[attach id=283320 size="medium"]Senior al-Qaeda figure Anas al-Liby is seen in an undated FBI handout photo released yesterday. Photo: Reuters/FBI[/attach]

Two US raids in Africa show the United States is pressuring al-Qaeda, officials said yesterday, though a failure in Somalia and an angry response in Libya also highlighted Washington’s problems.

In Tripoli, US forces snatched a Libyan wanted over the bombings of the US embassy in Nairobi 15 years ago and whisked him out of the country, prompting Secretary of State John Kerry to declare that al-Qaeda leaders “can run but they can’t hide”.

But the capture of Nazih al-Ragye, better known as Abu Anas al-Liby, also provoked a complaint about the “kidnap” from the Western-backed Libyan Prime Minister; he faces a backlash from armed Islamists who have carved out a share of power since the West helped Libyan rebels oust Muammar Gaddafi two years ago.

Meanwhile in Somalia, Navy SEALS stormed ashore into the al Shabaab stronghold of Barawe in response to the attack last month on a Kenyan mall but they failed to capture or kill the unnamed target.

Terrorist organisations can run but they can’t hide

Kerry, on a visit to Indonesia, said President Barack Obama’s administration was “pleased with the results” of the combined assaults early on Saturday: “We hope this makes clear that the United States of America will never stop in its effort to hold those accountable who conduct acts of terror,” he said.

Two years after Navy SEALs finally tracked down and killed al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a decade after al-Qaeda’s September 11 attacks on the US in 2001, the twin operation demonstrated the reach of US military forces in Africa, where Islamist militancy has been in the ascendant.

But the forays also threw a spotlight on how Somalia remains a fragmented haven for al-Qaeda allies more than 20 years after Washington intervened in vain in its civil war and on how Libya has descended into an anarchic battleground on the Mediterranean.

Disrupting the organisation of its most aggressive enemy in an oil-rich state that is awash with arms and sits on Europe’s doorstep may have been more the priority in seizing Liby than putting on trial a suspect in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people.

One Libyan security official, himself a former commander of Islamist rebels against Gaddafi, warned that al-Qaeda and its allies would prepare a violent response to the snatching of Liby as he returned to his suburban home from dawn prayers.

Clearly aware of the risks to his government of complicity in the US raid, Prime Minister Ali Zeidan said in a statement: “The Libyan government is following the news of the kidnapping of a Libyan citizen who is wanted by US authorities. The Libyan government has contacted US authorities to ask them to provide an explanation.”

Abdul Bassit Haroun, a former Islamist militia commander who works with the Libyan government on security, said the US raid would show Libya was no refuge for “international terrorists”.