WASHINGTON: With members of the Al-Qaeda network on the run from Afghanistan and other former safe havens, the United States is stepping up military activities in and around Somalia to prevent the lawless African country from becoming a new base for the group, Bush administration officials said.
In recent days, the United States and leading NATO allies have increased military reconnaissance flights and other surveillance activity in Somalia, the officials said.
Also, the Pentagon soon will have in the Arabian Sea three Marine Expeditionary Units, each carrying about 1,200 troops. One of those units is scheduled to set sail for the United States soon, but there will a one-week period during the middle of January when all three will be available for operations in the region, officials said.
As the Pentagon sharpened its focus on Somalia, US forces continued their efforts to track down Al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants in Afghanistan.
Asked about the possibility of imminent military action in Somalia, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declined to say what might happen. “It doesn’t do any good at all for me to be speculating about different countries and what we might do next,” he said.
But Rumsfeld went on to speak in some detail about the presence of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network in Somalia. “They go in and out,” he said. “We know there have been training camps there and that they have been active over the years and that they ... go inactive when people get attentive to them.”
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the administration has not decided what action, if any, it might take in Somalia. “We are working to ensure that Somalia doesn’t become a haven for terrorists,” he said. But, he added, “No decisions on future targets, no recommendations on future targets have gone to the president.”
The 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard and other ships, is scheduled to leave Singapore on Friday and steam westward into the Indian Ocean, officials said. The 15th MEU, which like the 13th is based in Camp Pendleton, California, is pulling out of Kandahar, Afghanistan, and is being replaced by a regiment of the Army’s 101st Air Assault Division from Fort Campbell, Ky. A third MEU, the 26th, based in Camp Lejeune, N.C., is also in the Arabian Sea.
Some experts speculated that the Marines might be used for large-scale raids in Somalia. But others dismissed that as unlikely, and said that the United States probably would rely more on low-profile intelligence actions. “I’m not convinced that Somalia will look like Afghanistan,” said one Pentagon official. “It might be one of those things Rumsfeld describes as something you don’t see.”
Suspected members of the group are finding that former havens such as Yemen, Egypt, and Sudan now are cracking down on them.
Even as he was overseeing planning for the war, Rumsfeld privately expressed concern that Al-Qaeda would be routed in Afghanistan, only to seek to establish a new base in another country.
The new US military activity in Somalia appears to be the implementation of the plans prepared in response to that order. In that sense, it is intended more to prevent additional Al-Qaeda members from getting into Somalia than to act against those already there. “I think it is pre-emptive,” said one US official. “It’s also to make the point that the war isn’t limited to Afghanistan.”
The major US aerial reconnaissance activity has been conducted by Navy P-3 planes flying out of a base in Oman, at the southeastern corner of the Arabian peninsula. They mainly are taking photographs of suspected Al-Qaeda sites. Such images are helpful in planning attacks, and because they are extremely detailed can also be used for tracking changes at a site, such as the number of people training there or the number of vehicles arriving and departing each day.
In addition, British and French aircraft are also flying over Somalia. The major purpose of the flights, which were first reported in Thursday’s Washington Times, is to “establish a baseline so we can be sensitive to anomalies in the future,” a Defence official said.
Somalia has been considered a center of Al-Qaeda activity since 1993, when Osama sent several top lieutenants to provide assistance to Mohammed Farah Aideed, a local warlord. Aideed’s forces killed 18 US troops serving in a UN peacekeeping force in a firefight in October of that year. That incident led to the US withdrawal from the country.
After the withdrawal, Al-Qaeda members continued to use Somalia as a base of operations. According to US officials and court records, Somalia was the site of some of the preparations for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. —Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.