N.Y. Times: U.S. Engagement in Somalia Greater than Acknowledged

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

Today the New York Times has an article on Somalia reporting that U.S. military engagement there was greater than the government has acknowledged:

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. 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. . . . 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.

Actually, that last sentence is not true. Regular CT Blog readers should not be surprised that U.S. military engagement in Somalia was greater than previously acknowledged by the government because I reported this in Pajamas Media well over a month ago, on January 9. An excerpt from my previous report:

U.S. ground forces have been active in Somalia from the start, a senior military intelligence officer confirmed. "In fact," he said, "they were part of the first group in." These ground forces include CIA paramilitary officers who are based out of Galkayo, in Somalia's semiautonomous region of Puntland, Special Operations forces, and Marine units operating out of Camp Lemonier in Djibouti. . . . Pajamas Media previously reported that Ethiopia's use of helicopter gunships capable of targeting the Islamic Courts Union's ground forces was a decisive factor in the army-to-army fighting against the ICU. A senior military intelligence source says that some of the gunships earlier described as Ethiopian were in fact U.S. aircraft. This has been confirmed by Dahir Jibreel, the transitional government's permanent secretary in charge of international cooperation, who said that U.S. planes and helicopters with their markings obscured have been striking targets since December 25.

The CT Blog: you heard it here first.

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