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. 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 leader of al-Qaida on the streets
of Tripoli, Libya.
In Tripoli, 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
Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai and known by his nom de guerre, Abu Anas al-Liby,
had a $5 million bounty on his head and 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 the militant
Somali group al-Shabab at a Nairobi shopping mall. The Navy SEAL team
targeted a senior al-Shabab leader in the town of Baraawe and exchanged
gunfire with militants in a predawn 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.
The military may have pursued both targets simultaneously
to avoid the possibility that news of one raid might spook into hiding
the target of the other, or that a public backlash in one country might
rattle the governments of the other into withdrawing its quiet
cooperation. It was unclear if Washington was planning other raids as
well.
But at a moment when President Barack Obama's popularity is
flagging under the weight of his standoff with congressional
Republicans and his leadership criticized for his reversal in Syria, the
simultaneous attacks are bound to fuel accusations that the
administration was eager for a showy victory.
Abu Anas, the
Libyan al-Qaida leader, was the bigger prize, and officials said
Saturday night that he was alive in U.S. custody. While the details
about his capture 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-Qaida 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.
Abu
Anas is not believed to have played any role in the 2012 attack on the
U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, senior officials briefed on
that investigation have said, but he may have sought to build networks
connecting what remains of the al-Qaida organization to like-minded
militants in his native Libya.
A senior American official said
the Libyan government was involved in the operation, but it was unclear
in what capacity. An assistant to the prime minister of the Libyan
transitional government said the government was unaware of any operation
or Abu Anas' abduction. Asked if American forces ever conduct raids
inside Libya or collaborate with Libyan forces, Mehmoud Abu Bahia, an
assistant to the defense minister, replied, "Absolutely not."
Disclosure
of the raid is likely to inflame anxieties among many Libyans about
their national sovereignty, putting a new strain on the transitional
government's fragile authority. Many Libyans already accuse their
interim prime minister, Ali Zeidan, who previously lived in Geneva as
part of the exiled opposition to Moammar Gadhafi, of collaborating too
closely with the West.
Abu Anas, 49, was born in Tripoli and
joined bin Laden's organization as early as the early 1990s, when it was
based in Sudan. He later moved to Britain, where he was granted
political asylum as Libyan dissident. U.S. prosecutors in New York
charged him in a 2000 indictment with helping to conduct "visual and
photographic surveillance" of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1993 and
again in 1995. Prosecutors said in the indictment that Abu Anas had
discussed with another senior al-Qaida figure the idea of attacking an
American target in retaliation for the U.S. peacekeeping operation in
Somalia.
After the 1998 bombing, the British police raided his
apartment and found an 18-chapter terrorist training manual. Written in
Arabic and titled "Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants,"
it included advice on car bombing, torture, sabotage and disguise.
Since
the overthrow of Gadhafi, Tripoli has slid steadily into lawlessness,
with no strong central government or police presence. It has become a
safe haven for militants seeking to avoid detection elsewhere, and U.S.
government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss
confidential information, have acknowledged in recent months that Abu
Anas and other wanted terrorists had been seen moving freely around the
capital.
The operation to capture Abu Anas was several weeks in
the making, a U.S. official said, and Obama was regularly briefed as the
suspect was tracked in Tripoli. While Obama had to personally approve
the capture, the operation, while conducted in great secrecy, did not
have the intensity about it that surrounded the hunt and killing of bin
Laden.
But Obama had often promised there would be "no boots on
the ground" in Libya when the United States intervened there in March
2011, so the decision to send in special operations forces was a risky
one.
American officials say they will want to question Abu Anas
for several weeks. But they did not dispute that, with an indictment
pending against him in New York, that was most likely his ultimate
destination. Obama has been loath to add to the prisoner count at the
U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, and there is precedent for
delivering suspected terrorists to New York if they are under indictment
there.
The operation is unlikely to quell the continuing
questions about the events in Benghazi 13 months ago that led to the
deaths of four Americans. But officials say it was a product of the
decision, after Benghazi, to bolster the counterterrorism effort in
Libya, especially as Tripoli became a safe haven for al-Qaida
leadership. Abu Abas was one of the most senior al-Qaida officials
captured in recent years.
His capture coincided with a fierce
gunfight that killed 15 Libyan soldiers at a checkpoint in a
neighbourhood southeast of Tripoli, near the traditional home of Abu
Anas' clan.
A spokesman for the Libyan army general staff, Col.
Ali Sheikhi, said five cars full of armed men in masks pulled up at the
army checkpoint at 6:15 a.m. and opened fire at point-blank range. It
was not clear if the assault at the checkpoint was related to the
capture of Abu Anas.
The raid in Somalia that targeted a leader
of al-Shabab was the most significant raid by U.S. troops in that
lawless country since commandos killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, an
al-Qaida mastermind, near the same town four years ago.
The town, Baraawe, a small port south of Mogadishu, is known as a gathering place for al-Shabab's foreign fighters.
The
military assault was "prompted by" the attack on the Westgate mall in
Nairobi two weeks ago, a senior government official said. More than 60
people were killed when al-Shabab militants overran the mall.
Witnesses
in Baraawe described a firefight lasting over an hour, with helicopters
called in for air support. A senior Somali government official who
spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed the raid, saying, "The
attack was carried out by the American forces and the Somali government
was pre-informed about the attack."
A spokesman for al-Shabab
said that one of its fighters had been killed in an exchange of gunfire
but that the group had beaten back the assault. American officials
initially reported that they had seized the al-Shabab leader, but later
backed off that account.
The FBI had sent dozens of agents to
Nairobi after the shopping mall siege to help Kenyan authorities with
the investigation. U.S. officials fear that al-Shabab could attempt a
similar attack on American soil, perhaps employing Somali-American
recruits.
A witness in Baraawe said the house was known as a
place where senior foreign commanders stayed. He could not say whether
they were there at the time of the attack, but he said that 12
well-trained al-Shabab fighters scheduled for a mission abroad were
staying there at the time of the assault. One U.S. official said it was
still unclear whether any Americans were involved in the Westgate siege,
though many Kenyan officials said they now believed that there were
only four attackers - far fewer than the 10 to 15 the government had
previously reported.
A spokesman for the Kenyan military said
Saturday that it had identified four of the attackers from surveillance
footage as Abu Baara al-Sudani, Omar Nabhan, Khattab al-Kene 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-Qaida operative killed four years ago
near Baraawe, the site of Saturday's raid.
The elder Nabhan was a
suspect in the bombing of an Israeli hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002
and the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Matt
Bryden, the former head of the United Nations Monitoring Group on
Somalia and Eritrea, said the tactics used in the Westgate attack were
similar to those used by al-Shabab in a number of operations in Somalia
this year. But he also said that local help was needed to pull off an
attack on that scale, and that several of the men identified as taking
part in the attack were connected to group's Kenyan affiliate, known as
al-Hijra.
"We should certainly expect al-Hijra and al-Shabab to
try again," Bryden said. "And we should expect them to have the capacity
to do so."
