Crews sort through bodies in Somalia
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – American military personnel and their Somali allies were sifting through the aftermath of a battle with suspected Islamist militants in Somalia on Saturday, a day after the U.S. Navy bombarded that nation’s hilly shoreline with high explosives.
So far, investigators have found the bodies of at least eight fighters – including one carrying a U.S. passport, a senior Somali official said.
“We have found an American, British, Swedish and some Middle Eastern passports on the corpses,” said Hassan Dahir Mohamoud, the vice president of Puntland, a semiautonomous state in northern Somalia where the fighting took place. “These are al-Qaida-connected forces from southern Somalia. Some of them have escaped but they are being tracked down by our soldiers.”
Mohamoud said U.S. soldiers were on the ground in Somalia to help collect intelligence and coordinate mop-up operations with American vessels patrolling off Somalia’s coast. One or two U.S. warships, possibly destroyers, pounded the militants with cruise missiles or artillery after they were chased up a brushy mountain by government troops, he said.
Another Somali official later said five gunmen had been captured. He added that combat operations were winding down and raised the militants’ death toll to 10.
The two-day battle in the remote hills of Puntland marks at least the third time the U.S. military has intervened recently in Somalia, one of the murkiest fronts in the global war on terror. Special Forces advisers are believed to have accompanied the Ethiopian army as it rolled into the unstable nation in December to crush a burgeoning Islamist movement. Since then the Pentagon has launched airstrikes against al-Qaida operatives holed up with the remnants of Somalia’s radical Islamic Courts Union faction in the country’s southern swamps.
It was unclear whether the latest U.S. bombardment was meant to target individual al-Qaida suspects or just to help prop up Somalia’s frail transitional government. At least one plotter behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania may be hiding in Somalia, terrorism experts said.
A Pentagon spokesperson did not return the Chicago Tribune’s calls Saturday. A Pentagon press statement neither confirmed nor denied the U.S. role in the battle in Puntland.
According to Somali sources, the fighting began when a fishing boat loaded with heavily armed men landed at the isolated northern fishing port of Bargal on Thursday and began shooting at local police. Four officers were wounded before the regional government contacted U.S. Navy ships steaming offshore for artillery support. A task force of American and allied vessels, called CTF-150, constantly patrols Somalia’s wild, 1,900-mile-long coastline against infiltration by international terrorists.
“The Americans helped us wipe them out,” Muse Gelle, the provincial governor, said of the extremists. “Their ships fired missiles into the mountains where the foreign fighters were trying to regroup. That was the end.”
Gelle said no civilians were injured in the U.S. strike because the area is uninhabited. Human-rights groups have accused the Pentagon of accidentally killing villagers and nomads in previous strikes on Islamic terrorists in Somalia – a charge the U.S. denies.
Mohamoud, the Puntland vice president, said he didn’t know why the militants chose to infiltrate his relatively quiet region of Somalia.
“Maybe they wanted to make a new base in the mountains,” he said. “Or maybe they couldn’t hide in the south any longer because the Americans were attacking them there.”
He said three U.S. military officers were helping the Puntland regional government analyze the documents seized from the dead. Besides the American and European passports, his troops recovered damaged identity documents from several unnamed Middle Eastern countries and another from Eritrea.
“We don’t want these foreigners in our territory,” he said. “It’s a big concern to us that these kinds of people may be spreading north.”