was just the sort of operation sought by hardliners in the Bush administration, who had been pressing the military's special operations command for strikes against suspected al-Qaeda cells. It was supported by the Somali government, whose shaky grip has been challenged by the rise of the Islamist Courts movement.
The US "has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania", the Somali president, Abdullahi Yusuf, told journalists in Mogadishu.
The attack was carried out under cover of Ethiopia's military push into Somalia late last month, which is believed to have forced the leadership of the militant Union of Islamic Courts from Mogadishu.
Like Ethiopia, the Bush administration accuses the Islamist Courts movement of harbouring and falling under the influence of al-Qaeda.
In addition to al-Sudan, the US believes two other suspects in the embassy bombings - Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Comorian, and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan - have been hiding in Somalia. All three were believed to have fled Mogadishu after Ethiopian troops entered the capital.