The only place I can find this news right now is here at The Telegraph but I also saw a blurb over at LiveLeak so I don't know how this is going to pan out but it appears that a VERY senior al Qaeda leader was taken out by a U.S. predator drone attack in NW Pakistan...according to the article it is confirmed that it is NOT bin Laden or al Zawahiri ...but if THAT can be determined, then why hasn't the name been released?
My guess is that this is coming out of the same airstrike I posted about yesterday where 4 al Qaeda and two Taliban were killed in the predator strike in South Waziristan but I'm not even sure if that is certain.
From the article:
My guess is that this is coming out of the same airstrike I posted about yesterday where 4 al Qaeda and two Taliban were killed in the predator strike in South Waziristan but I'm not even sure if that is certain.
From the article:
A senior al-Qaeda leader has been killed in a Predator drone missile strike in north-west Pakistan, US officials said
The officials told NBC News that the attack using Hellfire missiles had taken place in the last few days.
They said the target was not the network's Saudi leader Osama bin Laden or his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Hopefully, there will be an update on this soon and even more hopefully, this is one of the top ten al Qaeda leaders.
Keep your fingers crossed.
UPDATE:
Okay...I'm seeing some reports that we got Abu Yahya Al Libi and others that say we got Saleh al-Somali. We obviously aren't in a position to make the right call or whether it is even one of these two - hell, Al Libi has been claimed killed about six other times. I'll wait to see what The Long War Journal or Counterterrorism Blog reports later.
Senior al-Qaeda leader killed in US Predator drone strike in Pakistan
A senior al-Qaeda leader has been killed in a Predator drone missile strike in north-west Pakistan, US officials said
The officials told NBC News that the attack using Hellfire missiles had taken place in the last few days.
They said the target was not the network's Saudi leader Osama bin Laden or his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The officials told the US network that the killing followed an acceleration of operations targeting al-Qaeda leaders over the past weeks.
North-west Pakistan has seen a surge in US strikes, which fan anti-Americanism in the nuclear-armed Muslim country, since President Barack Obama took office. They have contributed to putting the country on the front line of the war on al-Qaeda.
The government in Islamabad is under increasing Western pressure to not only target Taliban groups attacking Pakistan, but also al-Qaeda-linked fighters and the militants who cross over the border and target foreign troops in Afghanistan.
Since August 2008, at least 65 such strikes have killed around 625 people, although it is difficult to confirm the precise identity of many of the victims given that the remote region is largely closed to outsiders.
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