Free Republic

U.S. war planes killed an Islamist rebel said to be al Qaeda's leader in Somalia and at least a dozen other people on Thursday in Washington's biggest blow against an insurgency raging since 2007. The rebels said Aden Hashi Ayro -- who led al Shabaab militants blamed for attacks on government troops and their Ethiopian allies -- died in the first major success for a string of U.S. air-strikes on Somali insurgents in the last year. "Infidel planes bombed Dusamareb," Shabaab spokesman Mukhtar Ali Robow told Reuters by phone, referring to a town in central Somalia, where body parts lay...

NAIROBI, March 18 (Reuters) - The United States has formally designated Somalia's al Shabaab militants a foreign terrorist organisation to increase pressure on what Washington says is al Qaeda's main link in the Horn of Africa nation. The al Shabaab is the militant wing of the Somalia Islamic Courts Council that took over most of southern Somalia for the second half of 2006, until Somalia's interim government and its Ethiopian military allies routed the group in a two-week war. The group, whose leader Aden Hashi Farah Ayro survived a U.S. airstrike in January 2007, is thought by security experts to...