Al-Qaeda Leader Believed Killed in Drone Strike

WASHINGTON: An al-Qaida leader believed to have played a key role in the bombing of a CIA post in Afghanistan last December was apparently killed by an American missile strike last week, a senior US official said Wednesday.

The counterterrorism official said Hussein al-Yemeni was believed killed in a strike in Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan.

CIA director Leon Panetta said the stepped-up campaign has driven Osama bin Laden and other leaders deeper into hiding and left al-Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal regions in disarray.

“Those operations are seriously disrupting al-Qaida,” Panetta told The Washington Post in an interview. “It’s pretty clear from all the intelligence we are getting that they are having a very difficult time putting together any kind of command and control, that they are scrambling. And that we really do have them on the run.”

Al-Yemeni is considered an important al-Qaida planner and explosives expert who had established contact with groups ranging from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula to Afghan and Pakistani Taliban militant groups. He is also known as Ghazwan al-Yemeni.

The counterterrorism official said al-Yemeni was in his late 20s or early 30s and was a conduit in Pakistan for funds, messages, and recruiting but that he specialized in suicide operations.

A jihadist Web site linked to al-Qaida recently announced his death, said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who now is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center.

“This is another sign that drone operations and stepped-up efforts against al-Qaida are having an impact in the tribal regions,” Riedel said Wednesday. He said al-Yemeni served prison time in Yemen in 2005 before being released and has since moved through Afghanistan and Iran and was a trainer for the Taliban.

In the CIA base attack, a Jordanian suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer. The bomber, a Jordanian doctor identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, detonated his cache of explosives at Camp Chapman, a tightly secured base in Khost.?

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