MOGADISHU, 3 June 2007 — A US warship shelled suspected Al-Qaeda targets in northeastern Somalia after Islamist fighters clashed with troops from the country’s semiautonomous region of Puntland, witnesses and officials said yesterday.
They said a US Navy destroyer fired on several targets overnight where Islamist militants are believed to have bases in mountainous and remote areas outside the coastal town of Bargal.
“The US military was targeting the Al-Qaeda hide-out. This was aimed at flushing out all the terrorists,” said Mussa Jelle Yusuf, the governor for Barri region.
“Puntland troops are surrounding the Bargal hills and hunting for those Al-Qaeda elements. They ... will be captured or killed,” he added. Witnesses earlier confirmed the bombardment, but could not say if there had been any casualties.
“We cannot yet tell you the casualty figures, but what I can confirm is that the American warship shelled several targets in the surroundings of Bargal” late Friday, Mohamoud Salah, a resident in the area told AFP by satellite phone.
“The heavy shelling continued about three hours around the coastal area and the mountainous sites where the Islamists had their trenches,” he said.
The US Defense Department refused to confirm the bombardment, but vowed to keep pursuing extremists.
“We recognize the importance of working closely with allies to seek out, identify, locate, capture, and if necessary, kill terrorists and those who would provide them safe haven,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said in a statement. “The very nature of some of our operations, as well as the success of those operations is often predicated on our ability to work quietly with our partners and allies,” he said.
The CNN television channel reported that the destroyer was targeting a suspected Al-Qaeda operative believed to have been involved in the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, mostly Africans.
A Puntland military official said the attack came three days after authorities there reported the entry of Islamist fighters and foreigners of Arab origin into Bargal, a coastal town about 1,250 km northeast of the Somali capital Mogadishu.
