US military in talks with Somali rebels

US military personnel have visited Somalia for the first time since their ill-fated peace keeping operation ended seven years ago, to investigate possible targets in the wider war on terrorism, it was revealed yesterday. According to UN sources, the nine-man US team held talks on Sunday afternoon with opposition warlords in Baidoa, south-western Somalia, focusing on the activities of al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (Islamic Unity), a Somali group listed by Washington as a foreign terrorist organisation.

US intelligence is convinced that al-Qaida camps in Somalia are still active and that the country is a prime destination for any of Bin Laden's followers able to escape from Afghanistan along the mule trails of southern Pakistan. An intelligence source said: "They are still active there. We're looking very hard at the islands off the coast near the Kenyan border, for example, and the Indian ocean off that coast is being intensively patrolled, mostly by German ships. "There have been reports in the US press of al-Qaida activity in the island port of Ras Kamboni, but those reports may be months, if not years, out of date. Any al-Qaida bases found in Somalia, as in Yemen or the Philippines, could be an immediate US target as military action would not be opposed by the state department, or by Washington 's European allies.

Action against Iraq, by contrast, would cause a rift inside the coalition as there is minimal evidence of al-Qaida links, and uproar in the Arab world. The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, said yesterday that al-Qaida was thought to have networks in 60 countries: "You don't take out a network just by taking out one piece of the network. We really have to dismantle the whole network." Visiting Nairobi on Friday, the US under-secretary of state for Africa, Walter Kansteiner, said: "We are concerned that there could be a real connection between al-Itihaad and al-Qaida and we are keeping an eye on that."

Mr Kansteiner added that some members of Somalia 's faltering, UN-sponsored administration "could well be al-Itihaad people ''. Al-Itihaad has a military training camp near El-Wak, southern Somalia, UN sources say. It is also Somalia 's biggest provider of education and health services, in the absence of an effective state administration. UN sources say the US military team was accompanied by high-ranking officials from neighbouring Ethiopia, which has been urging Washington to extend the war on terror to Somalia since September 11. Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 1997 to destroy al-Itihaad's militia, which it accused of a series of bomb blasts in Addis Ababa.