U.S. and Ethiopia teamed in Somalia (Michigan Daily)

U.S. struck al-Qaeda targets from eastern Ethiopia
By Michael R. Gordon and Mark Mazzetti, The New York Times

WASHINGTON - The U.S. military quietly waged a campaign from Ethiopia last month to capture or kill top leaders of al-Qaida in the Horn of Africa, including the use of an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to mount airstrikes against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia, according to U.S. officials.

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 counterterrorism effort was described by U.S. officials as a qualified success that disrupted terrorist networks in the East African nation, led to the death and capture of several Islamic militants and involved a collaborative relationship with Ethiopia that had been developing for years.

But the tally of the dead and captured does not as yet include some Qaida leaders - including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam - whom the United States has hunted for their suspected roles in the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. With Somalia still in a chaotic state, and U.S. and African officials struggling to cobble together a peacekeeping force for the war-ravaged country, the long-term effects of recent U.S. operations remain unclear.

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 Qaida suspects using AC-130 gunships. But the extent of U.S. cooperation with the recent Ethiopian invasion into Somalia and the fact that the Pentagon secretly used an airstrip in Ethiopia to carry out attacks have not been previously reported.

The secret campaign in the Horn of Africa is an example of a more aggressive approach the Pentagon has taken in recent years to dispatch Special Operations troops globally to hunt high-level terrorism suspects. President Bush gave the Pentagon powers after the Sept. 11 attacks to carry out these missions, which historically had been reserved for intelligence operatives. [for more story read here...]