U.S. troops engaged in secret campaign in Horn of Africa: report

The U.S. military quietly waged a campaign from Ethiopia last month to capture or kill top leaders of Al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, the New York Times reported on Friday.

The U.S. Air Force made use of an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to mount airstrikes against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia, the newspaper quoted unnamed U.S. officials as saying.

The close and largely clandestine relationship with Ethiopia also included significant sharing of intelligence on the Islamic militants' positions and information from U.S. spy satellites with the Ethiopian military.

Members of a secret U.S. Special Operations unit, Task Force 88, were deployed in Ethiopia and Kenya, and ventured into Somalia, the officials said.

The counter terrorism effort was described by American officials as a qualified success that disrupted terrorist networks in Somalia, led to the death or capture of several Islamic militants and involved a collaborative relationship with Ethiopia that had been in development for years.

It has been known for several weeks that U.S. Special Operations troops have operated inside Somalia and that the United States carried out two strikes on Al-Qaeda suspects using AC-130 gunship.

However, the New York Times noted the extent of U.S. operations with the recent Ethiopian invasion into Somalia and the fact that the Pentagon secretly used an airstrip in Ethiopia to carry out attacks had not been previously reported.

The secret campaign in the Horn of Africa is an example of a more aggressive approach taken in recent years by the the Pentagon taken to dispatch Special Operations troops globally to hunt high-level terrorism suspects.

U.S. President George W. Bush gave the Pentagon powers to carry out these missions after Sep. 11, 2001, which previously had been reserved for intelligence operatives, the newspaper said.

So far, the tally of the dead and captured does not include some Al-Qaeda leaders, such as Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam, who the U.S. is hunting for their suspected roles in the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Source: Xinhua