Murk of War

To many Somalis, history is repeating itself. They feel that the United States has once again invaded their country, albeit with a proxy force from Ethiopia, occupying most of the south and central part of it; has bombed members of the former government as they fled last Monday, then has followed that up with helicopter-gunship attacks as well as AC-130 aerial assaults on a daily basis since. After that, they say, Washington deployed American commandos to hunt down remnants of Islamic hard-liners, both from the carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower offshore, and across the land border from Kenya in the south.

Not all of this is true. But there's enough of a kernel of truth in this account to make the rest believable—and plenty of murkiness to make almost any version of U.S. involvement in the troubled African nation plausible at this point. The Eisenhower is indeed off Somalia's coast, and the Pentagon has confirmed that it launched a single airstrike against Al Qaeda targets in the far south of the country. Ethiopia has taken control of much of Somalia, its historic enemy, in an invasion apparently encouraged by the United States, and since applauded by it. The Islamic Courts Union, a hard-line group led by some pro-Al Qaeda elements, gave up Mogadishu without a fight late last month as Ethiopia marched in and installed the U.S.-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG), a Somali group with little popular support in its own country, in the capital for the first time.

But beyond those facts, it really depends whom you believe. Washington says it has no commandos on the ground—although some U.S. news organizations are reporting they are there, quoting Washington sources. Some Somali officials with the TFG, however, openly boast that U.S. ground forces are in Somalia, while others stick to the party line and flatly deny it. And in a telephone interview today from Mogadishu with NEWSWEEK, the TFG's interior minister, Hussein Aidid, confirmed that U.S. ground forces were involved in the mop-up in southern Somalia.

Somalis reached by NEWSWEEK in the area, and others who returned from there to the port of Kismayo, report repeated U.S. airstrikes against targets in the Ras Kamboni island area of the country's south, near the Kenyan border and the Indian Ocean. Some say the victims are innocent civilians, others claim Al Qaeda elements of the court have been cut down in full flight. Somali officials have even said the U.S. air raids killed one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Comoran native wanted for masterminding the Al Qaeda bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 (reward: $5 million); U.S. officials denied that was true, with one unnamed official telling Reuters that the airstrike had killed up to 10 suspected Al Qaeda targets but missed three of its most wanted suspects.

The area itself, the Lower Juba region, is heavily forested and in recent months has been severely inundated by record floods, making most roads impassable. Kismayo, the only large town in the area, was the last to fall to the Ethiopian Army's advance. The area is so difficult that aid agencies haven't been able to reach there to investigate reports of Rift Valley Fever, a deadly hemorrhagic fever. No journalists have been able to travel independently to the area, and Kenyan officials have cordoned off their frontier, as well, to prevent fleeing Islamists from seeking refuge there. The island of Ras Kamboni, just off the Lower Juba coast, was a known haunt of Mohammed, and a reputed Al Qaeda training area, and it's the location of the one airstrike the United States did acknowledge.

Villagers reached by telephone and radio on Ras Kamboni, four other small islands nearby, and neighboring mainland villages, said that U.S. airstrikes by gunships were continuing as recently as Wednesday of this week. In Burgabo village, on the mainland, village chairman Ali Bulaale Adan said Islamic hard-liners had been in the area three days before the bombing but were gone by the time the U.S. airstrikes occurred. In nearby Butiye village, Watira Suldan Farah, a mother of five children, said that "at least 35 people were killed in Butiye [on Tuesday and Wednesday], but all the people ran from the area." She continued: "It was a white big plane with a black tail that was raiding, people were saying it was [an] AC-130, and it was doing very awful actions." Hussein Tarabi, an old man who lost 30 cattle in one gunship strike said, "We are sad, because we lost all our belongings including the cows, camel and goats. We are not Islamist militia, but we are the victims, we ask the U.S. government to stop the genocide and give us compensation." These and numerous similar reports, including many reports of casualties of both civilians and, more often, cattle, were impossible to confirm.