EU: Somalia Peacekeepers may be needed

[maddezmom]

UNITED NATIONS - The European Union's foreign policy chief said that a United Nations' peacekeeping force may have to enter Somalia to guarantee security and stability as the government reasserts control.

Javier Solana, after meeting U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday, said that Ugandan forces as part of the African Union may be the first deployed to replace Ethiopian troops who routed an Islamic movement that recently controlled much of Somalia.

But Solana said the African Union's peacekeeping burden is already heavy — thousands of AU troops are in Sudan's Darfur region — and that the U.N. will likely have to step in.

Solana said he "put that on the table" when he met Ban and didn't expect an answer because the idea would have to be analyzed by U.N. peacekeeping officials. "But it's something we have to think about," he said.

more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070109/ap_on_re_af/un_eu_somalia

U.S. warplane strikes Somali Islamists, "many dead"

By Guled Mohamed

MOGADISHU, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Many people died in a U.S. air strike on a southern Somali village occupied by Islamists believed to be sheltering at least one al Qaeda suspect, a Somali government source said on Tuesday.

"I understand there are so many dead bodies and animals in the village," the senior source told Reuters.

In the first known direct U.S. intervention in the Somali war that began over Christmas, an AC-130 plane rained gunfire down on the southern village of Hayo late on Monday.
~snip~
Used by the U.S. military in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the AC-130 is a big, propeller-driven cargo plane fitted with electronic sensors that allow it to pinpoint targets with heavy automatic cannon fire.

It would almost certainly have been flown by the elite Special Operations Command from the U.S. Horn of Africa counter-terrorism base in Djibouti.
more: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L09911049.htm