WASHINGTON — When Navy SEALs were met with gunfire as they attempted a raid on a seaside militant compound in southern Somalia early Saturday, the commander of the operation had the authority to call in a U.S. airstrike. Instead, he opted to retreat.
The site had been under surveillance, and the operation against a group affiliated with al-Qaeda had been in the planning stages for months, current and former Obama administration officials said Monday. A drone strike against the al-Shabab compound had been rejected, officials said, because there were too many women and children inside, the same reason the commander opted against an airstrike once the operation was underway.
Destroying the compound probably also would have defeated a primary purpose of the mission: to capture, not kill, a Kenyan-born al-Shabab commander named Abdulkadir Mohamed Abdulkadir, also known as Ikrima. He has long been on a U.S. “capture or kill” list, along with al-Shabab leader Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, known as Godane, and was considered the group’s primary planner of attacks outside Somalia.
As they provided more details of the aborted operation in the town of Barawe, current and former administration officials said it was designed within restrictive counterterrorism guidelines President Barack Obama signed in the spring. Under the 2001 congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the guidelines say that lethal force can be used only when there is a “near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed.”
The decision to launch the raid closely followed an al-Shabab attack last month on a Nairobi shopping mall frequented by Westerners. Public administration statements Monday also alleged that Ikrima was “closely associated” with the al-Qaeda planners of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
But administration officials, speaking about intelligence matters on the condition of anonymity, said neither of those events was the justification for the attempted raid. The mall attack, they said, served only as further indication that al-Shabab’s expanded range soon would target Americans in the region directly.
U.S. officials have not commented on al-Shabab assertions that the group was warned of the operation.
