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The Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden raids an al Qaeda-linked house, but encounters fiercer resistance than expected.
US special forces have aborted a mission to capture an al Shabaab leader in Somalia linked to the Nairobi shopping mall massacre after they came under heavy attack.
A Navy SEAL team staged a pre-dawn raid on a house in the southern town of Barawa after swimming ashore before the al Qaeda-linked militants rose for morning prayers.
Reinforcements arrived at the house and SEAL Team Six, the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, encountered fiercer resistance than expected, a senior US military source told The Associated Press.
After a 15 to 20-minute firefight, the unit leader decided to abort the mission and they swam away, the source said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, in Bali for an economic summit, spoke about the US operations in north Africa, and said terrorists “can run but they can’t hide”.
A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that US military personnel had been involved in a counter-terrorism operation against a known al Shabaab terrorist in Somalia, but did not provide details.
