A U.S. airstrike killed a militant leader suspected of having ties with al Qaida in Somalia last week. A principle figure in the al-Shabab insurgency movement, Aden Hashi Ayro, was killed along with several other civilians in the area, according to Shabelle Media Network, based in Mogadishu.

“We so far collected 15 dead bodies, some of them shattered to pieces,” Somali local Mohamed Daud told McClatchy.

The strike could undermine the peace process, said Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, exiled chairman of the Alliance for Liberation and Reconstitution of Somalia, to The Associated Press.

Somalia has been without a functioning government since 1991, when the military regime of Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown.

The United States essentially “turned its back on Somalia” in the years after the Black Hawk Down incident, according to The New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman, but it started showing involvement again in 2006 with the emergence of the Islamic Courts, which filled the post-Barre vacuum of the ‘90s.

CIA agents flew into Mogadishu and handed out $100 bills to the same warlords who fought against the United States in 1993, persuading them to fight the courts, Steve Bloomfield said in The Independent.

The plan failed though, as the once scattered courts united to defeat the U.S.-backed warlords.

Four months after the failed plan, U.S. diplomat Jendayi Frazer traveled to Baidoa and told President Abdullahi Yusuf that the U.S. would help him “sweep out the Islamists,” Bloomfield said. On Christmas day in 2006, the Ethiopian invasion commenced and deposed the courts.

The resulting human toll has been sig-nificant.

An estimated 70,000 sought refuge from their homes after the first wave of the Ethiopian invasion. More than 600,000 people fled Mogadishu last year alone.

Somalia’s situation was called “one of the most challenging and acute humanitarian situations in the world,” by Doctors Without Borders and is the “worst on the continent,” with “higher malnutrition rates, more current bloodshed and fewer aid workers than Darfur,” top U.N. officials said.

Besides providing satellite reconnaissance and logistical assistance for the invasion, the United States carried out its first airstrike this past January on a fishing village near the Kenyan border against suspected senior al-Qaida leadership, according to the Pentagon.

Legal arguments can be made for and against the airstrikes, said Jackson School professor Frederick Michael Lorenz in a telephone interview.

Lorenz, who served in Somalia from 1992 -1993 as the senior legal adviser for the U.N.-authorized Operation Restore Hope, said that the U.S. legal justification is that the lawless elements in Somalia were suspected of killing Americans in the 1998 embassy bombings.

“There was only one problem,” Bloomfield noted. “None of the dead [were] connected to the courts.”

This was confirmed by locals as well as Western diplomats and aid officials in Kenya.

Some experts are concerned that the policy will backfire.

Within weeks of the Ethiopian invasion, the al-Shabab movement regrouped and started the insurgency. Former CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid warned Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi that Somalia could become “Ethiopia’s Iraq.”

“The policy has failed,” U.S. representative Donald M. Payne told The New York Times. “We’re Baghdad-izing Mogadishu and Somalia. We’re making people feel wrongly treated and pushing them toward more radical positions.”

The best thing the United States can do in the Horn of Africa is shift from the policy of compelling actors by violence to one of deterrence and engagement, said Kenyan UW visiting scholar Chrispus Musyoka.

The United States should be strengthening the bordering stable region of Somaliland and help form conditions that prevent state failure, “eliminating the authority and dry power vacuums within which terror thrives like in Somalia,” Musyoka said.