Americans Fire Missiles Into Somalia

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT

NAIROBI, Kenya — American naval forces fired missiles into southern Somalia on Monday, aiming at what the Defense Department called terrorist targets.

Residents reached by telephone said the only casualties were three wounded civilians, three dead cows, one dead donkey and a partly destroyed house.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington, said the target was a “known Al Qaeda terrorist,” and another American military official said the attack was carried out with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a submarine. The official said the missiles were believed to have hit their targets, but did not elaborate on the targets.

Witnesses on the ground, though, described the attack differently.

“I did not know from where they were launched, but what I know is that they hit a house in this town,” said Mohammed Amin Abdullahi Osman, a resident of Dhobley, a small town in southern Somalia near the Kenyan border.

Mr. Mohammed said two missiles crashed into the house around 3:30 a.m.

It was not the first time that American forces fired missiles into Somalia in pursuit of what the Pentagon has called terrorist operatives in the country. They did so at least three times last year.

Dhobley lies in the growing swath of southern Somalia that seems to be falling under the control of the country’s Islamist movement once again. The Islamists rose to power in 2006 and brought a degree of law and order to Somalia for the first time since the central government collapsed in 1991.

But they were driven out of Somalia in late 2006 and early 2007 by a joint Ethiopian-American offensive. The Americans and Ethiopians suspected Somalia’s Islamists of harboring Qaeda terrorists, including men connected to the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Thousands of Ethiopian troops poured across the border, backed up by American airstrikes and American intelligence. The Islamist movement then went underground.

But in the past several months, the Islamists seem to be making a comeback, taking over towns in southern Somalia, including Dhobley, and inflicting a steady stream of casualties on Ethiopian forces with suicide bombs and hit-and-run attacks. Efforts by foreign diplomats and the United Nations to broker a truce have failed, and concerns are rising that Somalia could be headed toward another war-induced famine like the one it suffered in the early 1990s.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Mohammed Ibrahim contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.