berita hari ini : Target in US Raid on Somalia Is Called Top Shabab Planner of Attacks Abroad - New York Times NAIROBI, Kenya — The target of the American commando raid in the Horn of Africa, a Kenyan of Somali origin known as Ikrimah, is one of the Shabab militant group’s top planners for attacks beyond its base in Somalia, an American official said Sunday. Though Mr. Ikrimah had not been tied directly to the Shabab’s deadly assault on a shopping mall in Nairobi last month, fears of a similar attack against Western targets broke a deadlock among officials in Washington over whether to conduct the raid. Special-operations commanders were in favor, pushing for a more aggressive response to the rising threat from the group in Somalia, while administration officials were nervous about incurring American military casualties. As it turned out, there were none, according to a United States official — but Mr. Ikrimah was not captured, and there is as yet no evidence that he was killed in the firefight that broke out on the Somali coast in the early hours of Saturday morning. Mr. Ikrimah is an associate of two Al Qaeda operatives who were involved in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi and in the 2002 attacks on a hotel and an airline in Mombasa. SEAL Team 6, the Navy commando unit that killed the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was dispatched to try to apprehend him. The Navy SEALs approached the Somali coast under cover of darkness for what was supposed to be a stealthy snatch-and-grab operation from a seaside villa in the port town of Baraawe. But instead of slipping away with the senior militant they had come to capture, the SEALs found themselves under sustained fire. The American troops retreated unharmed after inflicting casualties on the Shabab defenders, but the militant group has claimed victory in the skirmish on Saturday. “Al Shabab can lick their wounds and take some satisfaction that, after all, they repulsed the world’s most powerful military force,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. “On the other hand, for Al Shabab it sends a pretty disquieting message that the U.S. is willing to intervene and bring the war right to their doorstep.” Many questions about the raid remained unanswered on Sunday. The villa might have been a residence belonging to Ahmed Abdi Godane, the Shabab’s leader, according to local residents in Baraawe who were reached by phone on Sunday. The spokesman for the Shabab, Sheik Abdiaziz Abu Musab, denied that the villa housed anything other than “normal fighters,” saying it was “like any other house — it is not that special.” Analysts said it was highly unlikely that the raid had resulted in the death of either Mr. Godane or Mr. Ikrimah. If it had, “you would think the U.S. would make a major fuss about it,” said Abdi Aynte, director of the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies in Mogadishu. “The fact that they don’t know they’ve killed someone or not tells us a lot about the fact that the raid was not too successful.” Saturday’s operation came after months of simmering tensions inside the American government about whether direct-assault missions in Somalia were worth the potential risks to American troops. “The evolution of threats has refocused counterterrorism resources and attention on Africa and on terrorist groups operating in that region,” said Valentina Soria, a security analyst at IHS Jane’s in London. Former officials and Somalia experts said that the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command has been collecting more precise intelligence for some time about the whereabouts of senior Shabab leaders, and have pushed for permission to carry out capture-or-kill missions inside the country. State Department officials wondered whether such raids could accomplish enough to justify the significant risks the American troops would run. Animating the discussions have been questions about whether Al Shabab posed a danger to Americans compared with groups like Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has tried to attack the United States on several occasions. The attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi last month, which left more than 60 people dead, “provides the impetus politically to respond to the changing threat,” said Bill Braniff, executive director of Start, a terrorism research center based at the University of Maryland. The mall attack yielded intelligence leads, as militants actively discussed the days-long siege in Kenya among themselves; tracing those discussions made it easier to determine the militants’ whereabouts. Planning for the commando raid began more than a week ago, an official said. “The opportunity question is about intelligence — when do you have enough information to act?” said Mr. Braniff. “When you do have information, that tends to force your hand.” The raid in Baraawe was the most significant operation by American troops in Somalia since commandos killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Qaeda mastermind, in a raid near the town four years ago. Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a militant commander who acted as the group’s liaison with Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, was apprehended in April 2011 by the United States military in the Gulf of Aden. Last year, a team of Navy SEALs rescued two hostages held by Somali pirates, also without suffering any casualties. The Shabab spokesman, Mr. Musab, claimed the group had advance word that the raid on Saturday was coming, though its nature was unclear. “There was some information that there was going to be a strike that took place,” he said, adding that the group’s fighters fired the first shots in the firefight. He said the commandos came ashore using small speedboats launched from a larger naval vessel out at sea. An American official briefed on the operation said the SEALs withdrew from the firefight to avoid civilian casualties. A local witness said he saw four fresh graves for militants killed by the SEALs. But the losses were unlikely to put a dent in the activities, at home or abroad, of the Shabab, a group with thousands of committed fighters. Even so, analysts said the message sent by the raid might have been more important than the outcome. “The Shabab territories are dwindling, so that means the Shabab leaders will be more vulnerable,” said Stig Hansen, a Norwegian academic who is writing a book on the resurgence of Islamic militancy in Africa. “They wanted to show that it costs the Shabab to do international operations.” Nicholas Kulish reported from Nairobi, Kenya; Eric Schmitt from San Francisco, and Mark Mazzetti from Madrid. Josh Kron contributed reporting from Mombasa, Kenya. klik baca selanjutnya : bit.ly/15V6Ast
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 02:21:49 +0000
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