Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Somalia welcomes the U.S. raid on an al-Shabaab leader this weekend,
deputy prime minister and foreign minister Fawzia Yusuf Adam told CNN’s
Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Monday, adding that the
U.S. does not have to ask permission for future action.
“We are welcoming more if this will help us get rid of al-Qaeda,
al-Shabaab,” she said from London. “We have a cooperation, and they
don’t have to ask us, because we are fighting a common enemy.”
“We are grateful to their support,” Adam told Amanpour. “Otherwise the whole region will be in turmoil.”
The U.S. launched a pre-dawn raid this
weekend on a costal Somali villa. The target, a senior Obama
administration official told CNN, was a foreign fighter commander: a
Kenyan of Somali origin known as Irkma.
Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda subsidiary, launched a spectacular attack two weeks ago on a Nairobi, Kenya shopping mall.
“This [was] not just al-Shabaab,” Adam said, referring to the target
of the U.S. raid. “This was al-Qaeda. It’s a global phenomenon.”
Despite the Shabaab attack in Nairobi, Adam told Amanpour that al-Shabaab is on the ropes.
“They were in fact controlling, before we came, the capital city,
Mogadishu, and had most of the country,” the foreign minister said. “But
now they are in a very, very small pockets in the country, including
that small port where this incident happened.”
“The morale is gone,” she said. “We have taken back so many areas
from them, liberated many people whom they abused and tortured. So it’s
their last days and last legs.”