Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Meanwhile, Back At the Other War . . .

It is easy to forget that as America put out the fires and dried its tears following the 9/11 attacks, the focus was however briefly on the War on Terror, and that three years before that, we were introduced to a thug by the name of Osama bin Laden courtesy of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Eest Africa.
So it took a few minutes for me to register who Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was when I heard that he apparently had been killed in a U.S. airstrike early Monday in southern Somalia.
Fazul, one of the FBI's most wanted terrorists, had evaded capture for eight years and had been harbored by a Somali Islamic movement that had challenged this country's Ethiopian-backed government for power.

On Tuesday, U.S. helicopter gunships attacked suspected Al Qaeda fighters in the south following the airstrike in the first offensive in the African country since 18 American soldiers were killed in Mogadishu in 1993.

Isn't this what the U.S. should have been doing all along instead of diverting hundreds of thousands of men and hundreds of billions of dollars to Iraq?
Fazul, 32, joined Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and trained there with OBL. He had a $5 million price on his head for allegedly planning the 1998 attacks on the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 225 people.

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