SEALS could not get to their terrorist target because of heavy defenses.
Navy SEALS abandoned their mission to capture an Islamist terrorist suspected of planning the mall attack in Kenya after encountering strong resistance at the man's beach-side stronghold in Somalia, U.S. officials told Reuters and NBC.
The SEALS mission took place the same day that Army special forces captured a wanted terrorist in Libya in a raid in Tripoli. Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, is being held in a U.S. warship.
The target of the SEALS was Abdikadar Mohamed Abdikadar, Kenyan and Western security agencies say. Reuters said Abdikadar is a liaison between commanders of the al-Shabab Islamist group in Somalia with terrorist cells linked to al-Qaeda in Kenya, Yemen and the Afghanistan-Pakistan area, said J. Peter Pham, director of the the Atlantic Council's Africa Center.
Al-Shabab was involved in last month's attack on a Nairobi shopping mall that killed 67 people, and Abdikadar was likely a major facilitator of that attack, Pham said.
Abdikadar has so many connections in the militant world that "he would have valuable information about extremist groups, and more current information than al-Libi," Pham said. "Al-Libi was higher ranked but much of his knowledge was more historical."
Abdikadar is an ethnic Somali Kenyan with connections to al-Qaeda in East Africa, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Qaeda central in the Afghan-Pakistan area, Pham said. He was a protégé of two al-Qaeda leaders in East Africa who were both killed in recent years by U.S. special forces, Pham said. He is also known as Ikrima, a name he took from an early opponent of the Muslim prophet Mohammed who later became one of his most effective commanders and died leading the 636 battle that ended Byzantine rule in Syria.
Ikrima also has his own connections both to al-Hijra, al-Shabab's Kenyan arm, and to the Muslim Youth Center, an important support element within Kenya for al-Shabab that supplies it with foreign recruits, Pham said.
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