Yawn: U.S. forces helped Ethiopia rout jihadis in Somalia

posted at 12:42 pm on February 23, 2007 by Allahpundit
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With the cat out of the bag about Israeli nukes, this becomes, officially, the world’s least surprising military revelation.

The American military quietly waged a campaign from Ethiopia last month to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, including the use of an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to mount airstrikes against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia, according to American officials.

The close and largely clandestine relationship with Ethiopia also included significant sharing of intelligence on the Islamic militants’ positions and information from American spy satellites with the Ethiopian military. Members of a secret American Special Operations unit, Task Force 88, were deployed in Ethiopia and Kenya, and ventured into Somalia, the officials said…

When the Ethiopian offensive began on Dec. 24, it soon turned into a rout, somewhat to the Americans’ surprise. Armed with American intelligence, the Ethiopians’ tank columns, artillery batteries and military jets made quick work of the poorly trained and ill-equipped Islamist militia.

“The Ethiopians just wiped out entire grid squares; it was a blitzkrieg,” said one official in Washington who had helped develop the strategy toward Somalia.

It sounds like Special Forces was there mainly to intercept jihadis leaving the country and to investigate possible killings of high-value targets. Good news on that front, too: they think they might have killed Aden Hashi Ayro, who was one of the big four AQ operatives identified early on as a focus of U.S. interests, and the Ethiopians think they might have gotten others in their own airstrikes, one of the embassy bombers.

With the taint of American collaboration now upon them, the Ethiopians naturally are denying the Times’s report.

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