No. 2 al-Qaida Leader May Have Died in U.S. Airstrike in Yemen

Washington: Yemeni officials and extremists reported Monday that the leader of al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate and recently the second-ranking official of the entire terror network, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, was killed in a U.S. drone strike. U.S. officials said they could not confirm the reports but were investigating.

Al-Wuhayshi, 38, has led al-Qaida operations in Yemen since 2002 and built al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula into what counterterrorism officials considered the most dangerous group targeting the U.S. homeland, though all its attacks failed. The group was responsible for dispatching two underwear bombers to blow up airliners over U.S. soil and explosives in printer ink cartridges aboard two commercial cargo planes.

It was the second time in as many days that the fate of a militant leader targeted in a U.S. strike was uncertain. Over the weekend, U.S. F-15s carried out an airstrike in Libya on Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a leading Algerian terrorist, but by Monday his death remained very much in doubt.

The uncertainty about whether al-Wuhayshi and 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.

And although U.S. counterterrorism officials would consider the deaths of the two men a major victory, the strikes in both countries took place against a larger landscape of advancing anti-American extremists and dissolving government authority.

In Yemen, al-Qaida 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. Al-Qaida militants now control more territory than at any time since 2012.

In Libya, factional fighting since the ouster and death in 2011 of Moammar Gadhafi, the longtime dictator, has permitted multiple militant groups to seize territory and recruit supporters, including affiliates of both al-Qaida and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL.

"The tactical, whack-a-mole approach is not having the desired effect," said Micah Zenko, who studies counterterrorism policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

There was no official confirmation of al-Wuhayshi's death from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Supporters expressed condolences on social media, while others fretted that the group faced grave internal dangers, despite its capture of territory in recent months, as al-Qaida leaders were killed, one by one.

"Al-Qaida, to where?" one supporter wrote on Twitter, lamenting that the group had become a "hotbed of intelligence."

There were reasons to be cautious. The death of Belmokhtar, who planned an attack on an Algerian gas plant in 2013 in which 38 foreign workers died, has been reported multiple times over the years. And militants on Twitter announced that al-Wuhayshi had been replaced by the al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula's military commander, Qassim al-Raymi. Al-Raymi's death was widely, and inaccurately, reported in a 2010 strike.

Dirk Vandewalle, an expert on Libya at Dartmouth, said strikes are no substitute for a more lasting strategy in Libya, where the breakdown of authority has contributed to a migration crisis as impoverished Africans try to reach Europe.

"What we have in Libya is utter chaos," Vandewalle said. "The American strike shows that we're still relying on ad hoc measures rather than consistent policies along with the Europeans."

But Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, praised the decision to strike at militants in Libya.

"You can't defeat ISIS without taking on the Libya problem," he said, noting that as Islamic State extremists come under pressure in Syria and Iraq, they must be deprived of a haven in Libya.

"If we don't act in Libya, we'll see it go down a rat hole," Nunes said. "And if that happens, it could spread to Tunisia and, God forbid, to Egypt."

In Yemen, grisly photographs in a local newspaper showed the aftermath of the drone strike last Tuesday that may have killed al-Wuhayshi. Witnesses told the newspaper that a drone had fired two missiles, killing three al-Qaida members who had gathered in a public area near the beach.

The photographs showed a small crater on a stone plaza, overlooking the ocean. Another showed what appeared to be a bloodied torso, on a stretch of beach. The newspaper said that members of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula arrived after the strike, asked bystanders to leave the area and collected the bodies.

On Monday, Pentagon officials said they believed, though they could not be certain, that the weekend strike in Libya had killed Belmokhtar. Col. Steven H. Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said the military was "still conducting the post-strike assessment to determine whether or not our intended target was eliminated."

A militia leader in Ajdabiya, a coastal town in the country's northeast where the strike took place and a public funeral was held Monday, said it was impossible to be sure who had been killed.

The bodies of at least eight of the dead were charred beyond recognition, said the militia leader, who asked not to be identified for his own safety. Some militants survived the strike and were taken to a hospital, where fighters for a local branch of the Ansar al-Shariah Islamist group skirmished with local guards and took their wounded away about 11 a.m. Monday, he said.

There are rumors of imminent reprisals against those suspected of helping the Americans, the militia leader said.

Meanwhile, Al Akhbar, a Mauritanian website that has previously published Belmokhtar's messages, including his claim of responsibility after the 2013 attack on the gas plant, published an article Monday saying that six of Belmokhtar's men were killed in the weekend strike.

It did not list Belmokhtar among the dead.

The article, written in French, said the strike hit a garden inside Ajdabiya around 2 a.m. Saturday. It was inside this garden that Belmokhtar was presiding over a meeting of al-Qaida members, it said.

An individual associated with al-Shabab, al-Qaida's East African branch, also denied that Belmokhtar had died. "Heard from two AQ bros that he's alive, and 6 of the mujahideen have been killed," he wrote in a private message.