U.S. missiles destroyed the house of the man believed to be the top al-Qaida commander in Somalia, killing him and 10 others Thursday in a pre-dawn attack that analysts warned could torpedo peace talks but have little impact on the Islamic insurgency.

The killing of Aden Hashi Ayro comes amid escalating fighting and a spiraling humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa nation.

Islamist fighters have staged a series of attacks on towns in the months leading up to the U.N.-sponsored talks, scheduled to start May 10. They typically hold the towns for a few hours, free people from jails, then withdraw with captured weapons.

The talks offered a slim hope of bringing together the disparate groups in the armed opposition. But Thursday's attack has damaged the negotiations, said Rashid Abdi, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.

"However much the Americans claim the war on terror is one thing and the peace process is another thing, it's not that clear-cut," Abdi said. "This will definitely have political repercussions."

The U.S. missiles left a smoldering hole where Ayro's home had stood in the central Somali town of Dusamareeb.

"The bodies were beyond recognition, some of them cut into pieces, and those wounded have been severely burnt," resident Nur Farah told The Associated Press.

"The house was totally destroyed to the ground, also other houses nearby," said local elder Ahmed Mumin Jama.

Jama said five bodies were retrieved from Ayro's house and the other five dead and four wounded came from neighboring homes.

U.S. military Central Command spokesman Bob Prucha said the United States attacked al-Qaida militants. But he would not name the target.

"It was an attack against a known al-Qaida target and militia leader in Somalia," he said in Miami, Florida.

But another U.S. defense official, who sought anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, confirmed the strike targeted Ayro.

Sheik Muqtar Robow, a spokesman for the al-Shabab militia that Ayro led, called Ayro a martyr for the Islamist cause.

"Our brother martyr Aden Hashi, has received what he was looking for — death for the sake of Allah at the hands of the United States," he told The Associated Press.

He said another senior Shabab leader, Sheik Muhidin Mohamud Omar, also was killed in the attack.

Somali government officials have said Ayro, who was believed to be in his 30s, trained in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States and is the head of al-Qaida's cell in Somalia.

Few Somalis had heard of him before 2005, when Ayro desecrated a colonial Italian cemetery in Mogadishu, throwing hundreds of exhumed corpses into the sea. He then built a mosque on the site and began training fighters there.

An International Crisis Group report linked Ayro to the murders of four foreign aid workers, a British journalist and renowned Somali peace activist Abdulqadir Yahya.

The United States has repeatedly accused Islamist Somalis of harboring international terrorists linked to al-Qaida, which it blames for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The U.S. has backed Somali warlords promise to fight the insurgents, including some accused of human rights abuses. But the strategy has deepened anti-American sentiment.

Ayro's al-Shabab is the armed wing of the Council of Islamic Courts movement which aims to impose Islamic law. It launches daily attacks on the shaky, U.N.-backed Somali government and its Ethiopian allies.

Neighboring Ethiopia sent troops into Somalia in December 2006. They drove the Courts movement members from the capital and parts of southern Somalia. But Al-Shabab continues to wage an Iraq-style insurgency; the U.S. State Department considers it a terrorist organization.

Analyst Iise Ali Geedi of Somali University said the killings will fuel suspicions the United States is using the talks as a fig leaf.

"The U.S. is entertaining Somalis with empty diplomatic efforts — and is chasing its terror suspects on the other hand," he said. "I would like the U.S. to support reconciliation rather than carrying out attacks."

Abdi said the killings may not greatly impair the insurgency since Ayro had taken a lesser role in the fighting after being wounded in a U.S. airstrike in January 2007.

"The fact that he was killed in his house in his hometown shows he was not actively engaged in the struggle," Abdi said, although it was impossible to say to what extent Ayro was involved in strategy and planning.

In any event, analysts say, the insurgency has recently become more decentralized. Several different commanders with different agendas are fighting the insurgency, so the death of one or two commanders is not expected to have a significant impact.

Over the past year, the U.S. military has attacked several suspected extremists in Somalia — most recently in March, when the U.S. Navy fired at least one missile into a southern Somali town.

Somalia has been without an effective government for nearly 20 years. The United States sent troops in 1993 to back a massive U.N. relief operation for thousands of civilians left starving by the fighting.

But the U.S. attacked the home of a warlord, killing scores of civilians including women and children. Somali militiamen retaliated, bringing down two Black Hawk helicopters and killing 18 U.S. servicemen whose bodies were dragged through the streets. U.S. troops withdrew after that.

In the past year, fighting between insurgents and Ethiopian and government troops has killed thousands of people and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes.