Star Tribune
May-01-08
He was described by U.S. 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. Recently, he recently told his followers to go after peacekeepers sent to Somalia by the African Union.
Few Somalis had heard of him before 2005, when he desecrated a colonial Italian cemetery in Mogadishu, throwing hundreds of corpses into the sea. "He dug up the bones, desecrated the graves. He thought it was quite funny, desecrating the graves of the infidels," one U.S. counterterrorism official said.
Ayro built a mosque on the site and began training fighters there -- many of whom would be eager to take his place.
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, helping move men, money and supplies used in attacks, officials said. His militia, Al-Shabab -- or "the youth" -- is essentially the armed wing of the Islamic Courts Union, an Islamic fundamentalist movement that took over Mogadishu in 2006 and imposed religious law.
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. He is believed to have survived at least one previous airstrike, in January 2007.
Source: Star Tribune, May-02-08