The rebels said Aden Hashi Ayro — who led Al Shabaab militants blamed for attacks on government troops and their Ethiopian allies — died in the first major success for a string of US air-strikes on Somali insurgents in the last year.

“Infidel planes bombed Dusamareb,” Shabaab spokesman Mukhtar Ali Robow told Reuters by phone, referring to a town in central Somalia, where body parts lay strewn round a wrecked house. “Two of our important people, including Ayro, were killed.”

The death of the Afghanistan-trained militant is likely to bolster the Western-backed Somali government’s efforts to stem a rebellion that has gained ground in recent months. But it is sure to enrage Ayro’s fellow fighters, who say they are waging a jihad to eject Ethiopian troops.

Ayro was a key figure on the ground masterminding the Islamists’ Iraq-style insurgency against allied Somali-Ethiopian troops. The violence had intensified in recent weeks, with scores of deaths in Mogadishu and a series of hit-and-run raids by the Islamists on towns outside the capital.

“His elimination is very important,” said M.J. Gohel, head of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a security thinktank in London.

“(But) the penetration by Al Qaeda in Somalia is so great that he will be replaced. This is a setback (to the militants), and it will be felt, but it’s not a mortal blow.”

Dusamareb residents said several other Shabaab fighters and civilians were killed in the pre-dawn air strike on the dusty and rocky town in a largely pastoralist area.

Local broadcaster Shabelle said insurgent leaders had been meeting there and put the total death toll at 15.

“Bits of human flesh are scattered on the ruins of the building,” witness Farah Hussein told Reuters. “People are counting the skulls to know the exact figure.”

Another local said residents were woken at 2 a.m. by two huge blasts and counted four planes overhead. Shabelle said they were US AC-130 gunships.

Robow said Ayro had trained many men: “We know our enemy is happy today, but their work will continue.” Western security services have long seen lawless Somalia as a haven for militants. Warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, casting the country into chaos. Somalia-based Al Qaeda operatives were suspected in two suicide attacks in neighboring Kenya that killed 224 people at the US embassy in 1998 and 15 at an Israeli-owned beach hotel in 2002.

Security and intelligence sources say Ayro, in hiding since surviving a US air strike in January 2007, trained in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. He was one of six members or associates of Al Qaeda thought by the US to be in Somalia.