Al-Qaida execs said thinned by drones

Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni listens to opposition lawmakers at the Lower Chamber in Rome, Friday, April 24, 2015. Italy said Friday it wanted more information from the United States about how an Italian aid worker was killed in a U.S. drone strike on the Afghan-Pakistan border as officials sought to explain why it took three months to be told about the "tragic error." Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told Parliament in a hastily scheduled briefing that in an inaccessible war zone, where hostage-taking is frequent, it took that long for U.S. intelligence to verify Giovanni Lo Porto had been killed. (Maurizio Brambatti/ANSA via AP Photo)
Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni listens to opposition lawmakers at the Lower Chamber in Rome, Friday, April 24, 2015. Italy said Friday it wanted more information from the United States about how an Italian aid worker was killed in a U.S. drone strike on the Afghan-Pakistan border as officials sought to explain why it took three months to be told about the "tragic error." Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told Parliament in a hastily scheduled briefing that in an inaccessible war zone, where hostage-taking is frequent, it took that long for U.S. intelligence to verify Giovanni Lo Porto had been killed. (Maurizio Brambatti/ANSA via AP Photo)

LONDON -- Revelations of high-level losses among al-Qaida's top leadership in Pakistan's tribal belt have underscored how years of U.S. drone strikes have diminished and dispersed the militant group's upper ranks and forced them to cede prominence and influence to more aggressive offshoots in Yemen and Somalia.

A CIA drone strike that killed two Western hostages in January and was revealed this week has led to intense criticism of the drone program and potentially a reassessment of it. But the U.S. successes over the years in targeting and killing senior al-Qaida operatives in their home base have left the militant group's leadership diminished and facing difficult choices, counterterrorism officials and analysts said.

That process of attrition has been accelerated by the emergence of the Islamic State extremist group, the brutality and propaganda of which have sucked up funding and recruits from al-Qaida.

In the tribal belt, a Pakistani military drive that started in the summer has forced al-Qaida commanders into more remote areas like the Shawal Valley, where two of them were killed alongside Warren Weinstein, an American hostage, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian hostage, on Jan. 15.

"Core al-Qaida is a rump of its former self," said a U.S. counterterrorism official, in an assessment echoed by several European and Pakistani officials.

The Pakistanis estimate that al-Qaida has lost 40 loyalists, of all ranks, to U.S. drone strikes in the past six months -- a higher toll than other sources have tracked but indicative of a broader trend. Now, they say, al-Qaida commanders are moving back to the relative safety and isolation of locations they once fled, like Sudan and the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

Yet militancy experts caution that it's too early to sound the death knell for al-Qaida's leaders. Patience and adaptability have been hallmarks of the group, which remains the principal jihadist group focused on attacking the West.

"People always want to know when the job will be finished," said Michael Semple, a militancy expert at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. "I don't think we can talk about that. They're on the back foot, rather than being eliminated."

President Barack Obama's disclosure that a U.S. counterterrorism operation killed the two hostages and two American al-Qaida leaders offered a rare glimpse into the decade-old shadow war in Pakistan's tribal borderlands. It also offered a hint of how difficult it remains to get information about al-Qaida activities there.

Although the strikes that killed Weinstein and Lo Porto occurred several months ago, Obama said he could confirm their deaths only recently.

Yet there is little doubt that the swooping valleys and deep forests have become a deadly refuge for al-Qaida's leadership.

"The drones have left al-Qaida in tatters," said a Pakistani security official in Peshawar, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "They are in disarray, trying to reorganize but struggling to find people capable of leading the organization."

The group had put hope for new leadership on al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent, a local franchise begun in September by the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri, ostensibly to counter recruitment efforts by the Islamic State.

The deputy leader of the new al-Qaida group was Ahmed Farouq, who was apparently seen as a rising star in militant circles for some time.

In a letter to Osama bin Laden in 2010, which recently became public through a terrorism trial in New York, a militant of the same name was singled out as having potential leadership potential. "A good man," wrote Atiyah Abd al Rahman, a senior al-Qaida leader who was killed in a drone strike in 2011.

But the new unit's ability to impose itself has been constrained by drone strikes that have killed at least five of its leaders, including Farouq, who officials say was an U.S. citizen and who is said to have died in the strike that killed the hostages.

As ever, though, new militants are emerging to fill the vacant places. Several U.S. officials pointed to Farouq al-Qahtani al-Qatari, who is believed to be based in Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan. One U.S. official described him as "one of the most important remaining figures in the region."

U.S. officials said there was an upside to al-Qaida operatives relocating to Afghanistan. The U.S. military, despite its diminished presence in the country, still has far greater latitude to launch raids and strikes there than it does across the border. And the Afghan intelligence services and elite special operations forces are far more reliable allies than Pakistan's spies.

In Pakistan, the Shawal Valley, a long valley walled by high peaks and snow-dusted mountains close to the Afghan border, has become a shelter of choice for many militant groups fleeing the military operation in North Waziristan that started in June.

Otherwise, al-Qaida operatives are clustered in small pockets in South Waziristan and in the Tirah Valley, a militant bolt-hole in the Khyber tribal region, Pakistani officials said.

But U.S. and European officials cautioned against overstating the troubles facing al-Qaida's leadership, who has a long record of enduring adversity. Leaders started to disperse commanders from Waziristan to Africa and the Middle East in about 2008, when the drone campaign started in earnest.

But for now, al-Qaida's top leadership will probably be preoccupied with its survival rather than plotting attacks on the West, Semple said.

"They have ways of surviving, and the guys who remain are good," he said. "But can they get together to brainstorm attacks on the U.S.? I don't think there are too many meetings."

More broadly, though, questions about al-Qaida's ability to bounce back are likely to find answers in its rivalry with the Islamic State rather than in the valleys of Waziristan, experts said. The Islamic State has dwarfed al-Qaida's media presence over the past year, through aggressive use of Twitter and a constant stream of news releases.

To jihadist recruits, the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, looms as a more compelling figure beside the elderly al-Zawahri of al-Qaida, analysts said. Yet from Yemen to Somalia and Syria, al-Zawahri retains the loyalty of committed jihadist commanders who say they prefer the al-Qaida brand of militancy.

Then there is the wider question of whether al-Qaida's strength lies in its network or in the idea that it represents.

"Even if Zawahri has gone silent, the network is not dead," Aaron Zelin, an analyst at the Washington Institute wrote recently. "From the available information, it appears the network may have moved on."

Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Rosenberg and Ismail Khan of The New York Times.

A Section on 04/25/2015

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