Financial Times: US claims victory as key terror leader dies
The media wing of al-Qaeda has announced the death of one of its founding members, in what US officials are calling a victory for an expanded campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan.
Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, an Egyptian in his mid-50s, was accused of helping to finance the September 11, 2001 attacks and has emerged in recent years in a prominent role as an ideologue and spokesman for the terror network.
Yazid’s death would strengthen the Central Intelligence Agency’s argument that drone strikes have rendered al-Qaeda’s core leadership increasingly incapable of plotting spectacular attacks on the west.
Some analysts argue, however, that his demise would be a largely symbolic blow, warning that a new and more fragmented generation of jihadists inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology posed a greater threat.
“It’s a propaganda coup for the US but nothing more,” said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, the Arabic newspaper, who interviewed Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s founder, in 1996. “There’s a new batch of al-Qaeda leaders taking over.”
The White House warned last week of a dangerous new phase, citing the failed Christmas Day bombing of a US airliner and last month’s botched attempt to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square. Such attacks appear to have been organised by individuals acting in concert with groups aligned with al-Qaeda but operating with a high degree of autonomy.
In the Pakistan-Afghanistan border zone, CIA drones have killed at least 11 of an initial top 20 al-Qaeda targets sought by the US, according to a report by the American Security Project, a bipartisan think-tank. Some experts question the legality of the strikes, which have inflamed anti-western sentiment in Pakistan, whose co-operation is regarded as vital to Washington’s strategy for stabilising Afghanistan.
Mr Yazid was rumoured to have been killed in 2008. This time, al-Qaeda’s media wing said in an online statement that he had been killed with many relatives.
US officials say Mr Yazid, also known as Sheikh Sa’id al-Masri, was a conduit to the leader and was thought to have been jailed in Egypt in the 1980s with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s Egyptian chief ideologue and second-in-command.
“He was key to al-Qaeda’s command and control,” said a US official. “The removal from the battlefield of top leaders like al-Masri is further proof that the tribal areas are not quite the safe haven al-Qaeda and its allies thought them to be.”
A Pakistani intelligence official believed Mr Yazid had already been replaced. “His centrality to the organisation is being exaggerated,” he said.
Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies in Islamabad, said Mr Yazid also served as a link between al- Qaeda and an increasingly complex and potent array of Pakistani militant groups, including Pakistan’s Taliban movement. “He was an ideological force,” he said.
US officials are increasingly concerned at the growing ambitions of Pakistan’s Taliban, which they suspect of involvement in the failed Times Square attempt and a suicide bombing that killed seven CIA personnel at a base in eastern Afghanistan in December. Pakistani investigators have blamed the group for twin assaults on mosques in Lahore last week that killed more than 90 people in one of the worst attacks in Pakistan in years.
Mr Yazid also played a role in liaising with Afghanistan’s Taliban, according to counterterrorism experts, and sought to revive ties as the Afghan movement began to wage an increasingly effective campaign against Nato troops from exile in Pakistan. Mr Yazid was close to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the spiritual guide of the Afghan Taliban. Mr Yazid had a reputation for being less high-handed than some of the Arab members of al-Qaeda who were guests of the Taliban until the US invasion in 2001.
