By Steven Edwards and Mike Blanchfield

January 10, 2007

UNITED NATIONS - International concern over civilian casualties mounted Tuesday after the United States launched air strikes in Somalia against what the Pentagon said were ''principal'' al-Qaida suspects.

U.S. officials said the offensive was based on ''credible intelligence'' about the whereabouts of al-Qaida operatives, while critics note it comes just ahead of President George W. Bush's major address tonight on his administration's new strategy for Iraq and the war on terror.

The U.S. scrambled an AC-130 gunship capable of firing thousands of rounds a minute to attack villages in southern Somalia where it said al-Qaida suspects had been spotted Monday. Helicopter gunships carried out a second wave of attacks Tuesday, but it was unclear whether they were U.S. operated, or launched by Ethiopian forces allied to the U.S. and the United Nations-backed transitional government in Somalia.

Civilians were among the ''many dead'' in Monday's strikes, while locals said the attacks Tuesday left between 22 and 27 people dead.

With almost 200,000 Somalis living in Canada -   most having arrived as refugees since the country last had a national government 15 years ago -   federal officials say they are closely following developments.

Canadian officials responsible for Somali affairs at the Canadian Embassy in Nairobi, meanwhile, are expected to follow up on a statement made Tuesday by Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi that Canadians may have been among suspected terrorists killed or taken prisoner in the hostilities in Somalia.

Kenyan authorities had detained Somalis with Canadian passports.

"Many international terrorists are dead in Somalia," Zenawi told France's Le Monde newspaper Tuesday. "Photographs have been taken and passports from different countries have been collected. The Kenyans are holding Eritrean and Canadian passport holders. We have injured people coming from Yemen, Pakistan, Sudan, the United Kingdom."

Zenawai's comment caught the federal government off guard, and came one week after Kenya said it arrested a man carrying a Canadian passport at its border with Somalia.

"We don't have any basis to confirm or deny. We just have this declaration from the prime minister," Foreign Affairs spokesman Rejean Beaulieu said.

Canadian diplomats in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa were trying to gather more details but had nothing to report back to Ottawa as of Tuesday night.

''Any individuals found to hold Canadian passports will be offered the same consular services as any other Canadian citizen,'' Beaulieu added.

In Washington, White House spokesman Tony Snow said he was unaware of any consultations between administration officials and Congress ahead of the U.S. strikes.

The U.S. assault, meanwhile, met opposition across Europe, with one senior European Union official describing it as ''not helpful'' to the peace process, and Italian Foreign Minister Massimo d'Alema warning such a ''unilateral initiative'' could spark ''new tensions.''

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon -   in what may go down as his first criticism of the U.S. since assuming the UN helm Jan. 1 -   warned hostilities in the region may now escalate because of what he called Washington's ''new dimension'' of its war on terror.

The U.S. has long said al-Qaida operatives linked to the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa fled north to Somalia.

As well, one of three suspects the Pentagon says it targeted is under U.S. indictment for conspiracy in those bombings.

Another is accused by U.S. intelligence officials of leading an al-Qaida cell in East Africa, while the FBI seeks the third in connection with the bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel and an attempted missile attack on an Israeli plane in Kenya in 2002.

But questions are already being raised at the UN about whether the strikes conformed to UN Security Council resolutions on Somalia, which include a 1992 arms embargo to try to forestall all fighting there, and authorization last month for an African Union peacekeeping force to enter the country to help the transitional government prevail once Ethiopian forces leave.

For his part, Bush is expected to use part of his speech tonight to warn of an expanding al-Qaida threat, perhaps reiterating how al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, only last month urged Muslims to ''rise up to aid their Muslim brethren in Somalia.''

Ahead of the attacks, pundits had speculated Bush had little new to argue as he seeks support for an expected call for as many as 20,000 additional troops in Iraq.

The attacks mark the first overt U.S. military operation in Somalia since the 1993 ''Black Hawk Down'' debacle that left 18 U.S. soldiers dead.

They follow the re-establishment last month of the transitional government in the capital Mogadishu after Ethiopian troops spearheaded an offensive that drove out the Muslim extremist Islamic Courts, who fled south.

''We welcome the U.S. initiative, but we also hope there is great care taken to protect the lives of civilians because many people of this region are simple nomads who don't have the capacity to reject the Islamic Courts,'' said Idd Beddel Mohamed, the transitional government's deputy ambassador to the UN, who is also a naturalized Canadian citizen.

In Canada, Somali community leaders took pains Tuesday to reassure Canadians that Somalis living among them do not pose a terrorist threat despite the claims the Kenyans may have arrested some on suspicion of being militants.

''Of course, there are individuals who are still supporters of the Islamic Courts, but it is less a support for the Islamic aspect, and more a tribal (imperative),'' explained Farah Osman, founder of the Ottawa-based Canadian Friends of Somalia. ''The Islamic Courts mainly get their support from a tribe of the Mogadishu area called the Hawiya, and some of their fellow tribal members (in Canada) support them also.''

Meanwhile, a leading Somali human rights expert accused the U.S. of squandering an opportunity to be an "honest broker" in the quest for stability in Somalia by launching the air strikes.

"That sends back the clock to a place where I can't predict that anything positive comes out," said Hassan Shire Sheikh, head of the African Human Rights Defenders Project at York University in Toronto, and an experienced human rights monitor on the ground in Somalia for the past 15 years.

He said the U.S. State Department had positioned itself to be "an honest broker" to bring moderate elements of the Islamic Courts Union -   the Taliban-style militia driven out of power late last year by United Nations-backed Ethiopian troops -   into the fold of Somalia's transitional government.

"Now that has been lost because of this bombing," he said. "Now they are participating in the war."

Source: CanWest News Service