The Pentagon said
Friday that it had confirmed the death of a key Somali militant leader allied
with al-Qaeda who had been targeted in a U.S. airstrike earlier this week.
Ahmed Abdi Godane, a
co-founder of a network blamed for its brutal tactics in Somalia and for the attack
on an upscale Kenyan shopping mall last year, was killed Monday in an attack carried
out by U.S. drones and other aircraft, the Pentagon said.
“Removing Godane from
the battlefield is a major symbolic and operational loss to al-Shabab,” Rear
Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement.
U.S. military
officials had acknowledged that they were trying to kill Godane in Monday’s air
assault on a Shabab compound in southern Somalia. But they had been cautious
about asserting the mission was successful, mindful of reports of other al-Qaeda
leaders who had been killed in drone attacks, only to resurface later.
The State Department
had offered a $7 million reward for information leading to Godane’s arrest. It
identified him as a 37-year-old native of northern Somalia who, among other aliases,
went by the names Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr and Ahmed Abdi Aw Mohamed.
Monday’s drone strike
was the most aggressive U.S. military operation in Somalia in nearly
a year, and it came as the Obama administration was already grappling with
security crises in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine.
Counterterrorism
officials and analysts have described Godane as a particularly ruthless jihadi
leader who eliminated several rivals within al-Shabab, either by killing them
or forcing them to go underground.
It was unclear who might
succeed him as leader of the network. Although al-Shabab often posts comments
from the group on social media and gives interviews with journalists in
Somalia, it has been mum about whether he survived the airstrike.
Source: washingtonpost.com
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