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Mogadishu,(insidesomalia.org)- Residents of Dobley and surrounding villages at the remote southern part of Somalia took into the streets on Tuesday staging demonstrations against US air strikes on Monday in Dobley, said residents.
The demonstrators chanted anti-American slogans including "Down, Down,, Yankee", showing anger towards Americans whom they described as "neo-colonialists and anti-Islam".
"When our cattle became terrorists" said Ahmed Farah, a resident in Dobley, a small town on the Somali-Kenyan border.
The demonstrators demanded United States of America to compensate the damages and people killed during the air raid, say the resident.
"There is no AlQaeda here, we did not why Americans targeted Dhobley" Said Mohamed Amin, member of Alliance for the liberation of Somalia, a main opposition group led by the leader of the ousted Union of Islamic Courts based in Asmara, the capital of Eriteria, an arch foe of Ethiopia.
The district commissioner, Ali Hussein Nur, said the protesters were angry at the U.S. attack.
"Since the American government admitted bombing our town, where people and livestock were killed and properties damaged, it must pay compensation," Nur told Reuters.
Residents of Dobley said they believed the missiles were targeting senior Islamist leaders meeting nearby.
In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said on Monday the attack was against "a known al Qaeda terrorist".
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters the United States would pursue al-Qaeda operatives wherever it found them.
"They are plotting and planning all over the world to destabilise the world, to inflict terror, and where we find them, we are going to go after them," he said on Monday.
It was the fourth U.S. military strike in Somalia since Ethiopian troops entered the country in the Horn of Africa in December 2006 to help defeat Islamist militants who had seized Mogadishu, the capital, and to restore power to a U.N.-recognized transitional government.
Since then, the militants have shifted underground, launching an insurgency that has killed hundreds of Somalis and displaced 600,000. U.S. officials have accused the Islamists of harboring terrorists, including suspects from the 1998 Al Qaeda attacks against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
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