US warplanes killed between 22 and 27 people in a remote area of southern Somalia during a strike on Tuesday, an elder from a neighbouring town said. The elder, who declined to be named, spoke to Reuters by telephone from the Kenya-Somalia border crossing at Liboi. Earlier, a Somali government source said a US attack plane killed many people with barrages of gunfire in a remote Somali village occupied by Islamists thought to be hiding at least one Al Qaeda suspect. In the first known direct US military intervention in Somalia since a failed peacekeeping mission that ended in 1994, an AC-130 plane rained gunfire on the desolate southern village of Hayo near the Kenyan border late on Monday. “I understand there are so many dead bodies and animals in the village,” the senior source said.
The US Navy also confirmed it had moved the aircraft carrier Eisenhower to the Somali coast to beef up a naval cordon it had already put there. A US intelligence official said the air raid on a target in southern Somalia killed five to 10 individuals.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said that the strike was based on “credible intelligence”. US intelligence believes Abu Talha al-Sudani, identified in grand jury testimony against Osama bin Laden as an explosives expert from Sudan, is the leader of east Africa’s Al Qaeda cell and has been in and out of Somalia for over a decade. “The Americans are saying an Al Qaeda member heading operations in east Africa is among the Islamists there,” the source said. He did not know the man’s name or whether he died.
Interim Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed defended Washington’s targeting of the camps where suspects in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were believed under the protection of Islamists. Somali Information Minister Ali Ahmed Jama “Jangali” said: “The Islamists are hiding in the thick jungle and it’s only air strikes that eliminate them from there. The strikes ... will continue until no terrorist survives.”
The European Union criticised the US air raid. “Any incident of this kind is not helpful in the long term,” a spokesman for the European Commission said. In a related development, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said in an interview published on Tuesday that nationals from Britain, Canada, Pakistan and Sudan were among those captured or wounded during the ouster of Somalia’s Islamist rulers.