Airstrike Rekindles Somalis’ Anger at the U.S.

[Castro]

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and MARK MAZZETTI

 

MOGADISHU, Somalia, Jan. 9 — Somali officials said Tuesday that dozens of people were killed in an American airstrike on Sunday, most of them Islamist fighters fleeing in armed pickup trucks across a remote, muddy stretch of the KenyaSomalia border.

 

American officials said terrorists from Al Qaeda had been the target of the strike, which they said had killed about a dozen people. But the officials acknowledged that the identities of the victims were still unknown.

 

Several residents of the area, in the southern part of the country, said dozens of civilians had been killed, and news of the attack immediately set off new waves of anti-American anger in Mogadishu, Somalia’s battle-scarred capital, where the United States has a complicated legacy.

 

“They’re just trying to get revenge for what we did to them in 1993,” said Deeq Salad Mursel, a taxi driver, referring to the infamous “Black Hawk Down” episode in which Somali gunmen killed 18 American soldiers and brought down two American helicopters during an intense battle in Mogadishu.

 

The country’s Islamist movement swiftly seized much of Somalia last year and ruled with mixed success, bringing a much desired semblance of peace but also a harsh brand of Islam.

 

Two weeks ago, that all changed after Ethiopian-led troops routed the Islamist forces and helped bring the Western-backed transitional government to Mogadishu. Ethiopian officials said the Islamists were a growing regional threat.

 

The last remnants of the Islamist forces fled to Ras Kamboni, an isolated fishing village on the Kenyan border that residents said had been used as a terrorist sanctuary before. Starting in the mid-1990s, they said, the Islamists built trenches, hospitals and special terrorist classrooms in the village and taxed local fisherman to pay the costs.

 

On Sunday, an American AC-130 gunship pounded the area around Ras Kamboni, and also a location father north where American officials said three ringleaders of the bombings in 1998 of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were hiding. Somali officials said those bombings had been planned in Ras Kamboni after a local Somali terrorist outfit invited Al Qaeda to use the village as a base.

 

According to Abdul Rashid Hidig, a member of Somalia’s transitional parliament who represents the border area, the American airstrike on Sunday wiped out a long convoy of Islamist leaders trying to flee deeper into the bush, though he said he did not know if the specific suspects singled out by the United States had been with them.

 

“Their trucks got stuck in the mud and they were easy targets,” he said.

 

Mr. Hidig toured the area with military officials on Tuesday and said he had met several captured foreign fighters who had come from Europe and the Middle East. “I saw two white guys and asked, Where are you from?” Mr. Hidig said. “One said Jordan, the other Sweden. Yeah, it was weird.”

 

Mr. Hidig said two civilians had been killed by the airstrike, but representatives of the Islamist forces said it had killed many more.

 

The Islamists’ health director said dozens of nomadic herdsmen and their families were grazing their animals in the same wet valley that the Islamists were trying to drive across. “Their donkeys, their camels, their cows — they’ve all been destroyed,” he said. “And many children were killed.”

 

He spoke by telephone from an undisclosed location; his account could not be independently verified.

 

Mustef Yunis Culusow, a former Islamist leader who abandoned the movement days ago, said the once-powerful Islamist movement’s top leaders were now trapped in a small village with Ethiopian soldiers in front of them, the Indian Ocean behind them and now American gunships circling above them.

 

“The leaders know they’re finished,” Mr. Culusow said in a telephone interview from Kismayo, a large town north of Ras Kamboni. “They’ve basically told the young fighters they can go, it’s over, and that anyone who stays behind should be resigned to die.”

 

For several days, Ethiopian fighter jets and helicopter gunships have been laying down a blanket of fire over the area, and attacks continued on Tuesday.

 

American military and intelligence officials expressed confidence that at least one senior Qaeda leader in Somalia had been killed in the American attack or subsequent strikes by Ethiopian troops. One official said Abu Taha al-Sudani — a Sudanese aide to Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who is thought to be the ringleader of Al Qaeda’s East African cell — might have been killed.

 

American military and intelligence officials said that they expected further military strikes but that the terrorism suspects were probably traveling separately and trying to blend into the civilian population.

 

Pentagon and intelligence officials said the Ethiopian offensive had unearthed fresh intelligence about the location of Qaeda operatives whose trail had long gone cold.

 

“When you disrupt things and people move around, they become easier to target,” said one American counterterrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They have to make arrangements on the fly, and they become easier to find.”

 

American and Ethiopian forces are sharing intelligence to pinpoint the whereabouts of the terrorism suspects and their entourages. The Pentagon announced that the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower had been dispatched to the region to tighten a naval blockade off the Somali coast.

 

Washington’s decision to wade back into Somalia was, in a way, a culmination of America’s seesaw policy toward the country in the last five years.

 

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consuming the attention of national security planners in Washington, the Bush administration’s interest in Somalia was driven primarily by fact that a handful of Qaeda operatives responsible for attacks in the Horn of Africa were thought to be hiding there.

 

America’s recent forays into Somalia have tended to backfire. President Clinton abruptly curtailed a large American-led aid mission in the 1990s after the 18 soldiers were killed, leaving the country in a swirl of chaos and bloodshed, where much of it remains.

 

Then, last summer, American efforts to finance a band of Mogadishu warlords as a bulwark against the growing Islamist movement stumbled when many Somalis learned of the hidden American hand and threw their support behind the Islamists.

 

With the Pentagon still snakebitten by its experience in Somalia — rendering a ground offensive in the lawless country unpalatable — there was little the thousands of American soldiers and marines stationed in neighboring Djibouti could do to track down the Qaeda suspects.

 

Until this week, Washington was content to remain behind the scenes and use the Ethiopian invasion as the public face of the effort against the Islamists and their allies.

 

Now the Islamists have lost their grip on the country, and Somalia could be close to a turning point. For the first time since 1991, when the military dictator Mohammed Siad Barre fled, plunging the country into anarchy, there is a potentially viable government in the capital. But its survival depends on the thousands of Ethiopian troops still here, and increasingly, it seems, many Somalis do not like them. For their part, the Ethiopians have vowed not to stay much longer.

 

Some call the Ethiopians infidel invaders because Ethiopia is a country with a long Christian identity, though it is in fact half Muslim. Others do not like them because Ethiopia is a close ally of the United States, which is why American airstrikes could make things difficult for the Ethiopians and transitional government officials.

 

Some Islamists have vowed to carry on as an Iraq-style insurgency, and on Tuesday night two truckloads of gunmen attacked Ethiopian troops based at a government building, the former Ministry of Skins and Hides, in downtown Mogadishu.

 

The booms of rocket-propelled grenades echoed across town and set off a two-minute gunfight. As shoppers in a nearby market ducked for cover, spent shells clinked on the pavement. Afterward, residents reported seeing two bodies on the street.

 

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Mogadishu, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington. Mohammed Ibrahim and Yuusuf Maxamuud contributed reporting from Mogadishu.

 

NY Times