US Strike on al-Qaeda Safe House on Afghanistan Border
ABC News is reporting that a US air strike on a village at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border may have killed 5 high-ranking al-Qaeda figures, including the organization’s #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
On CNN, Wolf Blitzer speculated that since Zawahiri has been releasing video tapes (one just a week ago), the CIA may have found a way to trace the delivery of the cassettes back to the village.
I am going to hold off any comment about the possibility of Zawahiri being dead. There have been other strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions against supposedly big fish of al-Qaeda that have turned out to be no such thing. This time the leaks seem also to come from Washington counter-terrorism sources, so maybe there is something to them. On the other hand, the US intelligence people may have decided that Zawahiri has been making too much noise and that starting a rumor that he may have been killed will hurt his charisma at least in the short term.
This world is murky.
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