Off-target
It was 3:25 a.m. on March 3 in Dobley, Somalia, when the missile hit, scattering shrapnel in a wide arc and piercing the thin wooden walls of Mohamed Nuuriye Salaad's house. Shrapnel sliced into Salaad's eldest daughter, 15-year-old Amina, tearing open the skin between her ear and mouth. Amina didn't receive medical care for days, not until she could be smuggled across the Kenyan border.
Five others who were wounded tended to their injuries on their own.
The two Tomahawk missiles launched toward Dobley were the fourth U.S. airstrike aimed at individuals with Al Qaeda links in Somalia since January 2007. U.S. government officials claim that the latest strikes targeted Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan suspected of involvement in the 2002 bombings of a Kenyan resort and the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. The strike also might have been targeting Hassan Turki, a Somali leader of the Islamist group Itihaad al Islamiya, which is on U.S. and U.N. lists of terrorist groups.
Four days after the missile strike, however, Turki appeared to speak in one of Dobley's mosques after morning prayers. He used the attack for his own purposes, condemning the gaalo (unbelievers) and warning that any white people in the area, including aid workers, would be viewed as spies. Earlier that week, hundreds of Dobley residents reportedly joined an impromptu protest, marching through the streets and shouting anti-American slogans.
The Bush administration justifies such missile strikes by claiming that the United States is engaged in a global war against Al Qaeda and that it is legally entitled to annihilate any alleged Al Qaeda member just about anywhere in the world. To be fair, the administration insists that it will not, as a matter of policy, shoot alleged terrorists on the streets of London -- or in any other region where a functioning government is willing and able to arrest, detain or otherwise take action against those deemed to be terrorists. But southern Somalia is a fairly lawless place, and absent a dangerous ground mission, missiles are arguably one of the only ways that the U.S. can strike at Al Qaeda suspects there.
