U.S. Airstrike Kills Somali Accused of Links to Al-Qaeda

A U.S. intelligence official said that although Ayro was not a formal member of al-Qaeda, he served as a conduit and facilitator for extremists in East Africa. His participation in militia fighting in Somalia in the early 1990s "came to the attention of people in extremist circles," the official said. "One of the results of that was that he went to Afghanistan for training" and established contact with the senior al-Qaeda leadership.

On his return to Somalia, he joined a radical faction of the broad Islamic movement that eventually ousted the hated warlords, who had been backed by the United States to deliver terrorism suspects for questioning.

Ayro became a youth leader in his own right, training his young militiamen in a colonial Italian cemetery in Mogadishu. As the Islamic movement rose to power, Ayro earned a reputation for ruthlessness, ordering the killings of a British journalist, four foreign aid workers and a Somali peace activist.

After U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops ousted the Islamic movement in December 2006, he was blamed for introducing suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices and other al-Qaeda style tactics to the insurgency that has gripped Somalia ever since.

U.S. officials alleged that Ayro helped shelter the three al-Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Ayro had been on the run since the Islamic Courts' ouster, but U.S. intelligence sources said they don't believe he ever left Somalia. According to the sources, he continued to train and strategize in and around Mogadishu for al-Shabab.

U.S. counterterrorism officials say they think Africa is a priority for al-Qaeda, and several Africa-based extremist groups have declared their allegiance to the terrorist network. In a series of public pronouncements over the past year, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have called for Islamist extremists to travel to Somalia.

But while al-Qaeda operatives are believed to continue to travel to East Africa from Yemen, no cohesive Somali group has emerged.

"Do these kinds of concerns still exist? Yes," the U.S. intelligence official said. But the situation in Somalia has not "progressed as far as al-Qaeda would have liked. No doubt about that . . . there is no group that calls itself al-Qaeda on the Horn of Africa."

Ayro had posed a political problem for the broad-based coalition of former Islamic leaders, intellectuals and other moderate Somalis opposed to the transitional government of President Abdullahi Yusuf and the Ethiopians.

The opposition, which maintains that Yusuf has used the excuse of fighting terrorism to go after his political and business enemies, has sought to distance itself from Ayro in a bid for international legitimacy.

And it was perhaps Ayro's unpopularity among Somalis that was his undoing, said Mohamed Uluso, a political leader within Ayro's powerful Ayr sub-clan. Uluso said Ayro had been in Dusa Marreb to win the support of traditional clan leaders but had had little success.

"The traditional elders had rejected him," he said, adding that they "did not want their legitimate cause to be confused or compromised by the accusations against Ayro."

DeYoung reported from Washington. Special correspondent Mohamed Ibrahim in Mogadishu and staff writer Ann Scott Tyson in Washington contributed to this report.