Commandos And Clansmen In Somali Mission
In Somalia it is sometimes said that the town Galkayo translates as “foreigner runs away”.
After its airport was used as the base of a US Navy Seal (Sea, Air and Land Teams) hostage rescue in the lawless country’s pirate heartland; the town might now want to change its name.
Locals reported that several aircraft, both helicopters and fixed wing, occupied the city’s airport for the duration of the operation in which Seals parachuted onto secret locations near Adado, about 70 miles south, crept up on kidnappers holding Jessica Buchannan, 32, and Poul Hagen Thisted, 60, and killed them.
Within an hour the Seals were being lifted off the ground with the two hostages safe and with no casualties on the US side. Nine Somalis lay dead. Locals said that between three and five others were missing.
This was the first time American forces had attacked pirates on land.
The operation would have been a lot harder is they had not secured the cooperation of the local Somalis in Galkayo, where the two aid workers had been working for the Danish Refugee Council clearing the battlefields of mines.
As the biggest city in the traditional heartland of the Habre Gedir clan, which fought bloody battles against American forces during the 1990s culminating in the “Black Hawk Down” debacle, Galkayo was the least obvious place for a rendezvous between Somali clansmen and American special forces commandos.
In 1993 the Habre Gedir lost hundreds of men fighting US forces who were combing the streets of Mogadishu, the capital, for general Mohammed Farrah Aidid, the clan’s leader, who was accused of orchestrating attacks against United Nations peacekeepers in the city.
But clearly local elders have begun to tire of the disruptions brought to their lives by Somalia’s pirates – even though many of them come from Aidid’s own sub-clan the Sa’ad.
Somali sources said that the hostages, who had been held for three months, had been moved around central Somalia on a daily basis in an attempt to frustrate rescue operations. Kidnappers had regularly complained that they could hear aircraft over head.
Elders of the Habre Gedir have been negotiating the release of the two aid workers along with journalist Michael Scott Moore, who was kidnapped last Saturday, and British hostage Judith Tebutt who was abducted from Kiwayu in Kenya last year.
“We are very happy about this incident because the pirates are the ones causing insecurity in this region,” Mohammed Omar told the Somalia Report news agency.
Somalia has shot up the West’s agenda over the last couple of years after repeated intelligence reports of impending terrorist attacks in East Africa, launched from territory controlled by the al Qaeda linked al Shabab movement.
The spate of kidnapping last autumn provoked a Kenyan invasion of the south and Ethiopia recently moved into Somalia, south of Galkayo, while African Union peacekeepers have conducted a renewed offensive against al Shabab around Mogadishu.
Next month the UK will host an international conference on Somalia at which Prime Minister David Cameron hopes to galvanise an international effort to end the 20 years of chaos which has cursed the arid Horn of Africa nation.
The Seal raid is a sign that, perhaps, some of Somalia’s most notorious clansmen have decided to help make mayhem history.
sky.com