Reported U.S. Airstrikes Against Al Qaeda in Somalia

Major news outlets are reporting an American strike against Al Qaeda suspects in Somalia.

Somalia is currently home to a U.S. sanctioned invasion, begun on December 24, 2006, by neighboring Ethiopian troops. Ethiopia, in support of the Transitional Federal Government leaders installed in 2004, seeks to oust the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), an Islamist coalition that controls the country's capital, Mogadishu.

In the last several days, inroads by Ethiopian and Somali government troops have created an opportunity for the U.S. to close in on Al Qaeda members suspected of training there. In the hours before the U.S. bombing:

The Somali defense minister, Colonel Barre Aden Shire, said government troops were poised to enter the Islamic stronghold at Ras Kamboni, on the southernmost tip of Somalia between the sea and the Kenyan border, after a fierce two-day battle.

American warships were patrolling the coastline and the Kenyan military was securing the border, Shire said.

Skirmishes had taken place outside Ras Kamboni and both sides had suffered heavy casualties.

U.S. officials have said that extremists with ties to Al Qaeda were operating a training camp at Ras Kamboni and that Qaeda members were believed to have visited it.

The alleged mastermind of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa, Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, escaped to Ras Kamboni, according to testimony from one of the bombers.

Ayman al Zawahiri is alleged to have this week issued an audiotaped messageto Somalia's Islamists to "launch suicide attacks" against Ethiopian troops.

There is concern in some parts of the international community that collapsing the Islamist government at present will return Somalia to the extreme chaos that governed in the 1990s, and to dangerous conflict among warlord led clans vying for power.