Brights News Feed

“I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage,” said Somali presidential chief of staff, Abdirizak Hassan, today. “One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead.”

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was the chief suspect in the planning of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 225 people, and a number of other terrorist activities.

In a series of air strikes undertaken since Sunday, and ongoing (Retuers), the Somali transitional government claims the US forces have eliminated numerous Islamic Courts fighters, on the run from government and Ethiopian ground troops. A successful strike against Fazul Abdullah Mohammed represents closure on two fronts for the US military, as the air strikes are the first overt US military action in Somalia since the devastating failed mission in 1993 that was immortalised in the book and film Black Hawk Down.

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“We have been defeated. I have removed my uniform. Most of my comrades have also changed into civilian clothes. Most of our leaders have fled.”

So said one former combatant of the Union of Islamic Courts after the secular, UN-backed Somali transitional government, with the support of Ethiopian troops, re-took Mogadishu, today.

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After days of increased hostility — including exchange of rockets and artillery fire which claimed dozens of lives and injured hundreds — between Islamist militias and forces loyal to the transitional Somali government, tanks from majority-Christian Ethiopia yesterday rolled into Somalia’s Baidoa region, according to witnesses. (Ethiopia has so far denied this, possibly because they have previously promised to publicize any decision to officially go to war with the Islamists.) Their mission would be to defend the fragile seat of the internationally-recognised, UN-backed, secular Somali government, which holds sway only over a relatively small area around the city of Baidoa, against redoubled threat from the Union of Islamic Courts and their militia.

Somali forces defending the UN-backed government

The Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) control Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and most of the south of the country. Yesterday they issued threats that the militias were preparing to take Baidoa (Toronoto Star), desipte earlier claiming that they were at war with Ethiopia and not the transitional government (Al Jazeera). Ethiopian reinforcements pose a formidable block to the ambition of the Islamist militias, but a UN report states that arms in support of the UIC are continuing to roll in from Eritrea and Yemen, who back the Islamic Courts, and may yet send their own forces to officially stand alongside the militia. This would reignite war across the Horn of Africa, especially between old enemies Ethiopia and Eritrea. Meanwhile the UN has called for calm, but while the fighting continues, aid is still failing to reach thousands of people whose lives are threatened by flood and famine (News24.com).

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