The former commander of al Qaeda’s military is thought to have been killed in a mid-December airstrike on a command center in Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan.
Abdullah Said al Libi, the leader of the Lashkar al Zil or Shadow Army, is believed to have been killed in the Dec. 17, 2009, swarm attack in the Datta Khel region in North Waziristan.
The attack was carried out by an estimated five or six unmanned US Predator or Reaper strike aircraft and hit multiple targets, including a safe house, a cave, and a vehicle. Ten Hellfire missiles were said to have been launched in the strike. The target of the attack was Sheikh Saeed al Saudi, Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law and a senior leader on al Qaeda Shura Majlis, or executive council. Al Saudi was thought to be attending a high-level meeting; he is not thought to have been killed.
The airstrike was reported to have killed Zuhaib al Zahibi, a senior commander in the Shadow Army, six al Qaeda operatives, and nine Haqqani network fighters. Zahibi was a “general officer-equivalent” in the Shadow Army, a US intelligence official told The Long War Journal.
“This was a Lashkar al Zil command complex,” a US intelligence official told The Long War Journal. “We wouldn’t be surprised if the top commander [al Libi] was present during the strike.”
Abdullah Said al Libi was not initially reported to have been killed strike. His death was not confirmed until Mustafa Abu Yazid, al Qaeda’s leader in Afghanistan, said al Libi was killed [see LWJ’s exclusive report, “US killed al Qaeda’s Lashkar al Zil commander in airstrike“].
Yazid claimed that the suicide attack on the CIA base in Khost that killed seven Americans and an Jordanian intelligence officer was carried out to “avenge” the death of al Libi, Saleh al Somali, al Qaeda’s former external operations chief, and Baitullah Mehsud, the former leader of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan.
“[This attack was carried out] to avenge our righteous martyrs, as he [the suicide bomber] (may God have mercy on him) wrote in his will: ‘To avenge the leader, Amir Baitullah Mehsud, the leaders Abu Saleh al Somali and Abdullah Said al Libi, and their brothers (may God have mercy on them),'” Yazid said in a statement released on the Internet.
Al Libi was a Libyan national who is thought to have served in his country’s military before joining al Qaeda. In April 2009, al Libi explained al Qaeda and the Taliban’s strategy to retake control of the Khorasan, a region that encompasses large areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Iran. In the statement, al Libi is identified as the leader of the Qaidat al-Jihad fi Khorasan, or the Base of the Jihad in the Khorasan.
As the top commander of the Shadow Army, al Libi was tasked with running al Qaeda’s military organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Elements of the Shadow Army are attached to conduct complex attacks alongside the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and the multitude of Pakistani jihadi groups.
The Shadow Army also detaches members to serve as embedded trainers with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The US military killed once such commander on Dec. 1, during a raid in Kunar province. Qari Masiullah was described as the “al Qaeda chief of security for Kunar province” who “ran a training camp that taught insurgents how to use and emplace IEDs that were used in attacks on Afghan civilians, ANSF, and Coalition forces throughout the Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces.”
5 Comments
Interesting that one of the few occasions that a cave is targeted. A senior AQ leader is killed.
Perhaps the really secretive command posts and senior leaders using various caves to hide, are being supplied by villages in their vicinity.
How about getting a mole in the AQ network to “find” a new cave and get AQ guys to set up shop in it.
Or just do intensive cave-locating. Just find out where all the areas are that terrain is being used by the population as habitat (storing supplies, etc.) and monitor that.
Otherwise, we’ll just have to wait for a rock fall.
Picture of Abdullah Said al Libi:
http://polinews-international.blogspot.com/2010/01/al-qaidas-verteidigungsminister-stirbt.html
So we hit the site hoping to off Bin Laden’s brother-in-law. While we may not have gotten him we instead killed at least two high-ranking Shadow Army operatives including the overall commander al-Libi.
And came on the same day we launched strikes into Yemen on AQAP’s main training camp and a safehouse. Among the dead in that one including four imminent suicide bombers (according to General Petraeus), the base training camp commander Al-Kazemi plus ex-Gitmo detainee Hani Abdo Shalaan…both part of the core group of AQAP leaders with experience fighting/training in Afghanistan.
Two target rich environments.
Thanks unique for the picture sharing, i watching his face for the first time, ahhhh.
There are only 4 ways the USIC will ever get a fix on the most senior AQ leadership (UBL,Zawa)..
1) Real-time overhead imagery, which will never happen again
(their chance was 2001 and before)
2 Leaking electrons-also will never happen in the vicinity of these two men, but may link them to a geography
3) A confidential informant- very unlikely to happen for a near real-time close proximity fix, but possible.
4) Targeting and following a senior person that leads to a ‘lucky strike’-most likely to happen
…al Libi may have been hit this way (or with a combination of (4) and (2)).