Millennium Challenge: 666 hrs for three wars- The Adowa, Badme and Baidowa Connection- The Horn of Africa Allies -Ethiopia/USA and Kenya

1. U.S. Used Base in Ethiopia to Hunt Al Qaeda

Abukar Albadri/European Pressphoto Agency
A woman and her child sit in the third-floor window of their Mogadishu home, which has been repeatedly shelled and was hit again on Tuesday.


By MICHAEL R. GORDON and MARK MAZZETTI
February 23, 2007
WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 — The American military quietly waged a campaign from Ethiopia last month to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda 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 American officials.

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The New York Times
The United States and Somalia’s neighbors hunted Qaeda fighters.

The close and largely clandestine relationship with Ethiopia also included significant sharing of intelligence on the Islamic militants’ positions and information from American spy satellites with the Ethiopian military. Members of a secret American 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 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 developing for years.

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

It has been known for several weeks that American Special Operations troops have operated inside Somalia and that the United States carried out two strikes on Qaeda suspects using AC-130 gunships. But the extent of American 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, 2001, attacks to carry out these missions, which historically had been reserved for intelligence operatives.

When Ethiopian troops first began a large-scale military offensive in Somalia late last year, officials in Washington denied that the Bush administration had given its tacit approval to the Ethiopian government. In interviews over the past several weeks, however, officials from several American agencies with a hand in Somalia policy have described a close alliance between Washington and the Ethiopian government that was developed with a common purpose: rooting out Islamic radicalism inside Somalia.

Indeed, the Pentagon for several years has been training Ethiopian troops for counterterrorism operations in camps near the Somalia border, including Ethiopian special forces called the Agazi Commandos, which were part of the Ethiopian offensive in Somalia.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to discuss details of the American operation, but some officials agreed to provide specifics because they saw it as a relative success story. They said that the close relationship had included the sharing of battlefield intelligence on the Islamists’ positions — a result of an Ethiopian request to Gen. John P. Abizaid, then the commander of the United States Central Command. John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence at the time, then authorized spy satellites to be diverted to provide information for Ethiopian troops, the officials said.

The deepening American alliance with Ethiopia is the latest twist in the United States’ on-and-off intervention in Somalia, beginning with an effort in 1992 to distribute food to starving Somalis and evolving into deadly confrontation in 1993 between American troops and fighters loyal to a Somali warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid. The latest chapter began last June when the Council of Islamic Courts, an armed fundamentalist movement, defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the Central Intelligence Agency and took power in Mogadishu, the capital. The Islamists were believed to be sheltering Qaeda militants involved in the embassy bombings, as well as in a 2002 hotel bombing in Kenya.

After a failed C.I.A. effort to arm and finance Somali warlords, the Bush administration decided on a policy to bolster Somalia’s weak transitional government. This decision brought the American policy in line with Ethiopia’s.

As the Islamists’ grip on power grew stronger, their militias began to encircle Baidoa, where the transitional government was operating in virtual exile. Ethiopian officials pledged that if the Islamists attacked Baidoa, they would respond with a full-scale assault.

While Washington resisted officially endorsing an Ethiopian invasion, American officials from several government agencies said that the Bush administration decided last year that an incursion was the best option to dislodge the Islamists from power.

When the Ethiopian offensive began on Dec. 24, it soon turned into a rout, somewhat to the Americans’ surprise. Armed with American intelligence, the Ethiopians’ tank columns, artillery batteries and military jets made quick work of the poorly trained and ill-equipped Islamist militia.

“The Ethiopians just wiped out entire grid squares; it was a blitzkrieg,” said one official in Washington who had helped develop the strategy toward Somalia.

As the Islamists retreated, the Qaeda operatives and their close aides fled south toward a swampy region. Using information provided by Ethiopian forces in Somalia as well as American intelligence, a task force from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command began planning direct strikes.

On Dec. 31, the largely impotent transitional government of Somalia submitted a formal request to the American ambassador in Kenya asking for the United States to take action against the militants.

General Abizaid called Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and informed him that the Central Command was sending additional Special Operations forces to the region. The deployment was carried out under the terms of an earlier, classified directive that gave the military the authority to kill or capture senior Qaeda operatives if it was determined that the failure to act expeditiously meant the United States would lose a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy, American officials said.

On Jan. 6, two Air Force AC-130 gunships, aircraft with devastating firepower, arrived at a small airport in eastern Ethiopia. American Special Operations troops operating in Kenya, working with the Kenyan military, also set up positions along the southern border to capture militants trying to flee the country.

A Navy flotilla began to search for ships that might be carrying fleeing Qaeda operatives. Support planes were deployed in Djibouti. F-15Es from Al Udeid air base in Qatar also flew missions. Intelligence was shared with Ethiopia and Kenya through C.I.A. operatives in each country. American military planners also worked directly with Ethiopian and Kenyan military officials.

On Jan. 7, one day after the AC-130s arrived in Ethiopia, the airstrike was carried our near Ras Kamboni, an isolated fishing village on the Kenyan border.

According to American officials, the primary target of the strike was Aden Hashi Ayro, a young military commander trained in Afghanistan who was one of the senior leaders of the Council of Islamic Courts.

Several hours after the strike, Ethiopian troops and one member of the American Special Operations team arrived at the site and confirmed that eight people had been killed and three wounded, all of whom were described as being armed. After sifting through the debris, they found a bloodied passport and other items that led them to believe Mr. Ayro was injured in the strike and probably died. Several members of the Special Operations team were also in Somalia at the time of the strike, one official said.

The second AC-130 strike, on Jan. 23, had another of the Islamic council’s senior leaders, Sheik Ahmed Madobe, as its target. Mr. Madobe survived and was later captured by the Ethiopians, Americans say.

American officials said that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the mastermind of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the alleged ringleader of Al Qaeda’s East African cell, remains at large. Some officials caution that while the Ethiopians have said additional “high-priority targets,” including Abu Talha al-Sudani, a leading member of the cell, were killed in their own airstrikes, American intelligence officials have yet to confirm this.

In late January, American officials played a role in securing the safe passage of Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the second-highest-ranking Islamist leader, from southern Somalia to Nairobi, Kenya. The exact role of American involvement is still not clear, but some American officials consider him to be a moderate Islamist.


Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.

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2. Ethiopian Adviser Says Times ‘Fabricated’ Report

“The New York Times has fabricated this story, and if there is any Pentagon official whom they are quoting, then that official does not have the slightest knowledge of the region or Ethiopia,” Bereket Simon, a close adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, told Reuters. The Times report, published yesterday, chronicled how the American military provided the Ethiopians with intelligence on the whereabouts of Islamic militants in Somalia, and described how American AC-130 gunships conducted strikes on Qaeda suspects using an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia.

The article was based on interviews with American officials, who agreed to discuss the collaboration because they saw it as relatively successful in disrupting terrorist networks in the region.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, declined to comment on the details of American operations in Ethiopia, saying, “The very nature of some of our operations are not conducive to public disclosure.”

He added, “We work very closely with our allies in the region in the conduct of our military operations.”

Being seen as a close military partner of the United States is a delicate proposition for Ethiopia, since anti-American sentiment is high in parts of Somalia, and Ethiopia is already viewed as an invader by many Somalis.

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3. Uganda, AU sign Somalia deal
Friday, 23rd February, 2007

By Vision reporter
and agencies

Uganda has signed a memorandum of understanding with the African Union (AU) about the UPDF deployment in Somalia as tanks were seen driven through the streets of Kampala yesterday on their way to Mogadishu.

The memorandum, spelling out the details of the peacekeeping mission AMISOM, was signed in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Wednesday.

Minister of Defence, Crispus Kiyonga, signed on behalf of the Uganda Government, while Ambassador Said Djinnit, Commissioner for Peace and Security. signed on behalf of the AU.

Though the UPDF is secretive about the operation, it is believed that an advance party is already in Mogadishu while the bulk of the troops are expected to leave at the end of next week.

“We cannot reveal anything about the operation at this stage”, said commander of the land forces, Gen. Katumba Wamala.

“A few changes are still being discussed in Addis Ababa about the terms of deployment.

All we can say is that we are pre-positioning tanks and other equipment for transport and making arrangements in preparation for the troops to move,” he added.

The over-all AU force, comprising also of Nigerian, Burundian, Ghanaian and Malawian troops, is commanded by a Ugandan, Maj. Gen Levi Karuhanga.

Meanwhile, Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf said he would hold a national reconciliation conference soon that would be open to all clans in the country.

Three mortar bombs hit the runway and a car park at Mogadishu international airport on Thursday and two government soldiers were killed in clashes with local militiamen in the latest attacks in and around the increasingly violent capital.

Gunmen also shot dead a district commissioner in Mogadishu late on Wednesday.

“We are intending to start this (national reconciliation) congress within two, three weeks,” Yusuf told Reuters in an interview during a visit to London.

“We will start at national level and go down to local and regional levels ... down to grassroots. Our people fought hard, we slaughtered each other ... We have to discuss how to forget and forgive.”

Somalia’s transitional government, backed by Ethiopian warplanes, tanks and troops, drove an Islamist movement out of Mogadishu in late December, ending its six-month rule of the capital and much of the south.

The Islamists who survived scattered back to their clan areas and have vowed to fight an insurgency against the government and the planned 8,000-strong AU peacekeeping force.

Threats to the government also come from criminal gangs and warlords who hope to regain turf lost when the Islamists took control of Mogadishu in June.

Experts say there is little chance of the violence abating until the government reaches out to clans who feel excluded from the political