SEALS RESCUE TWO CAPTIVES IN SOMALIA
Nine kidnappers killed after Obama orders mission to save ill American
By Jeffrey Gettleman, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker THE NEW YORK TIMES
Aid workers Poul Hagen Thisted of Denmark and Jessica Buchanan, formerly of Ohio, had been held for ransom by Somali kidnappers since October.
KHARTOUM, Sudan — Under the cloak of darkness early yesterday, two dozen U.S. Navy SEALs answered the prayers of the many friends of Ohio-born Jessica Buchanan, 32, and Den-mark’s Poul Hagen Thisted, 60.
The SEALs parachuted into Somalia, stormed the hideout of the gunmen who had been holding the two aid workers hostage since October, killed nine of the gunmen and whisked the hostages out of the sweltering desert and into waiting helicopters, Pentagon officials said.
“Ever since Jessica was captured, we all as a community have been praying for her safety and for her safe release,” the Rev. Don Meyer, president of Valley Forge Christian College near Philadelphia, said of the graduate of his school yesterday.
The SEALs were from the same elite Navy commando unit — SEAL Team 6 — that secretly entered Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden in May, senior U.S. officials said, although the rescue mission in Somalia was carried out by a different assault team.
President Barack Obama was closely tracking the raid Tuesday night, which was yesterday morning in Somalia. As he stepped into the House chamber to deliver his State of the Union address, Obama looked at Defense Secretary Leon Panetta standing in the crowd and said: “Leon, good job tonight, good job.”
Minutes after giving his address to Congress, Obama was on the phone with Buchanan’s father to tell him his daughter was safe.
PETE SOUZA WHITE HOUSE President Barack Obama, accompanied by his wife, Michelle, tells John Buchanan by phone from the Capitol that his daughter is safe. Obama had just completed his State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night.
No SEALs were hurt during the operation, Pentagon officials said. The hostages were soon flown to a U.S. military base in neighboring Djibouti.
U.S. officials said they were moved to strike because they had received “actionable intelligence” that Buchanan’s health was rapidly deteriorating and could lead to kidney failure. The gunmen had just refused $1.5 million to let the two hostages go, Somali elders said.
A Danish Refugee Council official said Buchanan was “not that ill” but needed medicine. The family reported that her health is good, Meyer said, but there were no other details on her illness.
Before Buchanan’s family moved from Ohio years ago, she attended the now-closed Ridgeville Christian School in Springboro, north of Cincinnati. Buchanan was an elementary-education major at Valley Forge Christian, which has about 1,100 students, and had done a student-teaching stint at Rosslyn Academy in Nairobi, Kenya, as part of her course work, Meyer said. She had been in Africa about five years when she was abducted.
“She fell in love with Africa,” Meyer said. “She could hardly talk about Africa without tears in her eyes.”
The aid workers had been kidnapped by two truckloads of gunmen as they headed to the airport in Galkayo, a central Somalia town on the edge of pirate territory. The two were representing the Danish Refugee Council, one of the few Western organizations still operating in the area, and were working with a mine-removal unit. The two had finished a workshop on land mines just before they were kidnapped.
Somali elders said the gunmen were part of an established pirate gang. Pirates operate with impunity in much of Somalia, which has languished without a functioning government for more than 20 years. As naval efforts have intensified on the high seas, stymying hijackings, Somali pirates seem increasingly to be snatching foreigners on land. Just last week, pirates grabbed another U.S. hostage not far from where the SEAL raid took place.
Somali pirates have held hostages for months, often in punishing conditions with little food, water or shelter, and past ransoms have topped $10 million. One British couple sailing around the world on a small boat was kidnapped by pirates from this same patch of central Somalia and held in captivity for more than a year.
Obama authorized the operation on Monday.
“As commander in chief, I could not be prouder of the troops who carried out this mission,” he said in a statement yesterday. “The United States will not tolerate the abduction of our people.”
Pentagon officials said the SEALs dropped into the area by parachute about 2 a.m. and hiked nearly 2 miles to where the hostages were being held, near a small village called Hiimo Gaabo, south of Galkayo.
According to Pentagon officials, within minutes of the SEALs reaching the encampment, shots rang out. The hostages were quickly located and freed. In the gunbattle, the nine Somali gunmen, described as heavily armed, were killed.
Accounts differed as to whether the SEALs captured any of the gunmen, with local officials saying several had been taken. The Pentagon said no prisoners were taken.
Several hostages are still being held in Somalia, including a British tourist, two Spanish doctors and an American journalist kidnapped on Saturday.
Information from the Associated Press and McClatchy Newspapers was included in this story.
