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Six people were killed in the air strikes on Dhoble town and 20 wounded.

Somalia's Islamist insurgents seized the town last week and one of their leaders Hassan Turki was reportedly in the area over the weekend.

"We woke up with a loud and big bang and when we came out we found our neighbour's house completely obliterated as if no house existed here," local resident Fatuma Abdullahi told the BBC.

Regrouping

Islamist spokesman Sheikh Mukhtar Robow said the US was trying to hit Islamist hideouts in the area.

"The Americans bombed the town and hit civilians targets thinking that they were Islamist hideouts. They used an AC-130 plane," he told the AFP news agency.

Local official Ali Hussein told the BBC that many people were fleeing the town.

The border with Kenya has been closed for the past year.

There have been reports that the Islamists have been regrouping in the area around Dhoble in recent weeks.

They were ousted from the capital, Mogadishu in December 2006 by government forces, backed up by Ethiopia, with some intelligence from the US.

Dhoble was the last town they held.

'Worst place in the world'

The US has an anti-terror task force based in nearby Djibouti.

It accused the Somali Islamists of harbouring those responsible for the 1998 attacks on its embassies in Kenyan and Tanzania.

The Islamists denied this, as well as reports they had links to al-Qaeda.

Somalia has not had an effective national government since 1991.

Last month, a senior Unicef official told the BBC that Somalia was the worst place in the world for children.

Oslo Norwey
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