This really is an excellent article here at Times Online that speaks to just where the top personnel of al Qaeda have gone in Pakistan since the onslaught of airstrikes by U.S. predator drones in the NW Tribal Areas of Pakistan, and at the same time, the article does a great job of detailing the new al Qaeda leadership structure in Pakistan. Here's some of the report on the move of al Qaeda into urban areas to escape detection:
I encourage you to read the whole article, which I have excerpted at the end of this post to read up on the leadership structure of al Qaeda - here's one example:
The encouraging part of all of this is that this movement to urban areas has to be disrupting communications for al Qaeda as well as any serious gatherings of many members - 20 leaders meeting on a mountaintop can be pretty hard to detect but 20 jihadi leaders cramming into one safe house in a city is gonna get noticed.
Key al-Qaeda operatives have been forced out of the tribal regions of Pakistan after drone attacks killed 20 commanders in the past 18 months. They have moved into urban areas, where aerial surveillance is far more complicated, and have been replaced by a younger generation of militants who now control operations on the ground.
“Last year more than a dozen al-Qaeda figures were killed by drone strikes, and so far this year there have been four, two of them since President Obama took over from President Bush. Under Obama there have been many Predator attacks but not many al-Qaeda leaders have been eliminated because they have decamped to urban Pakistan.
“Staying in the tribal regions made them too vulnerable,” she said. “The focus has also switched to the Taleban, about two thirds of the more recent strikes have targeted Taleban figures in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
I encourage you to read the whole article, which I have excerpted at the end of this post to read up on the leadership structure of al Qaeda - here's one example:
Although Osama bin Laden remains the figurehead leader, a 15-member “shura” or supreme council now runs the organisation’s affairs, senior Pakistani intelligence sources say. The sources have disclosed that the council is headed by a Saudi national, Mustafa abul al-Yazidi. Other senior members include a Libyan, Abu Yahaya al-Libbi, along with militants from North Africa and Somalia.
Al-Yazidi is in overall charge of al-Qaeda operations in the region, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistani intelligence officials told The Times. The Predator and Reaper drones are armed with Hellfire missiles and precision-guided bombs and are launched from a base inside Pakistan but controlled from a US Air Force location in Nevada.
The encouraging part of all of this is that this movement to urban areas has to be disrupting communications for al Qaeda as well as any serious gatherings of many members - 20 leaders meeting on a mountaintop can be pretty hard to detect but 20 jihadi leaders cramming into one safe house in a city is gonna get noticed.
Drone attacks in tribal Pakistan force al-Qaeda into urban areas
Key al-Qaeda operatives have been forced out of the tribal regions of Pakistan after drone attacks killed 20 commanders in the past 18 months. They have moved into urban areas, where aerial surveillance is far more complicated, and have been replaced by a younger generation of militants who now control operations on the ground.
Al-Qaeda has been forced to regroup its core leadership with some of the key operatives moving out of the tribal regions into urban compounds in Pakistan to escape the American unmanned spy drones which have killed 20 terrorist commanders in the last 18 months.
Although Osama bin Laden remains the figurehead leader, a 15-member “shura” or supreme council now runs the organisation’s affairs, senior Pakistani intelligence sources say. The sources have disclosed that the council is headed by a Saudi national, Mustafa abul al-Yazidi. Other senior members include a Libyan, Abu Yahaya al-Libbi, along with militants from North Africa and Somalia.
Al-Yazidi is in overall charge of al-Qaeda operations in the region, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pakistani intelligence officials told The Times. The Predator and Reaper drones are armed with Hellfire missiles and precision-guided bombs and are launched from a base inside Pakistan but controlled from a US Air Force location in Nevada.
In recent months they have been targeting Taleban leaders operating from the tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan, rather than focusing exclusively on knocking out al-Qaeda commanders.
According to Katherine Tiedemann, a policy analyst on counter-terrorism strategy at the New American Foundation think-tank in Washington, part of the reason for this was that al-Qaeda had retreated to urban compounds to make it more difficult for armed drones to attack them.
“Last year more than a dozen al-Qaeda figures were killed by drone strikes, and so far this year there have been four, two of them since President Obama took over from President Bush. Under Obama there have been many Predator attacks but not many al-Qaeda leaders have been eliminated because they have decamped to urban Pakistan.
“Staying in the tribal regions made them too vulnerable,” she said. “The focus has also switched to the Taleban, about two thirds of the more recent strikes have targeted Taleban figures in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
The strike against Baitullah Mehsud, the young Pakistan-Taleban leader who has been used by al-Qaeda to plot and launch terrorist strikes on its behalf, is a major blow to bin Laden’s organisation. An American drone strike, operated by the CIA, targeted Mehsud’s car last month while it was travelling in Pakistan, but he was not in the vehicle.
The British also have Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles, but they are deployed strictly against Taleban and al-Qaeda targets inside Afghanistan. Three British Reapers are based at the huge Kandahar airfield, neighbouring Helmand province.
“We don’t carry out any operations across the border in Pakistan because there is no legal mandate for us to do so,” one senior defence source said.
In the past 18 months Americans directed much of their drone strikes on a key organisation in al-Qaeda that is responsible for overseas terrorist attacks. Although there are still hopes that cell phone intercepts or couriers might lead to bin Laden, he has succeeded in evading America’s Predators since disapearing from Afghanistan in 2001. Intelligence sources said that bin Laden travelled with a dozen bodyguards and was not thought to be in Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal regions.
So the Americans have been aiming their Predator strikes at the so-called “external operations unit”, responsible for all operations abroad.
The head of this unit used to be Abu Obeida al-Masri, an Egyptian, but he died from disease. He was replaced by Abu Jihad al-Masri Khakaina, who was killed by a Predator strike. He in turn was succeeded by Osama al-Kini, a Kenyan who was also killed by a Predator, along with Ahmed Salim Swedan, in a strike in January. The Pakistani intelligence sources said Mustafa abul al Yazidi, the Saudi, had succeded al-Kini.
A senior Pakistani intelligence official said: “Some 60 to 70 per cent of the core al-Qaeda leadership has been eliminated, dealing a serious blow to the network’s capacity to launch any major attack on the West.”
Many of the older al-Qaeda leaders known as “Sheiks” have now been replaced by younger men. “The influence of the sheiks is largely ideological, but the operational guidance comes from younger elements who now dominate the network,” the official said.
The new leadership comes from Somalia, Libya and other north African countries. They use the most modern means of communication for contact with their sleeper cells abroad.
Over the past years there has also been a major influx of new operatives, largely from Somalia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and North Africa.
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