More Than 50 Killed By U.S. Attack In Somalia

More Than 50 Die in U.S. Strikes in Somalia

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

01/09/07 "New York Times" -- -- MOGADISHU, Somalia, Jan. 9 — More than 50 people were killed by American air strikes in Somalia on Sunday, most of them Islamist leaders fleeing in armed pick-up trucks across a remote stretch of the Kenya-Somalia border, officials of the transitional Somali government said today.

The air strikes began Sunday night, when an American AC-130 gunship operating from a base in Djibouti pounded an area where American officials said three terrorist leaders were hiding. The three men are suspected of being ringleaders in the 1998 bombing attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

It was not clear whether any of the intended targets had been killed.

News of the air strikes set off fresh waves of anti-American anger in Mogadishu, the battle-scarred seaside capital of the country, which until recently was controlled by the Islamist forces.

“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, when 18 American soldiers were killed by Somali gunmen.

The country’s transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, said today that he had given American forces permission on Sunday to carry out the strikes, according to news agencies.

The United States has twice involved itself in Somalia in recent years, and neither episode ended well.

President Clinton abruptly ended a large American-led aid mission in the 1990s after the 18 soldiers were killed, leaving Somalia spiraling into chaos and bloodshed, conditions that still prevail in much of the country. Last summer, American efforts to finance a band of Somali warlords as a counterweight against a growing Islamist movement backfired when many Somalis learned of the hidden American hand and threw their support behind the Islamists.

The Islamists went on to capture much of the country, including the capital. But neighboring Ethiopia intervened two weeks ago by sending its troops in to aid the transitional government, saying that the Islamists were a growing regional threat.

The Ethiopian-led forces quickly routed the Islamists, though a small band of fighters and leaders, along with several terror suspects, escaped to a thickly forested area along the Kenyan border where terrorists have taken sanctuary before.

According to Abdul Rashid Hidig, a member of Somalia’s transitional parliament who represents the border area, the American air strikes in the area wiped out a long convoy of vehicles carrying Islamist leaders trying to flee deeper in the bush.

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

Mr. Hidig said two civilians were also killed. But representatives of the Islamist forces said that the number of civilian deaths was much higher.

Mohammed Dakhani, the Islamists’ health director, said that dozens of nomadic herdsmen and their families were grazing their animals in the same wet valley where the Islamist convoy was struggling to move across country.

“Their donkeys, their camels, their cows, they’ve all been destroyed,” he said. “And many children were killed.”

Mr. Daskhani, who spoke by telephone from a location he did not disclose, said he did not have more precise information about the effects of the attack.

For the first time since 1991, when the Somali dictator Siad Barre fled the country and plunged it into anarchy, a potentially viable national government is back in the capital. It is a transitional body set up with much United Nations help, and holds power now only because of Ethiopian military muscle.

But many people here dislike the Ethiopians. Some call them infidel invaders because Ethiopia is a country with a long Christian identity, though these days half its people are Muslim. Others object to Ethiopia’s close alliance with the United States and remember past conflicts between Ethiopia and Somalia.

Some members of the defeated Islamist movement have said that they plan to go underground and start an Iraq-style insurgency against the Ethiopian-backed government.

This evening, a band of such insurgents attacked a government building in downtown Mogadishu — the former ministry of skins and hides — where several dozen Ethiopian troops were based.

The boom of rocket-propelled grenade fire echoed through the city center and touched off a two-minute gunfight. Hot spent shells clinked in the streets as residents ran for cover. At least one person was hurt, Mogadishu hospital officials said.

Mohammed Ibrahim and Yuusuf Maxamuud contributed reporting from Mogadishu.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company