After the worst week for the market in over a year, the US knows the drill. Must. Distract. Population. And if a drunk-driving, prepubescent Miley Cyrus Canadian lookalike on a work visa won't do the trick, then by all means resort to ye olde faithful - bombing the feces out of some "independent" nation. In this case Somalia. CNN reports that earlier today, the US conducted a missile strike in Southern Somalia. The target: a "senior leader" affiliated with al Qaeda and Al-Shabaab, al Qaeda's affiliate in Somalia. Supposedly this is the Al Qaeda that the US isn't officially funding and supporting in Qatar's desperate and ongoing attempt to push its pipeline under Syria.

From CNN:

The U.S. military conducted an airstrike in southern Somalia on Sunday against a suspected militant leader, a U.S. military official told CNN.

The target was described by the official as a "senior leader" affiliated with al Qaeda and Al-Shabaab, al Qaeda's affiliate in Somalia.

The United States has not yet been able to determine whether the target was killed, the official said.

Last October, the elite U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six aborted a pre-dawn raid in southern Somalia to capture Al-Shabaab leader Ikrima after an intense firefight prevented them from reliably taking him alive, a senior U.S. official told CNN at the time.

In a second raid that same weekend, members of the U.S. Army Delta Force captured Abu Anas al Libi, an al Qaeda operative wanted for his alleged role in the deadly 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, during an operation in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

The U.S. military official said Sunday's strike involved missiles. No U.S. troops were on the ground.

Al-Shabaab, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, has a relationship with al Qaeda that goes back several years. In 2012, the two groups effectively merged, said CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen.