A senior foreign commander fighting with Shabab Islamic militants was killed in an American drone strike a few miles south of the capital over the weekend, according to Shabab officials.
The Shabab officials held a news conference to publicize the attack, identifying the commander as Bilal al-Barjawi, 27, a close associate of a Qaeda leader killed last year in Somalia. They said he was of Lebanese descent and had grown up in West London. British authorities denied that he was a British citizen.
One witness said there were two strikes on Saturday afternoon in a Shabab-controlled area near the town of Elasha Biyaha, about eight miles south of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, where the Shabab have a base. "One hit a car, which I believe held explosives," said the witness, who gave his name as Osman. Huge explosions were followed by clouds of flames and smoke, witnesses said, and Shabab militants sealed the area around the burning car.
Within hours, a Shabab spokesman, Ali Mohamud Raghe, told reporters, "American drones carried out today's attack and killed our brother, Martyr Bilal al-Barjawi."
He saluted the slain commander, also known as Abu Hafsa, as being among the first foreign jihadists to answer the Shabab's call for reinforcements, joining them in mid-2006 after having fought in Afghanistan.
Mr. Raghe said that Mr. Barjawi was a close associate of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Al Qaeda's leader in East Africa and the mastermind of the American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Mr. Mohammed was killed in June, in a late-night shootout at a security checkpoint in Mogadishu.
The Guardian reported that Mr. Barjawi's wife had given birth in a London hospital a few hours before the missile strike, and that the couple's relatives suspected that a celebratory telephone conversation between the couple had given away his location. The Guardian also reported that Mr. Barjawi had moved to Britain as a child and held British citizenship until a year ago, when the government revoked it under the 2006 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act.
In a chaotic, impoverished country that has not had a functioning national government for 20 years, the Shabab have managed to take control of large areas of territory, chopping off hands for what it considers un-Islamic behavior and blocking the delivery of emergency food to famine victims. An African Union mission has struggled for years to try to help the weak central government retain control of the capital, and Kenyan and Ethiopian forces have made incursions to try to keep the militants from expanding operations into their territories.
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SOURCE: NY Times
