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Mogadishu: Somali rebels vowed on Saturday to fight on under new leadership after US planes killed the man said to be Al Qaida's boss in the Horn of Africa nation.
Aden Hashi Ayro, who led the Al Shabaab fighters blamed for attacks on government troops and their Ethiopian allies, died on Thursday in the latest of a string of US air strikes on insurgents in the last year.
"This is not a personal cause but a national one. It will go on whether people die or not. Somalis should continue the struggle against the Ethiopian colonisation," senior Somali leader Shaikh Hassan Daher Aweys, a former mentor to the slain leader, told Reuters.
"Dying is an honour at the moment. He [Ayro] played his role and died honourably," Aweys added in a telephone interview from Eritrea, where he lives in exile.
Ayro was one of six members or associates of Al Qaida thought by the US to be in Somalia.
The Western-backed Somali government is trying to stem a rebellion that has been gaining ground. The rebels said the death of Ayro would not deter them.
Aweys said Ayro's death and the recent killing of civilians by Ethiopian forces had cast doubts over UN-sponsored peace talks hoped to start on May 10 in Djibouti.
The pre-dawn US strike on the small central town of Dusamareb flattened a stone house where Ayro had been staying and killed 30 other people, including Al Shabaab militiamen and civilians, witnesses said.
Al Shabaab is the armed wing of the Somalia Islamic Courts Council that took most of the southern part of Somalia for six months in 2006, until government troops backed by Ethiopian forces routed it.
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