The U.S. has stepped up its war effort in Somalia with a strikes against remaining Al Qaeda strongholds in Somalia. With the militant Muslim extremists in full retreat under a full-onslaught by the Ethiopians, opportunities are presenting themselves to finish off those who are fleeing. We have an inspirational video below the fold. .
CBS News has the full story.
As we celebrated last week, the U.S. provided naval assistance to Ethiopian army forces as they routed Islmo-fascists controlling most of Somalia. Our earlier coverage was here and here. We cheekishly suggested at the time that the U.S. should put Somalia in charge of Afghanistan and Iraq war planning.
The rapidly developing events in Somalia are a stark reminder that we are in a global war on terror. There will be ups and downs over the coming decades, yes, decades. Today is an up for the good old USA. We need more inspirational events like Somalia to counter the constant negativity offered by mostly anti-American critics of our righteous global fight. And as our new chums the Ethiopians have shown, we won’t always have to carry the major load.
A U.S. Air Force gunship has conducted a strike against suspected members of al Qaeda in Somalia, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports exclusively.
The targets included the senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al Qaeda operative wanted for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, Martin reports. Those terror attacks killed more than 200 people.
The AC-130 gunship is capable of firing thousands of rounds per second, and sources say a lot of bodies were seen on the ground after the strike, but there is as yet, no confirmation of the identities.
The gunship flew from its base in Dijibouti down to the southern tip of Somalia, Martin reports, where the al Qaeda operatives had fled after being chased out of the capital of Mogadishu by Ethiopian troops backed by the United States.
Once they started moving, the al Qaeda operatives became easier to track, and the U.S. military started preparing for an air strike, using unmanned aerial drones to keep them under surveillance and moving the aircraft carrier Eisenhower out of the Persian Gulf toward Somalia. But when the order was given, the mission was assigned to the AC-130 gunship operated by the U.S. Special Operations command.
If the attack got the operatives it was aimed at, reports Martin, it would deal a major blow to al Qaeda in East Africa.
Meanwhile, a jungle hideout used by Islamic militants that is believed to be an al Qaeda base was on the verge of falling to Ethiopian and Somali troops, the defense minister said Monday.
People, I needed this story and I can’t fully explain why. I am reinvigorated and more optimistic about the fight against Islamo-fascism than at any time in the last year.
“For Soldiers About to Rock”
“We Salute You !”
Love that video.
Roundup: Wizbang, Webloggin, Right Voices, Stop the ACLU, Pirate’s Cove, Suitably Flip, Riehl World, Malkin, Blue Crab, 186K, Don Surber, Axis of Right.
[tags]u.s., air+strikes, somalia, africa, el+qaeda, god+bless+america, video, youtube, ethipia, military, al+qaeda[/tags]
January 8th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
My dad was in the 1st Aviation during Vietnam and got to see one of those cargo ship conversion aircraft’s handy work up close and personal. When they had to fly into a super hot area during important night operations, and the Air Force gunship was available, they would let the AC-47 (the predecessor to the AC-130) light it up, and mow it down.
One of the oldest of the gunships was an AC-47 named “Puff the Magic Dragon”. It had a set of 3 mini-guns (that fire 6000+ rounds a minute EACH) that can put a 7.62 bullet in every square foot of a football field in less than a minute, and several thousand 45 minute flares that turn night into day.
It could fly around in a circle and fire on a position for 6 or 8 hours straight, and when they got through with an area there was nothing left but tree pulp, dirt, and puddles of what used to be the enemy.
The VC and NVA officers were so scared of the gunships that they issued direct orders to their soldiers that said to, “not attack the Dragon because it would only infuriate the monster.”
The AC gunships had such a terrifying effect on the enemy that eventually the Air Force started dropping leaflets and both the VC and NVA would just surrender before a shot was fired.
Between the B-52’s bombing North Vietnam and the AC gunships psychologically destroying the will of the enemy, the Vietnam War could have been won, but the public let Walter Cronkite sell them the sack of shit he was peddling on the nightly news and that was what broke the will of the American public.
The beginning of the end for the Vietnam War was the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive was a major military strike made simultaneously by NVA and VC during the holiday of Tet. They swarmed South Vietnam, and caught everyone off guard in the process. It was such a massive attack that the doom and gloom crowd of the era said enough is enough and called on congress to cut off the funding for the war. The icing on the surrender cake came when Gen. William Westmoreland started demanding 200,000 more troops (that he didn’t need).
Ironically, the US and ARVN forces, along with the civilian population fought the North Vietnamese back and not a single battle was lost during Tet. The NVA recorded 35,000 soldiers’ dead and another 65,000 wounded, and nobody knows for sure how many VC guerrillas were killed. The South Vietnamese Army lost about 4,000 men and the American body count was about 1,100. Not bad considering that we, and our ARVN friends fought off somewhere between 85,000 and 100,000 (maybe more) enemy soldiers, in hundreds of attacks over a two month period.
Of course this is watered down a bit due to the nature of the forum, but there are important lessons in this little tid-bit of past experience.
But anyway, the AC-130’s are cool. You should check them out sometime when your surfing the web.
January 9th, 2007 at 4:31 am
Yes - Puff - History Channel had a whole show about it.
I too am glad we went in and we do owe a lot of thanks to Ethiopia for recognizing the danger and doing something about it.
We need to go into whereever these extremists are hiding and get them.
January 9th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
McCain says: “I needed this story and I can’t fully explain why. I am reinvigorated and more optimistic about the fight against Islamo-fascism than at any time in the last year.”
I will help you to better understand your feelings. This is an attack against the same al Qaeda terrorists who reportedly mudered hundreds of people in the U.S. embassy bombings. It is self-contained and can’t “fail” because there is no expectation of “victory” or even of follow up. You are coming to realize, with delight, that the fight against terrorists is about attacking al Qaeda wherever they can be found and not about overthrowing secular dictators who did not want war with us.
January 10th, 2007 at 10:06 am
There is no Al Qaeda in Somalia. Just like there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. Sure there may be attempts to get it started, but the presence is negligible. the Union of Islamic Courts are not terrorists. They may not be ideal but they are one of the more stable forces in Somalia.
It’s not your fault you think as you do, because these media reports are highly distorted.
For example, the muslims did NOT overthrow the prime minister of Thailand. Sure, Muslims were involved. But it was the whole of the Thai people united in their quest to remove this autocrat.
Also, Islamo-fascism is a poor word. Muslim people do not practice fascism. But rather, unholy practise their brutalism under the flase flag of religion.
Nobody wants their home country to be destroyed. That would make us suicidal. But this “let’s get em before they kill us mentality” has really gotten out of hand.
January 10th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Actually
There is Al Qaeda in Iraq now, because our blundering invasion has created just the vacuum they need to grab a foothold.
Way to go Bushie !
January 10th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Truth - We concur on your last comment, but you are describing a situation that is an unexpected benefit of the war. When Osama ordered his followers to Iraq, I cheered. Better fight them there with 100,000 of our military than confront them somewhere else where we aren’t prepared. Osama made a strategic blunder, don’t you think?
And you can call the militant Islamists in Somalia anything you like because the semantics are unimportant. Whether they are technically card-carrying “Al Qaeda” members, their goals of spreading Islam throughout all cultures at the point of the sword is the same. They are the enemy of western civilization, and thank God the Ethiopians did something about the problem in their neighborhood. But we need more nations with courage to confront the cancer of Islamo-fascism.
Hard to rise to the occasion tho, don’t you think? We didn’t confront H1tler until we were bombed ourselves by the Japanese. That delay was immoral just as our delay in removing Saddam was immoral. So to some extent I understand nations working in their selfish interests, because rising to a higher moral calling takes courage that few politicians will ever possess.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Ahhh ! I’m glad you used the word cancer. So let’s say these individuals are a cancer.(Again, I won’t use the word Islamo to describe them, just as I won’t use the word Christian to describe the medieval chruch activities or Jewish to describe modern day Zionist settler activities.)
So anyway, there is this group that is up to no good and is spreading it’s falsely religious based ideology around the world. Why do I call it a cancer ? Because it spreads and it grows. And just because new cells are infected does not mean the old ones go away.
So when you say a strategic pleasantry was that “When Osama ordered his followers to Iraq, I cheered. Better fight them there with 100,000 of our military than confront them somewhere else”, I challenge that statement. Perhaps only a very few cancer cells moved into a new host body and began to turn their neighboring cells into cancer and start a new process of multiplication. So what you are saying is akin to “There is cancer in the lungs, so let’s invite it into the pancreas and we can kill it all there.” Do you get my point ?
Again, using the cancer analogy, let’s think of the best way to stop the proliferation of these cancer cells. I think it would be unanimously agreed upon by doctors that the best cure to disease is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Or, if you can’t do that, remove the fertile ground it needs to spread.
So there are some pre-existing situations and thus the first option is no longer available. But what about the second ? What is fertile ground for fundamentalism ? I would say hopelessness and despair. That’s why terrorist cells are very scarce in highly developed wealthy nations. It has nothing to do with religion.
So the key is to help the hopeless and desperate masses of the world, before some fanatic shows up and prays on their desperation, turning them into new cancer cells.
So regardless of whether one thinks the war in Iraq is justified or not, the basic question needs to be asked: Is the ground more fertile or less fertile for the cancer to spread. There are more ‘terrorists’ now in Iraq than before the invasion, so I would argue that it is more fertile.
The question is how to take away the hopelessness and desperation and restore the stability so that the cancer spreaders don’t have a chance, both in Iraq and Somalia. It isn’t an easy quest.
Cheers
January 10th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Interesting analogy, but the foundation of your argument from which all flows is faulty. Intelligence reports have concluded that there are now fewer Islamo terrorists in the world than there were before. The cancer is not growing. It will be a long decades war, but we have the upper hand now. And if the cancer is centered in Iraq, that’s a good thing. Easier to control a disease when doctors can isolate it.
But back to Somalia, the Ethiopians have put the cancer in Somalia into remission through a wildly successful military incursion you can think of as “chemotheraphy”. We won’t know if the cancer is cured for awhile, but the prognosis there is excellent.
Same in the Phillipines, by the way, thanks partly to some very moral assistance that the US is providing under the public radar.
Do you see the cancer growing anywhere other than Iraq? And to what do you attribute that growth?
January 10th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
I want to also expound a wee bit further, again just for the sake of finding a solution to the spread of fundamentalism.
I identified ‘hopelessness and despair’ as the fertile ground for the ancer to spread. But I think it is beneficial to then go one step further and analyze the roots of hopelessness and despair. One reason, among others, is anarchy. So a dictatorship like Saddam’s is not preferrable, but it wasn’t an anarchy. Now the bad regime of Saddam has been removed, but anarchy has moved in to replace it. So the trick is to take away a bad thing without introducing a worse thing.
Like the common conclusion we both reached regarding the Israel vs Iran thing. Attacking/Invading promotes anarchy -> despair -> fundamentalism. Chnange from the inside creates -> good governance -> opportunity -> optimism -> good world citizens.
So I question what attacking is doing here in somalia also. And I don’t think most readers are very informed about what the ideologies of the different somali factions are. Attacking for the sake of attacking is seldom good, and often bad.
Cheers
January 10th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
“Intelligence reports have concluded that there are now fewer Islamo terrorists in the world than there were before.”
I also recall intelligence reporting:
-Saddam is producing WMDs
-Saddam is importing yellowcake from Nigeria
-Iran’s Uranium enrichment equipment has been found to contain weapons-grade enriched uranium traces
Everyone of these has been since found to be untrue. So sometimes these intelligence reports are more like ‘un-intelligence’ reports.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Well that’s true, but you go with the best data you can get. You are an upstanding guy, but when stacked up against your personal intution, I’ll go with the intelligence report.
Oh, Saddam actually DID pursue yellow cake in Nigeria, not that it really matters now. The disgraced Joe Wilson’s fraudulent media peddling was exposed a few months ago. But whether Saddam was 10%, 30% or 80% committed to nuclear weapons isn’t that important to me, and was only one of the several arguments the US gave for the war.