U.S. commando raids target Shabab, Al Qaeda leaders
Libyan militant captured and senior suspected terrorist thought to be killed in the Somalian town of Baraawe
CAIRO— American commandos carried out raids Saturday in two far-flung African countries in a powerful flex of military muscle aimed at capturing fugitive terrorist suspects in the wake of the recent Shabab massacre at a Nairobi mall.
Navy SEALs emerged before dawn from the Indian Ocean to attack a seaside villa in a Somali town known as a gathering point for militants, while American troops assisted by FBI and CIA agents seized a suspected Al Qaeda leader on the streets of Tripoli, Libya.
In the Tripoli raid, U.S. forces captured a Libyan militant who had been indicted in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The militant — born Nazih AbdulHamed al-Ruqai and known by his nom de guerre, Abu Anas al-Liby — had a $5million bounty on his head. His capture in broad daylight ended a 15-year manhunt.
The Somalia raid was planned more than a week ago, officials said, in response to a massacre by Al Shabab, the militant Somali group, at Nairobi’s Westgate mall. The Navy SEAL team targeted a senior Al Shabab leader in the town of Baraawe and exchanged gunfire for an hour with militants in a pre-dawn firefight.
The unidentified Al Shabab leader is believed to have been killed in the firefight, but the SEAL team was forced to withdraw before that could be confirmed, a senior U.S. security official said.
Officials said the timing of the two raids was coincidental. But coming on the same day, they underscored the importance of counterterrorism operations in North Africa, where the breakdown of order in Libya since the ouster of the Gadhafi government in 2011 and the persistence of Al Shabab in Somalia, which has lacked an effective central government for more than two decades, have helped spread violence and instability across the region.
Abu Anas, 49, the Libyan Al Qaeda leader, was the bigger prize, and officials said Saturday night that he was alive in U.S. custody. While the details about his cap-
The Somalia raid was planned more than a week ago, officials said, in response to a massacre by Al Shabab at Nairobi’s Westgate mall
ture were sketchy, an American official said Saturday night that he appeared to have been taken peacefully and that “he is no longer in Libya.”
His capture was the latest grave blow to what remains of the original Al Qaeda organization after a 12-year-old American campaign to capture or kills its leadership, including the killing two years ago of its founder, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Kenyan military said Saturday that it had identified four of the Westgate attackers from surveillance footage as Abu Baara al-Sudani, Omar Nabhan, Khattab alKene and a man known only as Umayr.
The spokesman, Maj. Emmanuel Chirchir, said none of the militants had escaped the mall. “They’re all dead,” he said.
The footage, broadcast on Kenyan television Friday night, showed four of the attackers moving about the mall with cool nonchalance. At least one of the four men, Nabhan, is Kenyan, and believed to be related to Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, an Al Qaeda operative killed four years ago near Baraawe, the site of Saturday’s raid.