almotamar.net Google news - THE US decision to bomb Islamists holed up in Somalia near the border with Kenya is a high-risk tactic that could ignite an Iraqi-style insurgency across a swath of East Africa.
Buoyed by the success of its allies - Ethiopia and the transitional Somalian Government - in driving the Islamists out of Mogadishu in recent weeks, Washington clearly feels it has an opportunity to wipe out what it sees as a persistent threat to Western interests in the region. The Americans have gone for the jugular.
The danger is that the high loss of life in Somalia and the likelihood that many non-al-Qa'ida sympathisers have been killed, including more moderate leaders of the defeated Council of Islamic Courts, could see the operation backfire spectacularly and unite the Somalis against the US-supported Government.
"The US has sided with one Somali faction against another - this could be the beginning of a new civil war. I fear once again they have gone for a quick fix based on false information. If they pull it off, however, it could be a turning point. The stakes are very high indeed now," said one highly respected regional analyst, recalling the futile US role in the hunt for one Somali warlord in the early 1990s, which resulted in the Black Hawk Down tragedy when 18 US special forces troops were killed.
That attack, for which Osama bin Laden subsequently claimed credit, scarred US foreign policy for years.
Washington has long argued that al-Qa'ida sympathisers have used bases in the Ras Kamboni area, made up of dense mango swamps and small islands, from which to launch terror attacks in the rest of East Africa.
Some of the region's most wanted terrorists are known to be there, including the masterminds behind the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in the Kenyan and Tanzanian capitals of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, in which more than 200 people were killed.
The same group is believed to have killed 15 people with the bombing of a hotel in the Kenyan beach resort of Mombasa in November 2002, and narrowly missed bringing down an Israeli chartered tourist jet.
However, the links between the al-Qa'ida bombers and the CIC's main Islamic militia, the Shabab, have never been proved. And many of the Islamists now hiding in the area are from more moderate factions of what was a loose coalition of 11 groups.
"I fear the Americans are repeating the mistakes of the past - not only in Somalia but in Afghanistan and Iraq, and will end up creating a new insurgency which could destabilise this entire region," the analyst said.
The Times