Sunday, October 6, 2013 @ 02:10 AM ed
Washington (CNN) — U.S. Navy SEALs entered the southern Somalia stronghold of Al-Shabaab, the group behind last month’s Kenyan mall attack, in a mission targeting one of its leaders — but caught in a firefight, the team had to withdraw before confirming whether its target was killed, a senior U.S. official said Saturday.
The raid occurred Friday, a Pentagon spokesman said, deep inside the area of Somalia controlled by Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda subsidiary and U.S.-designated terrorist group intent on turning Somalia into a fundamentalist Islamic state.
It was one of two U.S. military operations in Africa revealed by U.S. officials Saturday. The other was a raid by U.S. special operations forces in Libya that happened Saturday and resulted in the captureof Abu Anas al Libi, a key al Qaeda operative wanted for his role in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
After coming under fire, the SEAL team in Somalia had to withdraw. The team made the “prudent decision” to withdraw rather than engage in further combat, the senior U.S. official said.
The identity of the targeted Al-Shabaab member wasn’t known. Pentagon spokesman George Little said the operation was against a “known Al-Shabaab terrorist” but declined to provide more details; a second U.S. official said it was a “high-value Al-Shabaab terrorist leader.”
The operation was aimed at capturing the Al-Shabaab target, the second U.S. official said.
No U.S. personnel were hurt or killed, the second official said, adding the U.S. team “took all necessary precautions to avoid civilian casualties” in the operation but did inflict some Al-Shabaab casualties.
Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the September 21 attack on a Nairobi, Kenya, mall that left 67 people dead. The United States has designated Al-Shabaab a terrorist organization.
The group is a subsidiary of al Qaeda, CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen says. It has a relationship with al Qaeda going back several years and last year formally announced a merger of the two groups.
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