2009 Baraawe raid
The Baraawe raid, code-named Operation Celestial Balance, was a helicopter assault conducted by SEAL Team Six against the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and associated al-Shabaab militants near the town of Baraawe in southern Somalia.
Background
Nabhan served as a key facilitator between al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab. He had been wanted by the United States since 2006 for his role as a member of the east-African al-Qaeda cell responsible for several terrorist attacks in East Africa, including the 1998 [United States embassy bombings] and the 2002 Mombasa attacks. In 2007, in the midst of the Battle of Ras Kamboni, Nabhan was unsuccessfully targeted by an American military airstrike in the town of Ras Kamboni.A long-Running CIA CTC/SAD operation hunted Nabhan for a number of years, recruiting a network of Somali agents and paying off Somali warlords for information on the location of Nabhan and his associates. A team from the ISA began getting a precise location of the target from cell phone intercepts and surveillance from both short-range US Navy Scan Eagle UAVs and long range CIA Predators.
CIA and JSOC planners presented President Obama with 4 options: a Tomahawk cruise missile strike, an airstrike, an attack by Little Bird helicopters or an attempt to capture the target with an assault force of SEALs. Obama picked the airstrike option, as it limited the any potential collateral damage and the chances of US casualties.