Yemeni officials and extremists reported on Monday that the leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate and recently the second-ranking official of the entire terror network, Nasser al Wuhayshi, had been killed in an American drone strike. American officials said they could not confirm the reports but were investigating.
The reports said Mr. Wuhayshi, a former secretary to Osama bin Laden, died of injuries suffered in a drone strike last week outside Mukalla, a Yemeni coastal town in the province of Hadramout where Qaeda fighters have tried to take control of local governance. Militants said on Twitter that Qassim al-Raymi, the group’s military leader, had succeeded him.
It was the second time in as many days that the fate of a militant leader targeted in an American strike was uncertain. Early Sunday, American F-15s struck a suspected gathering of jihadists in Libya, and more than 24 hours later the fate of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a leading Algerian terrorist whose death in the strike had beenreported by Libyan officials, remained in doubt.
The uncertainty about whether Mr. Wuhayshi and Mr. Belmokhtar were dead or alive underscored a recurring lesson from the Obama administration’s campaign of targeted killings of suspected terrorists: Even with multiple sources of intelligence, it is hard to be certain whom the missiles have hit in remote areas thousands of miles from the United States.
There were reasons to be cautious. The death of Mr. Belmokhtar has been reported multiple times over the last several years. And Mr. Raymi, who now may have taken command of Yemen’s Qaeda branch, was widely, and inaccurately, reported killed in a 2010 strike.
American counterterrorism officials would consider the deaths of the two men as a major victory. But the strikes in both countries take place against a larger landscape of advancing anti-American extremists and dissolving government authority.
In Yemen, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Sunni extremist group, has been strengthened by the support of Sunni tribesmen in the face of the takeover of much of the country by a Shiite militia group known as the Houthis. Qaeda militants now control more territory than at any time since 2012.
In Libya, chaos and factional fighting since the ouster and death in 2011 of Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime dictator, has permitted multiple militant groups to seize territory and recruit supporters, including affiliates of both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL.
“The tactical, Whac-a-Mole approach is not having the desired effect,” said Micah Zenko, who studies counterterrorism policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
New York Times
