Two U.S. missiles hit a house in southern Somalia on Monday, according to local officials, in a strike Washington said was directed at “known terrorists.”
It was the fourth U.S. air strike in 14 months on Somalia, where Washington believes local Islamist insurgents are giving shelter to wanted al Qaeda figures.
“We launched a deliberate strike against a suspected bed-down of known terrorists,” a senior U.S. official, who declined to be named, told Reuters in Washington.
Residents of Dobley, a remote Somali town 220 km (140 miles) from the southern port city of Kismayu on the Kenyan border, believed the missiles were targeting senior Islamist leaders meeting nearby.
Dobley district commissioner Ali Hussein Nur said six people were killed, but a local politician who had visited the scene and who asked not to be named, said only three people were wounded.
The U.S. official said it was too early to know what damage had been inflicted, or whether any people were injured or killed. The official declined to give details on the type of weapon used.
The Somali politician said Sheikh Hassan Turki, a local militant cleric, and other leaders from a militant Islamist group from Mogadishu were meeting in the vicinity. The Islamists have been waging a bloody insurgency against Somali government forces.
ASSESSING DAMAGE
“The town is very tense. People have started fleeing because they fear there might be more attacks,” he said.
A man in Kismayu, who said the house belonged to him, told Reuters his daughter had been wounded and four of his cows killed in the attack.
“We do not know whether the missiles were fired by the American AC-130 plane which is still flying over the city. All we know is they dropped from the sky,” Mohamed Nurie Salad told Reuters in Kismayu.
He said he was returning to Dobley to assess the damage, which he had been told about over the telephone.
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