On Sunday October 6th while members of Congress were throwing insults at each other over funding the government for another year, and the American people were busy watching their favorite NFL teams beat the crap out of each other, two Special Forces teams were conducting raids in Africa. The first raid was conducted in Somalia by Navy Seal Team Six, who has responsibility in the Horn of Africa.
Seal Team Six is the same team that killed bin-Laden in Pakistan about two years ago. The Seal Team came ashore in Barawe, Somalia in an attempt to surprise an al-Qaida linked group known as al-Shabab before they rose for dawn prayers. The team was hoping to capture or kill the leader of al-Shabab, Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, aka Ahmed Godane. It is this group who claimed responsibility for the shopping mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya on September 21st in which some killed sixty-seven people lost there lives.
The Team assaulted a two story house, where they were met with fierce resistance. A twenty minute firefight took place and the team’s leader aborted the mission and they apparently failed to capture Zubeyr. However it has been reported that they inflicted casualties on several members of al-Shabab.
The raid in Somalia came two decades after the “Black Hawk Down” shoot-out in Mogadishu, when a mission to capture Somali warlords went south. Two U.S. helicopters were shot down and eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed. It was this battle that ended United States efforts to stabilize that nation. It was during the last twenty years that al-Shabab formed an alliance with al-Qaida. Today hundreds of men from the United States, Great Britain and the Middle-East have trained and now fight alongside Somali members of al-Shabab.
The U.S. Army’s Delta Force has responsibility in North Africa and carried out the raid in Tripoli. Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqi, aka Abu Anas al-Lib was sized and whisked away to a secret location outside of Libya.
Al-Ruqi spent time in Sudan, but was forced to leave in the 1990s after bin Laden was forced to leave the country. In 1996 he turned up in Great Britain where he was granted political asylum, and he settled in Manchester. Scotland Yard arrested him in 1999, but had to release him due to lack of evidence and he fled Britain.
In 1998 al-Ruqai was involved in the bombings of two American embassies in Africa, which makes me wonder why Great Britain granted him political asylum. He was indicted by a U.S. federal court for his alleged bombings that killed more than 220 people.
After the U.S. led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Iran jailed a number of al-Qaida-linked people who fled to Iran from Afghanistan. Apparently, al-Ruqai was one of these men, because he was imprisoned in Iran for seven years.
Quote for the Week: “He that deals in dirt has foul fingers.”----Unknown.
