U.S. airstrike kills al-Qaida ally in Somalia

WASHINGTON — To the U.S. officials who had tracked him for years before killing him Thursday, Aden Hashi Ayro was the public face of one of al-Qaida's most dangerous allies — a brutal Somali militia that increasingly has been attacking Western targets in the war-torn nation.

Ayro was the commander of al-Shabab, an indigenous armed group involved in suicide bombings and other attacks.

He was killed by an early-morning U.S. Navy missile strike against his suspected hide-out near the central Somali town of Dusamareeb, along with several senior associates and some civilians. The strike was overseen by the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, which deploys 2,000 U.S. military and other personnel out of nearby Djibouti to fight what U.S. officials say is a growing threat from terrorism in the East Africa region.

Maj. Sherri Reed, a spokeswoman for U.S. Central Command, would confirm only that a strike was launched against "a known al-Qaida target and militia leader in Somalia."

Muktar Robow Abu Mansour, a commander who serves as a spokesman for the militia, said Ayro and Sheik Muhidin Mohamoud Omar, another top commander, were killed.

Ayro was described by U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials as a battle-hardened radical fundamentalist who took pleasure, and often played a personal role, in his militia's killing of a journalist, political and business leaders, peace activists and even an Italian nun in Somalia in recent years.

Also known as the Islamic Youth Movement, al-Shabab has been launching almost daily attacks in its effort to impose Islamic law, and Ayro recently told his followers to go after peacekeepers sent to Somalia by the African Union.

Ayro, believed to be in his late 30s, trained terrorists in military camps in East Africa, including one he established in an Italian cemetery in the capital of Mogadishu, officials said.

Ayro trained with al-Qaida in Afghanistan in the late 1990s and in recent years was a conduit between the terror network's leaders in Pakistan and several of its cells in East Africa. His militia is essentially the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union, a radical Islamic political alliance that has fought the U.S.-supported transitional government in Somalia, destabilizing the country to the point where no one is in charge.

U.S. intelligence and military officials said they have been pursuing Ayro actively and several foreign-born al-Qaida affiliates in Somalia for several years, since information linked them to the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya that killed 15 people and a failed attempt that same year to take out an Israeli commercial airliner with a shoulder-fired missile.

He is believed to have survived at least one previous airstrike, in January 2007.